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Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Felix Feneon, and the Art & Anarchy of the Fin de Siecle |
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Description:
With this handsome book, David Sweetman, a biographer of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, brings together the dissolute lives of various artists who came to represent decadent fin-de-siècle Paris: Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon, Alfred Jarry, and, of course, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. As the author reminds us, imitations of the latter's work adorn the walls of French-themed bars worldwide and have become a shorthand for sanitized debauchery. Toulouse-Lautrec--absinthe drinker and brothel frequenter--was instrumental in the development of the poster, but what is his artistic legacy? Although Toulouse-Lautrec dominates the book's subtitle, Sweetman's sweep is much grander. In much the same way as his main subject was, Sweetman proves a sympathetic host to the women of Montmartre, tragic figures such as La Goulue, Jane Avril, and Suzanne Valadon, and he is particularly insightful on the singer Aristide Bruant's influence on the fledgling artist. However, the amount of tertiary detail, allied to an ambitious attempt to run a parallel life of Oscar Wilde, tends to be a little too much for the author to handle at times. Sweetman's demands for Toulouse-Lautrec's art to be taken more seriously--for people to look beyond the scenes of dancing and drinking--appear overstated, especially when the painter appears, at best, morally mercenary. Of course, Lautrec was more than a "deformed man who saw ugliness in everything." His work influenced Picasso, Seurat, and van Gogh and was part of a vanguard of realism in French art that swept it into the 20th century and helped establish graphic art as the people's art. It also had the dubious distinction of paving the way for popular culture as we now know it. Hamstrung by a lack of color plates, Sweetman's book is nonetheless a worthy and well-told account of a pivotal time. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk
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