A legendary figure in his own right, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's immersion in the world of the demi-monde of Paris reached its apex in the mid-1890s, during which he spent time living in brothels, visiting cafés, bars, and cabarets, and documenting the figures, both on and off the stage, whom he met and often befriended. Far from an ethnographer of Montmartre, he chose to capture the people who most captivated him.
La Danse au Moulin Rouge is an iconic depiction of lesbianism in nineteenth century art. Executed in 1897, the work vividly captures the clientele and atmosphere of the storied cabaret including some of Montmartre’s most famous figures. These include: Jane Avril, the solitary figure dancing with her back turned; the Australian painter Charles Conder, wearing a Homburg hat, to her right; and at extreme left, François Gauzi, another painter and acquaintance of Lautrec’s. In the foreground, facing towards the viewer, is the figure of Mademoiselle CHA-U-KA-O, featured in the series Elles in full stage regalia as La Clownesse, this time dressed casually and dancing with her female companion.
The theme of lesbianism – a source of fascination for many for the artist’s contemporaries and a social taboo to the bourgeoisie – was frequently taken up by Toulouse-Lautrec during this period in works such as Les Deux amies, now in the collection of Tate Modern. Beyond his own practice, the subject was popular in both literature and fine art owing, in part, to a resurgence of interest in Sappho, the ancient Greek poet, in the 19th century. While male homosexuality was illegal at this time, lesbianism was not and it largely escaped unnoticed. For Lautrec, Charles Baudelaire’s poem Femmes damnées, published in Fleurs du mal in 1857, was a particular inspiration, and many of the women who populated the dance halls and cabarets were lesbians including La Macarona and La Goulue. ‘Most of the women,’ notes David Sweetman, ‘in the scenes of singers and dancers were in fact lesbians and quite a few of them were lovers. So many, in fact, that it is possible to argue that lesbianism is the hidden subtext of much of Henri’s mature years. As chronicler of his age, this was perhaps inevitable given the increased visibility of the subject in the bars and cabarets of the Butte – some contemporary accounts speak of an explosion of Saphisme, as if half the women of Montmartre were falling into bed with each other’ (D. Sweetman, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Fin-de-Siècle, London, 1999, p. 358).
Lautrec executed La Danse au Moulin Rouge on four lithographic stones, one for each colour, and a keystone printed in grey-black, using tusche crayon, brush, the spatter technique and scraper. The delicate gradations of tone created by the spatter technique allowed for only a small edition of twenty, and four known proofs. Of these at least thirteen are in public collections.