Reports    Published 17/07/11

Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge

The Courtauld Gallery, London
16 June–18 September 2011

Like all good advertising, Toulouse-Lautrec’s commercial posters have an uncanny ability to stick with the viewer. One encounters them as one would an old acquaintance, with a sense of familiarity, coupled with an uncertainty as to where this recognition originated. Lautrec’s images of cabaret women, with legs poised in the air mid-kick, function today in popular culture as much as a successful advertising campaign for a contemporary vision of the Moulin Rouge, as do the colours red and white signify the coca-cola empire.

This confirms the success of Lautrec as a commercial artist. As a consequence of his skill, however, the instantaneous and almost spectral quality of Lautrec’s images lure us, to wallow in visual pleasure, with no consideration as to the content or interpretation of the works themselves. We are satisfied to look, not question. The exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, Toulouse-Lautrec and Jean Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge serves to rectify this situation. By placing a friendship at the centre of the exhibition (Lautrec’s relationship to the dancer Jane Avril), the careful pairing leads one past an often glossy, romanticised Moulin Rouge and allows the consideration of how, inside the cabarets of 19th-century Paris, a complex medley of social forces were played out. 

Concentrating on a friendship between two highly distinctive characters, this exhibition is weighted heavily towards biography. Lautrec and Avril’s personal histories are explored both through their common features as well as their radically differences. Lautrec was born to one of France’s most prominent families. In stark contrast Avril’s mother was a courtesan, and following an abusive childhood, Avril ran away from home to be admitted to the infamous Salpêtrière psychiatric hospital in Paris. However, both figures were afflicted with physical impediments. Suffering from what (posthumously in the 1960s) was recognised to be pycnodysostosis, Lautrec had limited growth in his legs.¹ His distinctive physique made him well known. As his friend Paul Leclercq noted: “how could I fail to notice this little man, leaning on a crow’s-beak cane, dragging his leg painfully and whose head, which was pretty good, hardly reached the chest of an average-height person.”² Avril similarly suffered from chorea, popularly known as St Vitus’s Dance. This disease was characterised by eccentric, erratic movement. Her physical disposition led to various nicknames, which surrounded her stage persona, La Mélinite (Explosion), L’Etrange (Strange One) and Jane La Folle (Crazy One), all of which hark back to her illness.³ It was after she had begun dancing at the Moulin Rouge in 1889 that she befriended Lautrec, and during this period he made his most important representations of the dancer. 

Images included in the exhibition of Avril by other avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch and Maurice Biais (her husband for a short time) alongside poems by Arthur Symons and Raoul Ponchon illustrate Avril to be a figure that accrued a layered public image. She became as much a multiplicitous figure of the imagination as a real character. Contrary to these popular images, intimate studies by Lautrec of the dancer, such as Jane Avril: Back View (1892-93), Jane Avril Dancing (1891-92) and Jane Avril Looking at a Proof (1893) voyeuristically capture a glimpse of a woman out of the spotlight. Yet, in contrast to these more personal sketches, Lautrec’s commercial posters act to portray and emulate the same mythologised version of Avril seen in popular culture. In Troupe de Mlle Églantine (1896)Avril stands apart from a row of dancers who all perform similar movements. Her body is contorted, moulded in an eccentric movement. Here we see the evidence of her illness writ large in her public image.

Famously, Avril attributed the cure of her illness to the beginning of her dancing career. It was at the fancy dress ball entitled the bal des folles in Salpêtrière, where after finding herself dancing to the music “in a state of reverie”, she was shocked and pleased by the rupture of applause at the end of the song. In her personal mythology, therefore, her time spent in hospital becomes the origin of her idiosyncratic dance style, characterised by frenetic kicking and bodily contractions. 

The fascination with mental illness in 19th-century French culture due to Salpêtrière and Professor Charcot’s research into neurological disorders (famously hysteria) is well documented in academic writing. However, Avril’s careful manipulation of this popular discourse tells us what currency hysteria had in the culture surrounding the Moulin Rouge. In an essay included in the exhibition catalogue, written by the curator Nancy Ireson, we start to learn the careful balancing act Avril performed between exploiting her illness to promote her stage persona and her need to distance herself from the loaded condition of hysteria.⁴ The inclusion in the exhibition of a selection of medical documents from Salpêtrière (which map the different stages of a nervous fit), such as the drawings done by Paul-Marie-Louis-Pierre Richer (whose work Avril was familiar with), suggest the fine line women at the hospital trod between being patients and actresses. Whether or not Avril drew directly on these medical documents to develop her dance movement is not important. What becomes apparent in the exhibition, by juxtaposing the research of Charcot at Salpêtriére and the career of one dancer, is how the female body was choreographed in the Moulin Rouge, and the power of popular discourse to puppeteer the female form. Revealed therefore in the exhibition, is the fascinating link between 19th-century medical research and contemporary dance practices.

By concentrating on one personal narrative, we begin to comprehend the mélange of influences, tensions, and suppressions, which built up the culture surrounding the Moulin Rouge. Perhaps tracing the career of other contemporary dancers such as La Goulue (The Glutton), Grille d’Egout (Sewer-Grate), and Nini les-Pattes-en-l’air (Crazy Jane), all more famous than Avril and equally larger-than-life cabaret personalities, would allow us another entry into understanding how female dancers constructed their dance styles and stage characteristics based on contemporary social imaginaries. Where Edgar Degas’s ballerinas, who pirouette clumsily across the stage, speak more about the artist’s own practice and the 19th-century fascination with Baudelaire’s “heroism of modern life”, in this exhibition Lautrec’s paintings are used as a conduit by which to initiate a dialogue about the formation of cabaret dance styles, questioning the socialisation of the female body through dance; how the female dancer interacted with and manipulated the cultural imaginary; and what toll this took personally on the dancers involved.

References

1. Nancy Ireson, ‘Dancing in the Aisle: Jane Avril and Chorea,’ in Toulouse-Lautrec and Jean Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge, The Courtauld Gallery, London, 2011

2. Paul Leclercq, Autour de Toulouse-Lautrec, Geneva, 1954

3. Jean Avril was a stage name given to her by her English lover Robert Sherard. She was originally born Jeanne Richepin.

4. Working to Avril’s advantage hysteria was a disease in nineteenth-century medical practice that was seen to be something segregated and distinct from Chorea. See Nancy Ireson, ‘Dancing in the Aisle: Jane Avril and Chorea,’ in Toulouse-Lautrec and Jean Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge, The Courtauld Gallery, London, 2011.