The cabaret, and the man with his own table

The Moulin Rouge ("Red Mill") opened in 1889 in Montmartre, the hilly district on the north edge of Paris that was the city’s nightlife quarter, and it quickly became the icon of Belle Époque Paris (the glittering decades before the First World War). It was a Montmartre cabaret, a nightclub built around drinking, dancing and stage acts, famous above all for the can-can, the high-energy dance in which a line of women kicked their legs above their heads in unison, scandalous and thrilling in equal measure. And one of its fixtures, with his own reserved table, was the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Lautrec is worth meeting plainly, without legend. He was born in 1864 into an old aristocratic family, the counts of Toulouse, at Albi in the south of France; his parents were first cousins. As a teenager he broke both thigh bones, at thirteen and again at fourteen, and they did not heal properly. His legs stopped growing while his torso did not, leaving him an adult of about five feet tall. Modern medicine attributes this to a genetic bone disorder rather than to the falls alone. State it for what it is: a condition he lived with, which sharpened rather than caused his eye for the people at the edges of Montmartre society, the performers and night people and outsiders. It is not a freak show and it is not the secret of his genius.

He trained under serious academic teachers, then spent his short career embedded in the dance halls, cafés and brothels of Montmartre, which became his real subject. At the Moulin Rouge, painted across roughly 1892 to 1895, is the great picture of that world, and crucially it is a group portrait of the cabaret’s actual regulars and performers, not a generic crowd. Lautrec painted the people he drank with.

And here is the thing most people miss about Lautrec: in his own lifetime he was famous less for paintings like this one than for posters. He was the man who turned the printed advertising poster into real art, using lithography (a printing method that pulls many copies of an image off a prepared stone or metal plate), and in 1891 his first poster, advertising the dancer La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge, went up on walls all over Paris. People stopped in the street to look at it. For most Parisians alive then, Lautrec was the poster artist; the oil paintings were the private, gallery side of the same eye. His posters of La Goulue and Jane Avril did as much to make those performers stars as their own dancing did.

It is worth holding that alongside the painting, because the two halves explain each other. The flat color, the bold cropping, the figures cut off at the edge, all the moves that make At the Moulin Rouge feel so modern are the same moves a poster needs to grab a passerby from across the street. Lautrec was working out one visual language and using it in two places at once: on the wall of a gallery and on the wall of a building.