Moulin Rouge: How Toulouse-Lautrec Turned a Cabaret Into Art History

When the Moulin Rouge opened, one of Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings hung near the entrance. He became a conspicuous fixture of the place, and the club commissioned him to design a huge advertisement: the poster that launched his career as a poster artist.¹

He turned a spotlight on the crowded dance floor and its stars: the “boneless” acrobat Valentin le Désossé and La Goulue, “the glutton,” whose cancan skirts flew up at the finale of the dance.¹

For his 1893 poster of the dancer Jane Avril, a lifelong friend who commissioned it for her show at the Jardin de Paris, Lautrec used several lithographic stones, one for each color: inky black, acidic orange, yellow and green.²

The Met describes his style precisely: a radically skewed perspective, severe cropping, flattened forms and sinuous lines. The kick of Avril's leg is echoed by the neck of a double bass gripped by an unseen musician.²

Lautrec's posters embody the ebullient, frenetic nightlife of fin-de-siècle Paris.² In Divan Japonais, made for another café-concert, Jane Avril sits in the audience, while the singer Yvette Guilbert appears on stage, recognizable even without her head by her famous long black gloves.³

Lautrec also looked closely at Japanese prints: the Met compares the late-night faces in his dance-hall scenes to the kabuki portraits of Sharaku.⁴ Compare Hokusai's Great Wave. And Montmartre's dance halls had already inspired another painter, Renoir, at the Moulin de la Galette.