Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec was a tragic figure--ugly, crippled, addicted to alcohol, dead at 37--but tragic figures often have a way of achieving greatness, and Lautrec's output stands as a monument to his enormous talent. Lautrec brought an incredible originality and excitement to his paintings; he roamed the night clubs, brothels, courtrooms, circuses and hospitals of Paris in his search for subjects that he could use to mirror and interpret the contemporary scene. For some 15 years, he wielded his brushes and pastels, until he finally died a drunk in 1901. Among his other successes, he took the poster and illustration and raised them to the level of art. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that Ronald Searle--a renowned British cartoonist and caricaturist--should have developed an affinity for Lautrec and his work. Searle first thought of honoring Toulouse-Lautrec in 1961, when the small publishing house of which he was director was preparing to bring out a biography of Lautrec. Searle combed the artist's old haunts in France, in an effort to unearth material for use in illustrating the book. He discovered, among other things, a cache of previously unknown photographs and--in Toulouse--a gentleman in his 90s who told him how he had been a close companion to Lautrec during the painter's ramblings around the Moulin Rouge and music halls of Paris. As Searle proceeded with his search and accumulated more details and insights into the artist's life, he found himself visualizing an hommage, or tribute, in the form of a pastiche based on photographs of Lautrec's girls. Last spring, after seven years, the project finally began to take shape. Searle made some 50 drawings and settled on six to be printed in black and white by stone lithography. Alain Digard, owner of the Galerie La Pochade in Paris and proprietor of Edition Empreinte, offered to publish the lithographs and drawings as a combination book and catalog to accompany an exhibition of the work, and a special portfolio of the six lithographs (limited to 100 copies, signed and numbered) was prepared. The stones were then destroyed. Lautrec's girls, as Searle has emphasized in the lithographs shown here, appear to have been a pretty plain lot at best. Often small-breasted and broad-hipped, these women hardly could have appealed to Lautrec's artistic and occasionally lustful eye on the grounds of beauty alone. They must have been warm-blooded creatures, indeed, to compensate for their lack of physical charm, just as Lautrec himself reputedly made up in virility what he lacked in attractiveness and height. Perhaps the most delightful aspect of this hommage to Lautrec is Searle's insistence on showing the artist not at an easel or in a café but cavorting with a collection of lusty girls. Ronald Searle has imaginatively ignored the clichés, choosing instead to portray Lautrec as the man he was--a cripple who overcame his deformity to leave a lasting impression on the world of art, a dwarfed creature whose tremendous vitality and vaunted sexual prowess made it possible for him to find at least a modicum of pleasure in life before his untimely death. This unusual tribute to an artist, by an artist, honors not only Lautrec the painter but Lautrec the man as well.
