Toulouse-Lautrec: A life - Softcover

Frey, Julia Bloch

4.13

201 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0297812718 ISBN 13: 9780297812715

Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is usually portrayed as a debauched aristocrat, cabaret painter, accidental dwarf. Julia Frey's biography, ten years in the making, uses meticulous research to strip away this myth and reveal for the first time the tortured man beneath. During his lifetime and after his death, Toulouse-Lautrec's family shrouded the truth in a haze of distortion, self-righteousness and outright lies. Now, decades later, the discovery of over 10000 family letters fills in the half-truths, to show - a haunted genius, crippled both physically and psychologically by his gothic, pathologically inbred family. The Toulouse-Lautrecs were a close-knit, aristocratic family, and Henri's parents were first cousins. Intermarriage, not incompetent doctors, caused his deformity; and a childhood spent in ceaseless, aimless peregrinations around the family houses, with his wildly eccentric father more absent than not, created a smothering bond between his mother, a manipulative and neurotically pious woman, and her only surviving child. Henri, an energetic and bubbly child, grew into a rebellious, provocative man, who found among the prostitutes and cabaret performers of Montmartre a freedom so shocking and threatening to his class-obsessed family that they burned his paintings and committed him to an asylum for the insane. The life of Toulouse-Lautrec is a story of cruel disability overcome by bounding egotism and fierce humour, of great talent searching for its subject, of alcoholism, self-destructiveness and feverish insecurity. Julia Frey's book leads the reader through two mazes: decadent fin-de-siecle Paris, and the complex struggles of a tormented mind.

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About the Author:

Julia Frey was educated in the United States, Mexico and France, and earned her Ph.D. from Yale University. An expert on nineteenth-century French literature and culture, she also trained for years in Paris as an artist and printmaker. She has taught at Yale and the University of Colorado, where she is Associate Professor of French. She divides her time between New York, Boulder and Paris.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Stiff and hobbled by its own exhaustiveness, this biography of Paris's tiny painter/provocateur (18641901) takes lively material and renders it lifeless. Frey (French/Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) raided a trove of newly released Toulouse-Lautrec family letters for this life study. Writing to his dear ``Maman'' and other dotty family members, the painter reveals himself only in the most guarded terms. He presents a foppish self-caricature, one that pokes fun at his own dwarfism, aristocratic background, and artistic pretensions. Frey provides more than ample surrounding historical context. She discusses thoroughly the wealthy Toulouse-Lautrec bloodline, its possible genetic inbreeding, and prickly family dynamic. Lively illustrations throughout enrich the text, and in art historical matters Frey, who has training as a printmaker, is most solid. Paris's period atelier system is depicted with some color. A sensible account of Toulouse-Lautrec's technical development follows, particularly strong in its analysis of the liberating effect that lithography had on the artist's work and its role in propagating his public image. Examined at length are Toulouse- Lautrec's possible influences: the formidable shadow of Edgar Degas, the development of still photography, the radical perspectival schemes introduced to Westerners by Japanese prints, and the philosophical convictions of the social realist and art nouveau movements. Less convincing are the author's constant attempts to second-guess Toulouse-Lautrec's psychological motivations for depicting his chosen subjects--the performers and prostitutes of Paris's bohemian Montmartre--and her ceaseless harping on his chronic alcoholism, possible sex life, and probable syphilitic condition. Frey includes extraneous detail to the point of annoyance. No true sense of Toulouse-Lautrec the person emerges. Painstaking and scrupulously scholarly without managing to be evocative. (84 b&w illustrations; 24 pages color illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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