Quoted By:
Bumping your thread OP
"This is a deliberately primitive work of art, unfinished, wrecked by weather, later cut up and patiently reassembled. In its matching work, Oscar Wilde, a sad exile, is among La Goulue’s bohemian audience. People are strange, rough silhouettes, and dance is a self-destructive orgy of senseless energy, in these great, shocking paintings that put you right there in the real, dangerous Paris of the 1890s.
Picasso followed Toulouse-Lautrec into a new world of sexual frankness that is this artist’s secret greatness. In intimate, achingly honest pastels of the dancers and prostitutes he lived among, Toulouse-Lautrec portrays them in bed with each other, or in close conversation, or sombrely alone. He manages to avoid voyeurism because he draws his friends with total empathy.
There always have been two Toulouse-Lautrecs. His posters glamourise sex and the city. They do it well. But the real greatness of his art is elsewhere, in his unvarnished, rough and tender portrayals of the true nature of the demi-monde he inhabited. Wild, savage dances, raw desire, aching loneliness and fragile intimacy make this other, less famous side of Toulouse-Lautrec far more significant."
