.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘He has become the quintessential chronicler of Paris, as it is understood by those who come here seeking bright lights and wild pleasures’
(Gustave Geffroy, quoted in Toulouse-Lautrec, exh. cat., London & Paris, 1991-1992, p. 13)
Standing, seemingly lost in the world of her own thoughts as she adjusts her costume, the protagonist of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s deftly executed Trapéziste du Cirque Fernando presents the viewer with a glimpse of the vibrant world of fin-de-siècle Paris. Combining dazzling colour and deftly expressive, assured line, this rapidly executed painting was completed in 1890, at the height of Lautrec’s immersion in the heady, bohemian world of Montmartre. Indeed, just a year after, he would receive widespread fame and notoriety for his iconic poster of the Moulin Rouge and its star performer, La Goulue.
One of the compelling cavalcade of demi-monde dancers, performers, celebrities, voyeurs and prostitutes that constituted Lautrec’s now much mythologised life, and as a result his oeuvre, this auburn-haired performer was, as the title states, a trapeze artist in the famed Cirque Fernando, one of Montmartre’s most popular entertainments. One of the artist’s first and favourite subjects, the circus provided him with a wealth of vibrant subject matter, all of which enabled him to achieve his desire of creating art that was ‘outside the law’ (Lautrec, quoted in C. Stuckey, Toulouse-Lautrec: Paintings, exh. cat., Chicago, 1979, p. 105). A vivid relic of La Belle Époque, Trapéziste du Cirque Fernando was originally owned by Olivier Sainsère, the politician and influential patron of modern art at the turn-of-the-century. An important early supporter of Picasso – crucially, his governmental position enabled the artist to obtain the necessary papers to remain in Paris – he also acquired the work of Monet, Seurat, Gauguin, Matisse, Degas, and Lautrec.
The Cirque Fernando occupies an important role in the life and art of Lautrec. This revered and enormously popular institution had started out as a travelling circus that subsequently settled on waste land near Montmartre. Gradually the ramshackle wood and tarpaulin structure had grown larger, attracting ever bigger crowds, so that in 1878, it opened in an actual building on the Boulevard de Rochechouart. Run by an entrepreneur and bareback horse rider Ferdinand Beert, known as Fernando, the Cirque Fernando offered dazzling, ribald performances that included daring stunts by acrobats, trapezists and bareback riders, as well as clowns. The Cirque Fernando would later become the Cirque Médrano – a site that would a few years later enthral a young Picasso. Lautrec was first taken to the Cirque Fernando in the early 1880s by fellow artist and friend, René Princeteau, and was instantly captivated. It soon became one of the artist’s favourite haunts, and emerged as a theme in his art in 1886, one the first subjects of Montmartre life that he painted. Indeed, Richard Thomson has written, ‘We might even argue that the circus, which demanded from the artist a style that echoed its own perpetual movement, vulgar colour, and wicked sense of fun, helped Lautrec formulate the very mobile and graphic handling that was the hallmark of his mature work’ (R. Thomson, Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exh. cat., Washington, D.C. & Chicago, 2005, p. 238).
Like the café-concerts and cabarets, including the Chat Noir, Moulin de la Galette, and the Moulin Rouge, the Cirque Fernando provided Lautrec with a wealth of novel subject matter. Like many poets and artists before him –Verlaine, Laforgue, Degas, Renoir and Seurat – the circus provided a glittering, immersive world of performers and spectators, one that was based upon the very act of seeing, and which blurred the boundaries between reality and artifice. In addition to the array of beguiling subjects that populated the circus, the airborne acrobatic acts, and round stage with its multitude of simultaneous performances and viewpoints provided contemporary artists with unexpected compositions, foreshortening, and intense juxtapositions of light and shadow; stylistic concepts that furthered their radical pictorial experiments. It is no surprise then that this subject inspired Lautrec to begin one of his most ambitious projects: a large, mural-sized depiction of the circus. Now lost and most likely destroyed, this monumental work is known only from a photograph of Lautrec’s studio in 1890, which shows a composition featuring a clown, ringmaster, and horse rider all performing with the audience behind (see R. Thomson, ibid., pp. 238-239). The circus remained an important theme for the artist for the rest of his career. In 1899, towards the end of his life, when he was confined to a sanatorium, he made a series of drawings from memory in an attempt to prove his sanity. These works took as their subject the circus; a theme so etched into Lautrec’s mind that the drawings he created are regarded as some of the greatest of his oeuvre.
Executed at around the same time that Lautrec was likely working on the monumental though unknown painting, Trapéziste du Cirque Fernando pictures a trapezist not in the midst of a performance, but instead in a moment of quiet, seemingly solitary introspection. Wearing a turquoise leotard, stockings and delicate pink ballet slippers, this figure is imbued with an intimate vulnerability at odds with the supposed confidence of the daring airborne performances of her profession. Isolated within the empty ground of the board, with just the barest outlines of a background visible, this work removes the trapeze artist from her context. Unaware of our gaze, she leaves the viewer to consider, though never fully know, her thoughts, her identity and her life. Lautrec utilised this compositional device in a number of other works of this year, including Danseuse ajustant son maillot (P. 371), Danseuse assise (P. 370), as well as a remarkably similar work, Trapéziste (Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi).
Like Degas’ contemporaneous depictions of dancers resting between rehearsals, preparing in dressing rooms or waiting in the wings of a stage, Lautrec similarly pursued every aspect of the performance. While Degas stalked the corridors of the rarefied, haloed world of the Paris Opéra and its ballets for his subjects, Lautrec, by contrast, immersed himself in the populist entertainments and the seedier underworld of Montmartre. It was this thriving bohemian heartland, removed from the bourgeois convention of Third Republic Paris, and home to artists, writers, poets, prostitutes and performers alike, that modern life in all its varied forms could be found. Amidst the riotous nocturnal hedonism of the cabarets, dancehalls, cafés and circuses, classes collided, men regarded women, who in turn watched other women, and illusion and artifice disguised reality. From within this debauched world, of which Lautrec himself was a part, the artist scrutinised its inhabitants, their relationships and their gestures, capturing stolen glances, yearning looks and introspective gazes, as well as the performance acts themselves. It was this intense observation that lends Trapéziste du Cirque Fernando and the rest of his work of this time such vivid power. In the words of Charles Stuckey, ‘Lautrec had the profound insight to scrutinise people looking, or as they follow their thoughts along the paths of glances over shoulders and across rooms, or tracked backwards into private reveries. Confronting the visual act increases our awareness of all that it can mean to see, and this was Lautrec’s poetry’ (C. Stuckey, op. cit., p. 28).
(Gustave Geffroy, quoted in Toulouse-Lautrec, exh. cat., London & Paris, 1991-1992, p. 13)
Standing, seemingly lost in the world of her own thoughts as she adjusts her costume, the protagonist of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s deftly executed Trapéziste du Cirque Fernando presents the viewer with a glimpse of the vibrant world of fin-de-siècle Paris. Combining dazzling colour and deftly expressive, assured line, this rapidly executed painting was completed in 1890, at the height of Lautrec’s immersion in the heady, bohemian world of Montmartre. Indeed, just a year after, he would receive widespread fame and notoriety for his iconic poster of the Moulin Rouge and its star performer, La Goulue.
One of the compelling cavalcade of demi-monde dancers, performers, celebrities, voyeurs and prostitutes that constituted Lautrec’s now much mythologised life, and as a result his oeuvre, this auburn-haired performer was, as the title states, a trapeze artist in the famed Cirque Fernando, one of Montmartre’s most popular entertainments. One of the artist’s first and favourite subjects, the circus provided him with a wealth of vibrant subject matter, all of which enabled him to achieve his desire of creating art that was ‘outside the law’ (Lautrec, quoted in C. Stuckey, Toulouse-Lautrec: Paintings, exh. cat., Chicago, 1979, p. 105). A vivid relic of La Belle Époque, Trapéziste du Cirque Fernando was originally owned by Olivier Sainsère, the politician and influential patron of modern art at the turn-of-the-century. An important early supporter of Picasso – crucially, his governmental position enabled the artist to obtain the necessary papers to remain in Paris – he also acquired the work of Monet, Seurat, Gauguin, Matisse, Degas, and Lautrec.
The Cirque Fernando occupies an important role in the life and art of Lautrec. This revered and enormously popular institution had started out as a travelling circus that subsequently settled on waste land near Montmartre. Gradually the ramshackle wood and tarpaulin structure had grown larger, attracting ever bigger crowds, so that in 1878, it opened in an actual building on the Boulevard de Rochechouart. Run by an entrepreneur and bareback horse rider Ferdinand Beert, known as Fernando, the Cirque Fernando offered dazzling, ribald performances that included daring stunts by acrobats, trapezists and bareback riders, as well as clowns. The Cirque Fernando would later become the Cirque Médrano – a site that would a few years later enthral a young Picasso. Lautrec was first taken to the Cirque Fernando in the early 1880s by fellow artist and friend, René Princeteau, and was instantly captivated. It soon became one of the artist’s favourite haunts, and emerged as a theme in his art in 1886, one the first subjects of Montmartre life that he painted. Indeed, Richard Thomson has written, ‘We might even argue that the circus, which demanded from the artist a style that echoed its own perpetual movement, vulgar colour, and wicked sense of fun, helped Lautrec formulate the very mobile and graphic handling that was the hallmark of his mature work’ (R. Thomson, Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exh. cat., Washington, D.C. & Chicago, 2005, p. 238).
Like the café-concerts and cabarets, including the Chat Noir, Moulin de la Galette, and the Moulin Rouge, the Cirque Fernando provided Lautrec with a wealth of novel subject matter. Like many poets and artists before him –Verlaine, Laforgue, Degas, Renoir and Seurat – the circus provided a glittering, immersive world of performers and spectators, one that was based upon the very act of seeing, and which blurred the boundaries between reality and artifice. In addition to the array of beguiling subjects that populated the circus, the airborne acrobatic acts, and round stage with its multitude of simultaneous performances and viewpoints provided contemporary artists with unexpected compositions, foreshortening, and intense juxtapositions of light and shadow; stylistic concepts that furthered their radical pictorial experiments. It is no surprise then that this subject inspired Lautrec to begin one of his most ambitious projects: a large, mural-sized depiction of the circus. Now lost and most likely destroyed, this monumental work is known only from a photograph of Lautrec’s studio in 1890, which shows a composition featuring a clown, ringmaster, and horse rider all performing with the audience behind (see R. Thomson, ibid., pp. 238-239). The circus remained an important theme for the artist for the rest of his career. In 1899, towards the end of his life, when he was confined to a sanatorium, he made a series of drawings from memory in an attempt to prove his sanity. These works took as their subject the circus; a theme so etched into Lautrec’s mind that the drawings he created are regarded as some of the greatest of his oeuvre.
Executed at around the same time that Lautrec was likely working on the monumental though unknown painting, Trapéziste du Cirque Fernando pictures a trapezist not in the midst of a performance, but instead in a moment of quiet, seemingly solitary introspection. Wearing a turquoise leotard, stockings and delicate pink ballet slippers, this figure is imbued with an intimate vulnerability at odds with the supposed confidence of the daring airborne performances of her profession. Isolated within the empty ground of the board, with just the barest outlines of a background visible, this work removes the trapeze artist from her context. Unaware of our gaze, she leaves the viewer to consider, though never fully know, her thoughts, her identity and her life. Lautrec utilised this compositional device in a number of other works of this year, including Danseuse ajustant son maillot (P. 371), Danseuse assise (P. 370), as well as a remarkably similar work, Trapéziste (Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi).
Like Degas’ contemporaneous depictions of dancers resting between rehearsals, preparing in dressing rooms or waiting in the wings of a stage, Lautrec similarly pursued every aspect of the performance. While Degas stalked the corridors of the rarefied, haloed world of the Paris Opéra and its ballets for his subjects, Lautrec, by contrast, immersed himself in the populist entertainments and the seedier underworld of Montmartre. It was this thriving bohemian heartland, removed from the bourgeois convention of Third Republic Paris, and home to artists, writers, poets, prostitutes and performers alike, that modern life in all its varied forms could be found. Amidst the riotous nocturnal hedonism of the cabarets, dancehalls, cafés and circuses, classes collided, men regarded women, who in turn watched other women, and illusion and artifice disguised reality. From within this debauched world, of which Lautrec himself was a part, the artist scrutinised its inhabitants, their relationships and their gestures, capturing stolen glances, yearning looks and introspective gazes, as well as the performance acts themselves. It was this intense observation that lends Trapéziste du Cirque Fernando and the rest of his work of this time such vivid power. In the words of Charles Stuckey, ‘Lautrec had the profound insight to scrutinise people looking, or as they follow their thoughts along the paths of glances over shoulders and across rooms, or tracked backwards into private reveries. Confronting the visual act increases our awareness of all that it can mean to see, and this was Lautrec’s poetry’ (C. Stuckey, op. cit., p. 28).