Post-Impressionism also anticipated the idea of art as a performative projection of the artist’s life, thanks to three figures—Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), and Paul Gaugin (1848–1903)—who explored new ways of linking their art to their own experiences and biographies.
Lautrec’s work, especially his graphic output, became synonymous with La Belle Époque—the “beautiful era” between 1871 and the start of the Great War in 1914, which saw rapid technological and cultural changes accompanied by a ferment in art, literature, fashion, and music. More pertinently for Lautrec, the period also birthed modern nightlife and the demimonde of bars, bistros, brothels, cabarets, clubs, and dance halls of which he was both creature and observer.
The scion of an aristocratic family from the South of France, Lautrec was distinguished by dwarfism at a time when it meant ostracism and derision. He broke both of his legs during childhood, and neither healed properly due to a genetic defect. It left him with a stunted stature that not only scarred him emotionally but also made him a walking signature.
Lautrec presented his slice of Belle Époque Paris as its sordid if beguiling underbelly, where alcohol and prostitution were prevalent temptations. He availed himself of both and, like most bohemians, was particularly fond of absinthe. This potent spirit was often depicted in 19th-century painting, and its green color became part of Lautrec’s palette for numerous paintings and pastels featuring his favorite haunt, the Moulin Rouge. One notable example from 1895, At the Moulin Rouge, includes a dark-emerald backdrop and a woman’s garishly lit face that looks like a chartreuse-tinted mask.
Sex workers frequently populated Lautrec’s work, and while his relationships with them were certainly exploitative, he identified with their marginalized place in society and portrayed them sympathetically. Lautrec also depicted the celebrities of his milieu—the dancers and chanteuses who held the spotlight—as well as the venues that put them there.
The last would figure prominently in Lautrec’s ventures into printmaking, which revolutionized the medium and made him the premier visual chronicler of Paris in the 1890s. Lautrec took advantage of the newly developed technology of chromolithography to produce large color advertisements for cabarets such as Divan Japonais and Chat Noir. Deeply indebted to ukiyo-e woodblock prints from Japan, these ads manifested the popular culture of the era, making Lautrec a sort of ur-Pop artist.
Whatever his achievements and successes as an artist, Lautrec’s life ended badly: He died of complications due to alcoholism and syphilis at age 36, making him an emblem of the artist as tormented outcast. In that regard, however, he was outclassed by Van Gogh, who became the template for that role.
Basically, Van Gogh revived Romanticism’s worship of nature and its power to inspire awe. He took plein air painting to frenetic new heights, employing manic swirls to ignite the sky in Starry Night (1889) and flamelike stabs of yellow to pictorially set Wheatfield with Crows (1890) on fire. Strokes of blues, whites, and greens writhe feverishly in his studies of irises, while in what is believed to be his final self-portrait from 1889 curlicues of similar colors rise like steam around him, as if he were sublimating in front of the viewer.
Correctly or not, the intensity of Van Gogh’s images is often ascribed to his mental illness, the most famous episode of which—a botched attempt to cut off his ear—connects to Gaugin. Younger than Gaugin by five years, Van Gogh viewed him as a mentor. In 1888 he invited Gaugin to join him in the South of France at a house in Arles, where Van Gogh dreamed of establishing an artist collective with Gaugin as its “bishop.” The latter, however, was motivated by money: Van Gogh’s brother, Theo, who acted as both men’s dealer, offered Gaugin a monthly stipend of 150 francs if he moved in with Van Gogh. It proved to be a combustible combination riven by heated arguments. Gaugin lasted only three months before storming out of town, leading to Van Gogh’s rendezvous with the razor.
Their disputes revolved, naturally, around art, with Van Gogh proclaiming that it must be derived from nature and Gaugin insisting on the primacy of the imagination. In Gaugin’s case, flights of artistic fancy required a literal escape from reality, or more precisely, conformity.
After years of working as a stockbroker, and later a tarpaulin salesman, Gaugin notoriously abandoned his wife and five children to pursue art, which took him to destinations far and wide that included Brittany, Panama, and Martinique. His work, however, is most famously associated with his travels to Tahiti, where he first sojourned between 1890 and 1893. Two years later, he relocated to French Polynesia, returning to Tahiti for six years before living out his days on the Marquesas Islands.
If Van Gogh was the poster boy for the artist driven by personal demons, then Gaugin certainly served as same for the middle-aged artist gone native. He lived in thatched huts and took girls as young as 13 as consorts, several of whom bore him children. His penchant for underage females, the persistent rumor that he infected them with syphilis, and his view of French Polynesia as a sensualist’s paradise have blighted his artistic reputation since at least the 1970s (though a newly published biography argues for a more nuanced reading of his life and work).
Gaugin’s barely adolescent lovers also appeared in his paintings, the best known of which, Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), pictures Teha’amana, the first of his three native “wives,” prone and naked on a bed. The titular apparition sits at the far left, hovering behind her.
Stylistically, Spirit embodies Gaugin’s penchant for flattening figures, which he emphasized by outlining them in black—a trope dubbed cloisonnism by the critic Édouard Dujardin due to its resemblance to cloisonné, an enameling technique in which powdered-glass pigments are fired after being organized on a copper plate divided into sections by raised wires.
Spirit also illustrated Gaugin’s mingling of the spiritual with the ordinary, as he did again in The Yellow Christ (1889), a crucifixion scene set in the landscape of Brittany. Portraying three Breton women in traditional dress seated beneath Christ, the piece, much like his other work, took Japonisme in a primitivistic direction.
