Richard Thompson, Phillip Denis Kate, and Mary Weaver Chapin,  Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre (2)

Visual Images from Montmartre

Adolphe Willette, Parce Domine* (c.1884) -- Decoration for the Chat Noir Cabaret

[* Parce Domine are the first two words at the beginning of a Gregorian chant.  The line reads: "Spare, O Lord, spare Your people: lest You be angry with us forever."]

The  cabaret culture . . .  developed visual vocabularies strongly phrased in  decadent terms. Adolphe Willette's decorations for the  Char Noir cabaret are  a case  in  point. Trained by the  celebrated history painter Alexandre  Cabanel, Willette  adapted his academic training in  Parce Domine [see above],  a huge  decorative canvas  with  a multitude of  figures pitched in  a vertiginous neobaroque torrent.  This  spate flows between Montmartre,  identified by the  windmills to the upper right, and downtown Paris, with  the  Opera and   Notre Dame silhouetted on  the  horizon. It consists  of  Montmartrois types, headed  by Willette's alter ego,  Pierrot [the traditional clown-like figure in French culture] : cancan dancers. revelers from a masked ball, prostitutes,  the inevitable black  cat.. and men on the  razzle [a British euphemism for a drunken celebrity]."8  The crowd is unruly, suffering from  a "contagion" or  "hysteria, "to use the  terms borrowed from  medicine and psychology. as the  discourse of decadence was so wont to do in  its analysis of  the  ailments of  modern society. 9  The momentum of  this surge of  pleasure seekers is downward -- it is, literally, decadent -- and the  moon in  the  nocturnal sky above takes  the  form of a skull, a salutary warning. Parce Domine was an  ironic inversion of  the  patriotic and rhetorical imagery  of the mural paintings commissioned by the Third Republic to  decorate its  town  halls and other public buildings, an  irony echoed when Victor Meusy's guide to  Montmartre in  1900 suggested that the  state itself purchase the  subversive painting. 10

This  visual vocabulary was soon raided  by artists who worked outside the  immediate circles of the  cabarets. At  the Salon des Indépendents in  1890 Georges Seurat exhibited his  large canvas Chahut, complex casting of Montmartrois nightlife into the avant-garde neo-impressionist style,  it suited Seurat (who had  certainly visited the Chat Noir) to  recycle the compositional idea  from Villette 's stained-glass Le Veau d'or [Golden Calf] of  the  decadent spectacle being conducted. [Click here to see Chahut and Le Veau d'or.]

Adolphe Willette, Parce Domine [Detail](c.1884)

 

Shadow Puppets from the Chat Noir

Of even more vital pictorial importance  was the Chat Noir's shadow plays,  developed by Henri Riviere, Henry Somm. and others from Japanese prototypes. The subjects of  these were  various. While some took uplifting themes -- such as Riviere's Marche á l'etoile (Journey Following the Star)  and Caran  d 'Ache's L'Epopée (The Epic), about the  Nativity and Napoleon's grande armée, respectively -- others favored decadent subjects, like  Louis Morin's Pierrot pornographc  (I893), set, of course, in  Montmartre. 11  The  black silhouette that  derived from the  experience of watching these shadow  plays  was not  just  a pictorial convenience. a simple, dramatic dark form. The silhouette was suggestive; it did  not  describe the  whole  figure but reduced it , even  distorted it.  With its lack of exact definition, it expected the viewer to make assumptions about what it defined, to bring into play their knowledge of the shadows.

Thus the silhouette was an ideal  pictorial device  for the decadent imagination. Anquetin, a close friend of Lautrec's, used  it in a large pastel  made in 1889.  Although set in  central Paris, on  the
Champs-Elysees, the  image is Montmartrois  both in  its  use  of  the  silhouette and in the allusions  that it  makes about single women with poodles in  this particular part of  the  city:  this  was the  clandestine identification and cruising ground for  lesbians. 10  Not everyone looking at Anquetin's pastel-exhibited. it seems, as Soir (Evening) at  the  1891  lndépendants -­ would know that, but to do so would require specific inside knowledge of "decadent" codes and behavior.  When Lautrec himself came to design his  first  poster , Moulin  Rouge: La Goulue,  he also  turned to  the  silhouette. The black forms create a dark  backdrop to offset the  dancer's blonde hair and dotted blouse. but they also characterize the typical spectators.  Their smart bonnets and top  hats  reveal  them as bourgeois; their fictive presence in  a dance hall watching a working-class  women dancing provocatively suggests the decadence that  the  Montmartre entertainment industry so assiduously marketed.

The decadent  critique, taken  from wider social debate and  geared into commercial entertainment -­ first by the  cabaret culture  by the  Chat Noir, then by professionally crafted  leisure organizations such  as the Moulin Rouge --- became what  typified  Montmartre in  the  eyes of  Parisians, French, and  foreigners. By the time Pablo Picasso arrived in  Paris in  1900, the  gambit was a stale one, but  the young Spaniard eagerly adopted it.  In  a self-portrait from his second visit he took  on the persona of  a s1nart   bourgeois,  lining the  back­ground with  brazenly  bare-breasted tarts. It is an  image that, with  all  the  hollow confidence of youthful knowledge, proclaims the clichéd  Montmartre nostrum that  creativity has its  roots in  decadence.

Toulouse- Lautrec, Moulin  Rouge: La Goulue

Yvette Guilbert, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1894)

 

How might we define Lautrec's relationship with and  contributions to this Montmartre culture?  First, it may be useful summarily to summarily to map the trajectories of the  subculture and the  artist.  In simple terms the  opening of the Chat Noir in 1882 in initiated the  vogue  for  the  "cabaret  aristic.” It was followed by a burgeoning number, typically with their ow n individu l  identity, such  as Bruant 's Mirliton,  opened in  1885, or Maxim Lisbonn e's Taverne  du  Bagne.  By the  later 1880s the  dance halls of  Montmartre were attracting more and more audience from outside the quartier, and in 1889 Oller and Zidler launched the Moulin Rouge  to capitalize on  this  by presenting a  wide  range of  attractions. Growing activity and   increasing investment  led to  greater media  coverage and to still greater momentum within what  could now be defined   s the  Montmartrois entertainment  industry.

That momentum is evinced by the rapidity with  which  the  promotional machinery settled on
a new "star" and   propelled him or her into instant celebrity. Take the  case of Yvette Guilbert, a nobody performing in  the  provincial cafés-concerts of Lyon in  the  summer of 1889. Yet by December 1890 she was being lauded by the influential journalist Jean Lorrain as a deluxe product:  " the  article de  Paris most  in fashion."" Success  ed  to over-exploitation: a constant appetite for  novel and not necessarily better  acts,  yet more shadow theaters,  and  cabarets with  themes such as Heaven or Hell.  But by the  mid-1890s momentum and  originality were  waning. The Moulin Rouge was increasingly a tourist trap; the Chat Noir and  the Mirliton both closed their doors in 1897. The  lively posters made at  the  turn of the  century by artists such as Jules Grum and  Maxime  Dethomas  were  advertising a faded "Montmartre. " in  Grun 's case explicitly, for  the  foreigner'.