A well-loved cabaret personality in Montmartre, Caudieux was a large, floppy ball of a man, shown here with coattails billowing behind him as he exits, stage right. As the actor purses his lips in self-satisfaction after what we can imagine to be a fine performance, a hollow-cheeked audience member gawks curiously up from the orchestra pit. Feinblatt calls this “a study in dynamic motion and concentrated energy… and his bustling sweep across the boards is an unparalleled rendering of movement among Lautrec’s posters” (Wagner, p. 20).
Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, La Promeneuse, 1892, oil on cardboard.
This intimate natural portrait depicts a prostitute walking the streets. Lautrec was particularly fascinated by the lifestyle of prostitutes and felt a strong affinity with them and other members of the urban underclass. This is perhaps because he felt like a freakish social outcast among his own aristocratic classes due to his physical abnormality.
Crush by Richard Siken // Two Girls in Bed by Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec // “Washing Machine Heart” by Mitski // David Altmejd // Wasted by Marya Hornbacher // Embrace Painting by Peter Wever
1. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - The Two Girlfriends, 1894
2. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec The Two Friends 1894
“Throughout the 1890s Toulouse-Lautrec visited brothels in Paris and spent days observing the women there. A series of paintings on this theme culminated in ‘Au Salon de la Rue des Moulins’ of about 1894 (Albi, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec), which depicts the women sitting awaiting their clients.
This painting (2) may represent an early stage in the genesis of the Albi picture, but it also belongs to a series of paintings focusing on the friendships between the women which often, as here, portrayed intimate moments or gestures of companionship or sympathy. “ [source]
