Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 29))

glory of Charpentier’s “Louise.” Lautrec, born in an old family, was literally slain by his desire
for artistic perfection. Montmartre slew him. But he mastered the secrets of its dance halls, its
purlieus, its cocottes, its bullies and habitues before he died. In Meiergraefe’s little book on the
impressionists Lautrec gets a place of honor, the critic asserting that he “dared to do what Degas
scorned.” This is a mystification. Degas has done what he cared and has done it in an almost
perfect fashion. A pupil and follower of Ingres, he paved the way for Lautrec, who went further
afield in his themes and simplifications. If Degas broke the classic line of Ingres, Lautrec has
torn to shreds the linear patterns of Degas. Obsessed as we are in America by the horrors of
magazine illustrations, by the procrustean conventions of our draughtsmen, by cowboys of wood,
metallic horses, melodramatic landscape, it will be long before we can sympathize with the supple,
versatile, bold drawing of Lautrec, who gives movement, character, vitality in a curve.
It is not only that he portrays his women of the streets without false sentiment (profoundly
immoral, always, in its results), but he actually shows a solicitude for them. He is not the ento-
mologist with the pinned bug, as is often Degas, as was often Flaubert, but a sympathetic inter-
preter. He doesn’t make vice interesting, he makes it hideous. His series “Elies” is worth a
volume of moralizing commentary. And there is a certain horse of his—it’s as good as a real
horse. His lithographic method is personal and effective. We advise all students of art who are
studying how not to draw by the aid of the antique to see Toulouse-Lautrec’s work. He is not
so swift, so stenographic in his notation as Henri Matisse, but he is the bigger fellow all the same.
He is one of art’s martyrs, and for that reason has always been discredited by those who conceive
art to be a sort of church for morals and the sweet retreat of the perfectly respectable professor.
Joseph Edgar Chamberlain in the Mail, December 30, 1909:
Among the great French draughtsmen who have wrought most cleverly along the line be-
tween the grotesque and the pathetic, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec ranked very high. He depicted,
very emphatically, the seamy side of life. He delighted to draw the worn and saddened women
of pleasure; and while he shrank from no trait of ugliness, his marvelous skill, veracity and in-
sight led him to the revelation of much of that sort of subtle beauty that trembles, intense, be-
neath the surface of ugly things. He was altogether a decadent, and exemplified in his art the
complex sensitiveness of a highly advanced urban civilization.
There has never before this week, I believe, been an exhibition of the works of Lautrec in
this city, and as usual, it is the Photo-Secession which enables Manhattan to get its first glimpse
of them. The collection which Mr. Stieglitz shows at his little gallery at 291 Fifth avenue con-
sists entirely of lithographs by Lautrec. It includes the series called “Elies,” the “Woman with
Dog at Cafe,” the “Truffier in Les Femmes Savantes,” and other characteristic things. Most
of them are indescribable; and a description would not be edifying if it were possible. It is enough
to say that the lithographs are full of weird power; that there is scarcely one of them which does
not contain something which may instruct any artist, and that those who are capable of looking,
as the man who made them certainly did, beneath the surface of things, will find strange and
touching beauty in more than one of them.
They are well worth a visit—but not to those who are looking for pretty things.
B. P. Stephenson in the Post, December 24, 1909:
Were it not for the exhibitions at the little galleries of the Photo-Secession, at No. 291 Fifth
avenue, the New York public that does not get an opportunity of going abroad would miss a great
deal of what the more advanced men are doing or have done recently in art on the continent of
Europe. True, some of the exhibitions have been of a startling nature, but revolutionary move-
ments have to be startling to be effective, and it is only by these apparently startling shocks that
art is got out of those commercial grooves into which it drifts every now and then. The latest
collection that Alfred Stieglitz has gathered into the galleries is of some thirty lithographs by Henri
de Toulouse-Lautrec, a Frenchman of whom great things were expected when he died, in 1902,
at the age of thirty-five. It is the first exhibition of his work that has been held in this country.
The lithographs are not for sale. They were collected with much difficulty in Germany,
where Lautrec’s vogue is great, and Mr. Stieglitz exhibits them more as a protest than anything
else, against that commercialism which has led so many of our men to waste their undoubted
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