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

talents on “Gibson girls,” etc. Meier-Graefe wrote of Lautrec: “Only one artist capable of
grasping all that Degas possessed remained in the vicinity of the great prototype. This was Lau-
trec, a painter who, under more favorable conditions, and with a longer term of life, might have
greatly surpassed his exemplar.” Women interested Lautrec more than anything else; man is
only admitted into his drawings to play a secondary part. In the series of “Elies” we have woman
in many forms, the most beautiful being of a girl lying across her bed, the drawing of which is
exquisite, while the proof is the very perfection of the lithographer’s art. The exhibition is one
that will interest all artists, and those who would see the art of this country dragged out of lethargy
into something vital, so that men who really possess talent would be allowed to draw what they
see and not what the Philistine thinks they ought to see. The exhibition will last until January
H.
Arthur Hoeber in the Globe, December 29, 1909:
Lautrec the painter we do not know. With Lautrec the lithographer we make acquaintance
for the first time now, in an exhibition held at the Photo-Secession Gallery, 291 Fifth avenue, where
perhaps a score of his work is shown. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, to give him his full name, is
a Frenchman who died in 1902 at the age of thirty-seven. As artistic as he was wilful, as uncon-
ventional as he was daring, he was of that group of revolutionaries who have made men talk in
the past decade, who have turned the head of many a student, and who have, in the last analysis,
had perhaps an influence by no means for the best. A decadent, he rejoiced in protraying the
sordid, the joyless, the abnormal. It was his mission to depict not alone the unusual but to invest
all he did with a cunning caricature of humanity, a fiendish, cold, analytical causticness, where
he brought out the worst of his men and women with a deliberate maliciousness as cruel as un-
necessary. All this, too, is accentuated by his cleverness, by his facile touch, and his keen insight.
If the mission of art be to look for humanity’s weakness, for its more ignoble side, then Lautrec
has succeeded admirably. He flays his human being unmercifully, and apparently takes a fiendish
joy in the process.
We believe, however, the call of the arts to be something more than this, something higher
and nobler. It is the old tale of the person who was sent out to gather weeds, and thus engaged,
found no flowers, whereas another who was sent to gather flowers, returned with the report that he
saw no weeds. One can find, as a rule, that for which he searches and to start out with the pre-
conception that all humanity is degraded, sordid, ignoble, is to deliberately ignore the presence of
other and better qualities. The consumptive woman of the pavement is scarcely fit theme for
the brush of the painter, the pencil of the lithographer. Granted she is part of the problems of
life, it serves little of the purpose of art to perpetuate her in serious drawing. The degraded female
of the bagnio, no matter how realistically presented, is only abhorrent, and the vulgarity of the
semi-nude bourgeoise is never subject for aesthetic eyes, for the more true the presentation, the
more objectionable the fact. One leaves this room with a bad taste in the mouth; it is depressing to
study these types; the visitor feels apologetic for his race, or would, but that on second consideration
he realizes the world contains after all much of beauty, of promise, of hope; that there are reasons
for optimism; that there is a spiritual side worth cultivating. That Lautrec manipulated his stone
so admirably, knew so well the possibilities of lithography and gave out such brilliant prints, only
serves to make the regret more poignant that he did not use his talents to better ends.

ART WISDOM:
Overheard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:—
“See! A cow isn’t supposed to have any expression. But in this wonder-
ful picture a cow has!”

54