Shorter Notices
Toulouse-Lautrec : Au -Moulin Rouge. By Daniel Catton Rich.
Gallery Books No. 20. - (Lund Humphries. 4s. 6d.)
THE general approach of this admirable series is now well-known, and there is no need to enlarge upon it. As the subject of his essay upon Toulouse-Lautrec D. Catton Rich has chosen the painting Au Moulin Rouge (to which title the clarifying addition of La Table is often added) from the Art Institute of Chicago. This is one of Lautrec's more carefully constructed compositions—he returned to it some time after it was first painted, enlarged it and redesigned it —and to the quality of its painting and the characterisation of its cast the detail reproductions in the booklet bear witness. -Mr. Rich offers us nothing new in his notes upon the artist. Perhaps in a few hundred words that.is not possible as far as factual material is concerned, but phrases like "‘ Ah, la vie, la vie' he used to mutter as his hand traced the lines of a broken profile " inevitably suggest a Hollywood reconstruction. The novel hook upon which Mr. Rich hangs his analysis of thE painting itself is Gauguin's Café de Nuit, now in Moscow. The direct and overwhelming influence which he chooses to ascribe to this picture is surely far-fetched. It might equally be .applied to Lautrec's portrait of M. Boileau, or a multi- tude of contemporaneous pictures. Realism, the photograph and the Japanese print were in the eir, and a certain mode of vision was then fashionable. Is there more to it than that ?
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