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  • Moulin Rouge--La Goulue--Tous les Soirs (Moulin Rouge--The Glutton--Every Evening)

  • 1896
  • Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French 1864-1901)
  • Color lithograph, small format version in Maindron's Les Affiches illustrées
  • 20.1 x 14.0 cm., 7-15/16 x 5-9/16" image
  • Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts Purchase through Gift in Honor of Dr. and Mrs. Thomas William and Barbara Carter, Paul A. Anderson Art History Collection, Augustana College 2005.8

Essay by Dana Kau, Class of 2005 and Catherine Carter Goebel, Editor

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's celebrity was not achieved through exhibitions in galleries or commissions from private collectors, but through a single commercial piece publicizing Montmartre's most infamous cabaret, the Moulin Rouge. Moulin Rouge: La Goulue (1891), a poster reaching nearly six feet in height on public exhibition along the Paris streets, elevated Lautrec and La Goulue to overnight celebrity status. As the official chronicler for this popular institution, through his posters as well as smaller journal illustrations such as this one published in 1896, Lautrec exploited the popularity of the Moulin Rouge and established his own position as one of its immortals.

Moulin Rouge: La Goulue was the embodiment of fin-de-siècle Parisian society. Paris in the 1890s was coming to terms with a rapidly industrialized world. With censorship laws relaxed, subjects with overt sexual connotations rapidly emerged. The Moulin Rouge became an effective stage-set for performers like La Goulue who epitomized this climate. Moulin Rouge: La Goulue embraces what was modern for the 1890s. The world which for centuries was agrarian was becoming commodified. The rapidly industrializing city needed an outlet for its workers. The café culture of Paris was at its peak. The former outlying suburb of Montmartre, the artists' district, had recently become an official quarter of Paris, with further latitude granted to media and art. And no artist more shrewdly integrated the two than Lautrec, who effectively defined his persona in the process.

He astutely combined the commercial textual message with large flat outlined forms, here featuring the characters of Valentin le Désossé (the boneless one) in the right foreground, cast in purple shadow, and Louise Weber, nicknamed La Goulue (the glutton), spotlighted at center. The foreground includes Valentin while la Goulue is pushed further back at center, yet highlighted as she teases the crowd with her raised skirts. The bourgeoisie, depicted as a black mass defined by elaborate coiffures and top hats, provide a backdrop as well as targets for her performance, since she was famous for kicking off the hats of her spectators. The yellow lamps appear to take on a personality and importance of their own, one particular lamp on the far left seems to illustrate a time sequence as it spins.