Toulouse-Lautrec and the real story of the Moulin Rouge

By Johnathan Jones

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/aug/17/toulouse-lautrec-moulin-rouge-paintings

"The exhibition concentrates on the sickly southern-aristocrat painter's friendship with a thin, nervous dancer called Jane Avril. Hospitalised for mental illness as a teenager, Avril was mocked by some as a crazy dancer whose legs spun all over the stage while her face remained a mask of misery. But in Toulouse-Lautrec's portraits and posters, she is at once intensely lonely, mysterious and – blatantly – his object of desire. The bony beauty of Avril blazes eerily in his supercharged vision. The power of Toulouse-Lautrec is that the more seedy and unglamorous he makes places and people look (for he is a savage realist, and faces in his pictures are waxen with pain) … the sexier it all is."

I remember studying Toulouse-Lautrec in Art history. We've just finished the Impressionists and then the Post-Impressionist so a certain type of mood was set. The Impressionist traveling into Normandy and absorbing themselves in natures. Van Gogh and Paul Guigins exotic eccentrisisms . ... So a mood was set, but when we came to Toulouse-Lautrec a velvety sort of saloon door was opened.... He was different and different amongst differences, how odd? ..... He painted about a very intimate relationship between himself and these Parisian prostitites. The out casts, the misfit toy. A delicate understanding.. Humanity found with in a distorted emotional , chaotic under world of Paris.


They understood each others pain and misfortune and carried on, they share themselves as artist tend to do.
Quite a few of these girl were rejected because they were just different and forced in desperation to survive . They were caught up in the machine of their times , Victorian Industrial revolution.

For pictures, continue on to :

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.554376777941706.1073741836.501447479901303&type=1