mercredi 11 juin 2014

Paintings Of Toulouse Lautrec And Gustave Courbet

By Darren Hartley


Toulouse Lautrec paintings of dancehall performers and prostitutes are personal and humanistic. They reveal the sadness and humor hidden behind rice powders and gaslights. Their influences were long lasting. To say the least, there would be no Andy Warhol, if there was no Lautrec.

One of the early en plein air Toulouse Lautrec paintings was the Streetwalker. The pallid complexion and artificial hair color of his subject, a prostitute named Golden Helmet, clashed with the naturalistic setting of the drawing. Later on his career, Toulouse would devote an entire series of prints, called Elles, to life inside a brothel.

Divan Japonais was among the Toulouse Lautrec paintings featuring Toulouse's favourite cafe concert stars Yvette Guilbert and Jane Avril. Yvette was known as a diseuse or speaker for the way she half-sung, half spoke her songs during performances. She had bright red hair, thin lips, a tall gaunt physique and wore black elbow-length gloves.

Gustave Courbet paintings challenged convention by rendering scenes from daily life on a large scale previously reserved for historical paintings. These works included The Stonebreakers and A Burial at Omans. Omans was Gustave's native village in the Franche-Comte in eastern France and it was where this group of paintings was set.

One of Gustave Courbet paintings on monumental canvas, The Painter's Studio : A Real Allegory Summing Up a Seven Year Phase of my Artistic Life, was rejected by the Exposition Universelle jury in 1855. As a retaliation, Gustave mounted his own exhibition of more than forty works in his Pavilion of Realism, built within sight of the official venue.

During the 1850s, Gustave Courbet paintings went beyond the Omans subjects in their embrace of modernity. They captured the cafe culture of bohemian Paris through portraits of its denizens and works inspired by popular cafe songs. They also featured hunting scenes that brought Gustave critical and popular success.




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