© COPYRIGHT

by

Danielle D. Sensabaugh

2015

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

To my parents.

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BETWEEN PAINTING AND POSTER: ARTISTIC AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY IN

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC’S PANELS FOR “LA GOULUE”

BY

Danielle D. Sensabaugh

ABSTRACT

My thesis focuses on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s pendant paintings titled La danse au

Moulin Rouge (Dance at the Moulin Rouge) and La danse mauresque (The Moorish Dance).

These two works, collectively known as Les panneaux pour la baraque de La Goulue à la Foire

du Trône (Panels for the fun fair booth of La Goulue at the Foire du Trône), have been

underemphasized by scholars in part because they do not adhere to the hierarchies of value that

have been established between fine art and the applied arts; nor do they support the much-

mythologized image of Lautrec. Although Toulouse-Lautrec’s commercial accomplishments are

widely recognized by scholars today, and contribute to his mythic persona as a bohemian artist

steeped in the culture of Montmartre, his paintings continue to be privileged as the more

“authentic” portion of his artistic output. Furthermore, the commissioning of these works by the

cancaneuse “La Goulue” (Louise Weber) has also inhibited their study. A woman known for

licentiousness on- and off-stage, La Goulue cannot be considered a conventionally feminist

figure, and therefore has been denied the agency accorded to fellow popular dancers, such as

Jane Avril and Loïe Fuller, who were also depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec and have received more

scholarly attention. My study provides a comprehensive account of the panels, encompassing a

range of questions raised by the works themselves and the biographical and historical contexts

that produced them. Products of collaboration, the panels are evidence of La Goulue and

Toulouse-Lautrec’s symbiotic relationship, one necessitated by the need to individualize and

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sensationalize oneself in order to achieve and maintain fame both within the Parisian art world

and the entertainment industry.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to profusely thank Dr. Juliet Bellow for her words of encouragement and

sage advice throughout the duration of this project, without which this would have seemed an

insurmountable feat. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Kim Butler Wingfield and Dr. Andrea

Pearson for their constant support and guidance. Finally, thank you to my friends and colleagues

Brittney Bailey, Caitlin Hoerr, and Kelley Daley.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... ii  

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iv  

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ......................................................................................................... vi  

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1  

CHAPTER 1 THE DANCER AS PATRON: THE AGENCY OF LA GOULUE ............ 8  

La Goulue’s “Disruptive Acts” ............................................................................. 12  Commodity Culture and the Display of Women .................................................. 17  Maintaining Spectacle: La Goulue’s Cultivation of a Public Image .................... 23  Collaboration: The “Queen of Montmartre” and her “peintre officiel” ................ 27  

CHAPTER 2 BETWEEN PAINTING AND POSTER: TOULOUSE-LAUTREC’S MIXING OF MEDIA ................................................................................ 34  

Panels as Poster ..................................................................................................... 36  Panels as Paintings ................................................................................................ 41  The Status of Posters and Paintings ...................................................................... 45  

CHAPTER 3 DANCING ON THE FRINGE: CULTURAL OTHERNESS AND LA DANSE MAURESQUE ............................................................................................. 51  

French Colonialism and the Expositions Universelles ......................................... 55  The Parisian Entertainment Industry: Appropriating the danse du ventre ........... 59  La danse mauresque: Embodying and Exploiting the Exotic ............................... 64  

CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 68  

ILLUSTRATIONS ....................................................................................................................... 71  

BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................... 74  

 

 

 

 

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La danse au Moulin Rouge (Dance at the Moulin Rouge), 1895, oil on canvas, 3,160 x 2,980 mm, Paris, France: Musée D’Orsay .......................... 71  

Figure 2: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La danse mauresque (The Moorish Dance), 1895, oil on canvas, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay .............................................................................. 71  

Figure 3: Lunel, “Le Quadrille à L’Élysée Montmartre” in Le Courrier Français, 1889, illustrations ........................................................................................................................ 71  

Figure 4: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1893, lithograph ............................................. 71  

Figure 5: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Troupe de Madamoiselle Églantine, 1895, lithograph printed in three colors on machine wove paper, 27 7/16 x 31 ½ inches, New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art ............................................................................................ 71  

Figure 6: Ferdinand Bac, “Femmes automatiques: Ce qu’on y met, ce qu’il en sort,” La Vie Parisienne, 1892 ............................................................................................................... 71  

Figure 7: Louis Victor Paul Bacard, La Goulue and Grille d’Egout bare-chested, c. 1885, albumen paper from a collodion glass negative pasted on cardboard, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay .............................................................................................................................. 71  

Figure 8: La Goulue wearing a Montmartre themed dress decorated with windmills, cats and mice ................................................................................................................................... 71  

Figure 9: Louis Victor Paul Bacard, Series of photos of La Goulue seated in a chair at a table, 1885, albumen paper from a collodion glass negative pasted on cardboard, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay .................................................................................................................. 71  

Figure 10: Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, 1891, lithograph, 74 13/16 x 45 7/8 inches, New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art .......................................... 71  

Figure 11: Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge (La Goulue entrant au Moulin Rouge), 1891-92, oil on board, 31.25 x 23.25 inches, New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art .................................................................................................... 71  

Figure 12: Louis Victor Paul Bacard, La Goulue frontally in a dance pose, c. 1885, albumen paper from a collodion glass negative pasted on cardboard, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay ........................................................................................................................................... 71  

Figure 13: Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Miss Loïe Fuller, 1893, lithograph, 381 x 275mm, Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago ............................................................................... 71  

Figure 14: Isaiah West Tauber, La Loie Fuller, 1897, aristotype, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay 71  

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Figure 15: Jules Chèret, Loïe Fuller at the Folies Bergère, 1893, lithograph, 48 1/2 x 34 1/2 in, New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art .......................................................................... 71  

Figure 16: Jean de Paléologue (Pal), La Loïe Fuller, Folies Bergère, c. 1894, lithograph, 48 x 33 inches, Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art ...................................... 71  

Figure 17: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Music Hall: Loïe Fuller, 1892, oil on cardboard, 46 x 32 cm, private collection ................................................................................................ 71  

Figure 18: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue and her Sister (Au Moulin Rouge: La Goulue et sa soeur), 1892, lithograph printed in six colors, 17 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches, New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ........................................ 72  

Figure 19: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge: Training the New Girls (At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance), 1890, oil on canvas, 45 1/2 x 59 inches, Philadephia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art ............................................................................................. 72  

Figure 20: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Au Moulin Rouge (At the Moulin Rouge), 1892/1895, oil on canvas, 48 7/16 x 55 1/2 inches Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago ....................... 72  

Figure 21: Jules Chéret, Bal du Moulin Rouge, 1889, lithograph, 48 7/8 x 34 5/8 inches, Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art ......................................................... 72  

Figure 22: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue et Valentin-le-Désossé (La Goulue and Valentin the Boneless), 1887, oil on cardboard, 24 x 19.75 inches, private collection .... 72  

Figure 23: Georges Seurat, Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque), 1887-1888, oil on canvas, 39.25 x 59 inches, New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ...................................... 72  

Figure 24: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Le Bois sacré cher aux arts et aux muses, 1884, oil on canvas, 93 x 231 cm, Chicago, IL: Art Institute Chicago ................................................. 72  

Figure 25: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Parody of Puvis de Chavannes’ “The Sacred Wood Dear to the Arts and the Muses,” 1884, oil on canvas, 67 11/16 x 149 5/8 inches, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum ............................................................................. 72  

Figure 26: Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Detail of Contrabass from La danse au Moulin Rouge, 1895, oil on canvas, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay .......................................................... 72  

Figure 27: Georges Seurat, Le Chahut, 1889-90, oil on canvas, 67 x 55.5 inches, Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum .............................................................................. 72  

Figure 28: Edgar Degas, Café-Concert aux Ambassadeurs, 1876-77, pastel on monotype, 37 x 26 cm, Lyon, France: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon .......................................................... 72  

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Figure 29: Plan of the 1889 Universal Exposition Paris, France. Top register is the Champs de Mars and Trocadéro. Bottom register on the right is a detailed map of the attractions on the Esplanade des Invalides and on the left is a map showing the geographical location of the various fair ground sites. ............................................................................................. 72  

Figure 30: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Souvenir de l’Exposition Universelle: La belle Fathma, 1889, pen and ink drawing, 17.3 x 10.7 cm, Vienna, Austria: Albertina Museum .......... 72  

Figure 31: Louis Legrand, “Tuesdays at the Elysée Montmartre. The belly-dance by La Goulue and La Macarona,” engraving, published in Le Courrier Français, 1890 ....................... 72  

Figure 32: Louis Bacard, La Goulue facing frontally, full length, dance pose, test on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative pasted on cardboard, circa 1885, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay .................................................................................................................. 72  

Figure 33: Adrien Marie Aiousché performing at the Café Egyptien on the rue du Caire ........... 72  

Figure 34: Unknown, Three performers of the Café Egyptien, photograph from Delort de Gléon’s “L’architecture arable des Khalifes d’Egypte à l’Exposition Universelle de Paris en 1889,” 1889 .................................................................................................................. 72  

Figure 35: “Concert Égyptien:”Abou Halaka, 40 years old, musician from album of forty anthropological photographs presented at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris .. 73  

Figure 36: La Goulue's fun fair booth with Lautrec's panels La danse au Moulin Rouge (left) and La danse mauresque (right). Photograph taken for Le Figaro at the Neuilly Fair and published in 1902 .............................................................................................................. 73  

Figure 37: Photograph of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec dressed as an “Arab” man ....................... 73  

Figure 38: Photograph of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec with his friends Claudon and Nussez in costume, 1884, Albi, France: Musée de Toulouse-Laturec .............................................. 73  

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INTRODUCTION

In 1895, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec produced two pendant paintings: La danse au

Moulin Rouge (The Dance at the Moulin Rouge; fig. 1) and La danse mauresque (The Moorish

Dance; fig. 2), now collectively known as Panneaux pour la baraque de la Goulue à la Foire du

Trône (Panels for La Goulue’s Booth at the Foire du Trône).1 These large-scale works originally

served to decorate a fun fair booth for the former Moulin Rouge celebrity Louise Weber, known

as “La Goulue” (“The Gluttonous One”), at the Foire du Trône, held on the Place de la Nation in

Northeast Paris.

Damaged by the elements, and by subsequent alterations visible in seams on their

surfaces, the canvases nonetheless remain more or less intact. The history of their making,

however, is incomplete. We do not know exactly why or how Lautrec, whose reputation was on

the rise in 1895, came to execute this unusual work for a dancer whose status was on the brink of

decline after leaving the Moulin Rouge around 1894. Other than the panels themselves, the only

surviving document of this transaction is a brief letter from Weber, written on April 6, 1895,

requesting Toulouse-Lautrec’s artistic services for her booth. “My dear friend,” she writes,

I will call on you on Monday April 8 at two o’clock in the afternoon. My booth will be at the Trône Fair, at the left as you enter; I have a very good spot and I would be very happy if you have the time to paint me something. Just tell me where to buy the canvases and I will bring them to you the same day.2

All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 1 The paintings are often mentioned in footnotes or briefly as another example of Lautrec’s works. The

scholars who have researched and analyzed these works most fully are David Sweetman in Explosive Acts, Zenep Çelik and Leila Kinney in their article “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelle,” and Julia Frey in Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life. David Sweetman, Explosive Acts: Toulouse Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon and the Art and Anarchy of the Fin de Siècle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999); Zeynep Çelik and Lelia Kinney “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Exposition Universelles,” Assemblage No. 13 (Dec. 1990); Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).

2  Cited in: Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, 409; David Sweetman, Explosive Acts, 401. “Mon cher ami, je serai chex toi le 8 avril à deux heures de l’après-midi. Je serais contente si tu as le temps de peindre quelque chose sur ma baraque: elle est au Trône, je suis placée en entrant à gauche, j’ai une très bonne place...”    

2

From the slim testimony of this letter, we can infer a few things about the circumstances that

forged the panels: that Lautrec and Weber were fairly well acquainted; that their relationship

combined business with friendship; that the project was instigated by Weber; and that it was not

a typical commission, given that Weber paid the cost of the canvases, but did not pay Lautrec for

the labor of painting them.

The lack of clarity surrounding the panels’ production is only heightened by their

complex, and rather confusing, formal and iconographic structure. La danse au Moulin Rouge

depicts La Goulue at center, in an attention-grabbing green costume. She performs the quadrille

naturaliste, a fast-paced variant of the cancan—that is, the panel portrays her in her former glory

days as a star at the Moulin Rouge.3 To her right, we see her erstwhile dance partner Valentin le

Désossé (Valentin the Boneless), so named for his seemingly joint-less flexibility.4 Behind this

pair, who occupy the lion’s share of the foreground, is a crowd of onlookers that includes the

famous performer Jane Avril, and other friends of Lautrec’s including the amateur photographer

Maurice Guibert and the artist Maxime Dethomas, both of whom he had featured in previous

paintings. When we move to the second panel, we see La Goulue once again—recognizable from

her brightly-colored skirt and her distinctive topknot hairdo. Purportedly, she is performing a

Moorish belly dance, although her high kick again suggests a cancan. Accompanying her on

stage is a pair of vaguely “Oriental” musicians: a dark-featured, jewelry-laden woman playing

the tambourine and a turbaned, dark-skinned man playing a drum. Once more, a throng of

3 The quadrille naturaliste was a somewhat more refined version of the original cancan, in the sense that it

was more structured. However, it was also more eroticized and faster-paced than the original. It typically involved performing high kicks and splits. La Goulue is often attributed with the revival of the quadrille-naturaliste. She and Valentin became renowned for their particular version of the dance, which they performed nightly at the Moulin Rouge. David Price, Cancan! (London: Cygnus Arts, 1998): 27-29.

4  Partrick O’Connor, The Nightlife of Paris: The Art of Toulouse-Lautrec (New York: UNIVERSE, 1991):

14.

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famous Montmartre personalities surrounds her. Notably, Lautrec has placed his own diminutive

body in the right foreground, flanked by Avril and the art critic Félix Fénéon; standing to the left

of Jane Avril is Oscar Wilde.5 These various figures would have been recognizable to many

period viewers for two reasons: both because of the notoriety each achieved in the subculture of

bohemian Montmartre, and because each serves as an intertextual reference to Lautrec’s other

artworks of the preceding years.

Though these references to celebrity and popular would become a hallmark of Lautrec’s

aesthetic, the impact of this unique historical context—the development of the entertainment

industry, and the careers of the celebrities associated with it—on Lautrec’s oeuvre has remained

largely unexamined. Scholarship on Toulouse-Lautrec primarily has centered on a biographical

approach, with a concomitant tendency to privilege Lautrec’s artistic intent over any outside

influences on his work. The difficulty of moving away from such an artist-centered approach is

quite evident in the case of this particular work, for its subject and patron, La Goulue, has

received minimal scholarly attention relative to Lautrec. Yet, the commissioning of the panels

inarguably makes La Goulue an active agent in the production of these works; for that reason,

this thesis takes a more inclusive approach to the authorship of these panels, which are

considered in the contexts of both the dancer’s and the painter’s careers. This approach reveals

that Lautrec’s working relationship with La Goulue was not only collaborative but also

reciprocal.

Although La danse au Moulin Rouge and La danse mauresque are the only works known

to have been commissioned by La Goulue, the panels for her fun fair booth demonstrate her

awareness that images of her—particularly those by Toulouse-Lautrec—served as marketing

tools. Such images built and sustained her career as a performer in the emerging mass culture of

5 Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, 410.

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fin-de-siècle Paris. In the modern era, the advent of mass production encouraged an increase in

the circulation of celebrity images in a variety of forms; this dissemination of images was

invaluable to the career of an entertainer such as La Goulue, whose success was largely

determined by the cultivation of an easily recognizable image and a larger-than-life public

persona.6 In this way, La Goulue and Toulouse-Lautrec were alike. Acknowledging the need and

his own desire to create a name for himself within both the commercial and avant-garde art

worlds, Toulouse-Lautrec founded his artistic career on the marketing of dance hall and café-

concert celebrities in a range of media. These media included mass-produced posters, limited-

edition prints and one-of-a-kind oil paintings. By directly commissioning Toulouse-Lautrec to

create the panels, La Goulue at once recognized, and made direct reference to, the impact his

previous works had in establishing her as one of the premier Montmartre celebrities.

Painted in 1895, after both La Goulue and Toulouse-Lautrec had left Montmartre, the

panels exemplify the collaborative nature of Lautrec’s works—the exchange between artist and

performer. Not necessarily direct, this exchange was a unique negotiation between formal

aesthetics (drawn from both commercial and “fine” art) and content (the identifiable

representation of celebrities). In part, the success of Toulouse-Lautrec’s café-concert works lay

in his ability to capture and translate into art the singular persona of the individual celebrity. This

process of translation was not based simply on observation; it was interactive, premised upon

acquaintance and even close friendship with the stars of Montmartre.7

Scholars have failed to fully recognize the impact of such negotiations on Toulouse-

Lautrec’s celebrity images: these works are produced by the competing agencies of the artist and

6 Mary Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and the Café-Concert: Printmaking, Publicity, and Celebrity in

Fin-de-Siècle Paris” (PhD diss., New York University, 2002).

7 Catherine Pedley-Hindson, “Jane Avril and the Entertainment Lithograph: The Female Celebrity and Fin-de-Siècle Questions of Corporeality and Performance,” Theatre Research International 30, no. 2 (2005): 113.

5

his subjects. The panels, in particular, have only been discussed in light of Toulouse-Lautrec’s

work. Scholars have omitted La Goulue’s agency in the making of these works, in part due to the

lack of biographical information on the cancaneuse. Alternatively, I will reintroduce La Goulue

as a key figure in the creation of the panels—bringing her agency to bear, along with Lautrec’s,

on the style and the iconography of the work, thereby decentering the standard reading of his

artworks. In the act of initiating the commission for the panels, La Goulue revealed herself as

complicit in Toulouse-Lautrec’s representations of her, licensing his past depictions of her in the

process. In other words, La Goulue should not be seen as a passive receptor of Toulouse-

Lautrec’s images, but rather as an active force in their conception and execution.

In chapter one, I discuss the panel’s role in Weber’s entrepreneurial efforts to sustain a

precarious career as a dancer. In so doing, I will recuperate La Goulue’s image in feminist terms,

documenting her role in constructing an identity for herself through the public visibility afforded

to her by fin-de-siècle mass culture. I pay particular attention to developments in commercial art,

specifically the heightened production and use of lithographic posters to advertise for various

Parisian entertainments and celebrity photographs, both of which became crucial to the creation

and preservation of fame in this period. As will become clear, La Goulue actively used these

media to promote herself; her commission of the panels is an extension of those activities.

Chapter two focuses primarily on how Toulouse-Lautrec approached this unusual

commission, placing the work in the context of his painting and poster practices of the 1890s.

Considering the panels as a hybrid of oil painting and publicity poster, I will elucidate how the

work presents a unique brokerage between the high-cultural and sub-cultural spheres: it

incorporates formal and iconographic elements drawn from both the color lithograph and avant-

garde painting. The panels partake of both media in equal measure, thus allowing Lautrec to

6

associate himself with the bohemian, lowbrow culture of Montmartre even as he holds on to the

elite status still accorded painting in this period. Through this complex dynamic, the panels

refuse categorization, and thus call into question the very hierarchy of “high” and “low”—a

hierarchy that, as I note earlier, still is enforced in much of the scholarship, which has

contributed to the lack of attention to Toulouse-Lautrec’s panels to date.

Returning to La Goulue, chapter three presents a broader analysis of La danse

mauresque. My analysis relates her turn to “Moorish” dance to the Universal Exposition of 1889,

which popularized such exotic dances in France, and thus played a role in the politics of colonial

expansion. In so doing, it discusses the potential repercussions and benefits of embodying the

cultural “Other” through performance; I consider whether her performance of a “Moorish” dance

further relegates her as a societal “other” or, alternatively, casts into relief her Frenchness. In

addition, it addresses Toulouse-Lautrec’s investment in La danse mauresque as he included a

self-portrait—depicting himself as one of the spectators in the foreground among other key

Montmartre figures.

Although this thesis focuses primarily on the panels, it considers that work in relation to

other works by Lautrec in a variety of media, such as At the Moulin Rouge: Training of the New

Girls by Valentin (1889-90) and Moulin Rouge: La Goulue (1891). The work of Lautrec’s avant-

garde predecessors and contemporaries (including Edgar Degas and Georges Seurat), as well as

posters by Jules Chéret and publicity photographs of La Goulue and other performers, reinforce

key points through visual comparison. For the panels engage not only with the aesthetics and

iconography of high and low art generally speaking, but specifically engage with earlier works

by Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as by artists he admired and with other visual forms of publicity

including drawings and photographs. In sum, the panels act as a catalyst for the re-interpretation

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of Toulouse-Lautrec’s artworks on several levels: the importance of collaboration to his working

practice; the transgression of the hierarchy between commercial and “high” art; the meanings

and signifiers of the subversiveness central both to his and to La Goulue’s careers. By examining

the panels in this way, it becomes possible to decenter the artist-genius myth surrounding a

canonical figure like Toulouse-Lautrec, which has obscured the role of other integral figures—

like La Goulue—in the making of his art.

8

CHAPTER 1

THE DANCER AS PATRON: THE AGENCY OF LA GOULUE

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”8 - Oscar Wilde

The first of Toulouse-Lautrec’s celebrity “muses,” La Goulue, née Louise Weber, was a

ribald cancaneuse. She began her career as a performer at the Moulin de la Galette, a public

dance hall frequented by lower-class patrons.9 While accounts of her origin vary, all describe her

as unmistakably lower class, either from rural France (possibly Alsace-Lorraine) or the outskirts

of Paris (Clichy).10 Originally a laundress, La Goulue did not become a professional performer

until her partnership in the late 1880s with Valentin le Désossé (Valentin the Boneless) at the

Élysée Montmartre, a famed dance hall located on the Boulevard de Rochechouart in

Montmartre, where they drew in large crowds with their fast-paced and highly sexualized

rendition of the cancan.11

Lured away from the Élysée Montmartre in 1889 by Charles Zidler and Joseph Oller of

the Moulin Rouge, a new dance hall that would feature a number of different spectacles and

eventually put the Élysée out of business, La Goulue became their headliner, making around

3,750 francs a week.12 Credited with the re-invention of the cancan, redubbed the quadrille

8 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1999): 21.

9 Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, 243.

10 Sweetman, Explosive Acts: Toulouse Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon and the Art and Anarchy of the

Fin de Siècle, 160; Patrick O’Connor, Nightlife of Paris: The Art of Toulouse-Lautrec (New York: UNIVERSE, 1991): 14.

11 Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, 192.  

12 Sweetman, Explosive Acts, 254. Çelik and Kinney’s “Ethonography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles” cites the average earnings of a cancaneuse as 300 francs a month or 70 francs a week (Zeynep Çelik

9

naturaliste or réaliste, La Goulue became the face of Montmartre decadence from the late 1880s

until the mid 1890s when the dance hall and the cancan were becoming passé. During this time,

Toulouse-Lautrec would become enthralled with La Goulue, depicting her on numerous

occasions—creating over ten works in various media over the span of seven years.

Though La Goulue is frequently mentioned in the literature on Lautrec, few accounts pay

close attention to her commission of the panels for her booth. Those scholars who have analyzed

the panels generally have diminished or downplayed La Goulue’s involvement in the creation of

the works. This artist-centered approach has the effect of sustaining the artist-genius myth that

surrounds Toulouse-Lautrec. The lack of attention to La Goulue’s active role in this transaction

is all the more surprising given that scholars have accorded other celebrities with whom Lautrec

worked—Yvette Guilbert, Aristide Bruant, Loïe Fuller, and Jane Avril—a notable amount of

agency in their self-marketing and in their interactions with Toulouse-Lautrec.13 In contrast, La

Goulue has more often than not been viewed as “an unwitting victim” or an ungrateful, impudent

celebrity who failed to acknowledge the important role Lautrec played in bolstering her fame.14

The denial or erasure of La Goulue’s agency in the making of the panels derives in part

from the lack of autobiographical accounts from the cancaneuse who wrote very few letters and

no memoir (a common practice for popular female celebrities during the fin-de-siècle). As a

and Lelia Kinney “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Exposition Universelles,” Assemblage No. 13 (Dec. 1990), 50.).

13 Pedley-Hindson, “Jane Avril and the Entertainment Lithograph;” Nancy Ireson, Toulouse-Lautrec and

Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge (London: The Courtauld Gallery, 2011); Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and the Café-Concert: Printmaking, Publicity, and Celebrity in Fin-de-Siècle Paris.”

14 David Sweetman is one such example of a scholar who sees Lautrec and La Goulue’s working

relationship as one-sided, privileging Lautrec’s artistic genius and seeing La Goulue as naive of the need to self-market. He attributes La Goulue’s transient fame mostly to Lautrec and compares her to Jane Avril and Aristide Bruant whom he argues acknowledged the importance of Lautrec’s images to combating the ephemeral nature of café-concert fame. In contrast Reinhold Heller argues that Toulouse-Lautrec exploited celebrities for his own financial gain in Toulouse-Lautrec: The Soul of Montmartre.

10

result, scholars are left to rely on highly mediated accounts of her “personality” and

performances—including Lautrec’s images of her. These accounts often feature physical

descriptions of La Goulue, and equate her rendition of the cancan with sexual prowess—whether

they are condemning or applauding her actions. For example, an 1899 book entitled Danse, by

Raoul Charbonnel, includes an 1892 excerpt by the writer Eugène Rodrigues that describes the

appeal of La Goulue and her proletarian dance:

At that time, La Goulue was eighteen, small, pink, chubby and well developed—she shot out of her dark low-necked bodice—with her pearly shoulders and her mischievous head of golden hair… From the start [of the dance], her cheeks glow like ripe peaches, her wild hair flies about like gossamer fibers. No method, no order, but a sure sense of rhythm and an undeniable openness and gaiety. She lifts her arms, careless of the strap taking the place of a sleeve; her legs bend, sway about, hitting the air and threatening hats…Without question, one can confirm that a large part of her celebrity comes from her fresh demeanor, her appetite, prideful nature and excessive display of fearlessness. She constantly searches for the risqué gesture of the hand, the foot, the whole body; she finds it, she imposes it and the audience applauds. La Goulue is an enchantress.15

The above quote exemplifies contemporaneous descripitions of La Goulue and her quadrille.

Rodrigues captures her brazen personality and her prowess at sensationalizing and sexualizing

the dance. Likewise, Georges Motorgueil’s description of La Goulue’s performance describes

her dance as something more akin to a “striptease” rather than an artistic rendition or an

acrobatic feat:

15 Raoul Charbonnel, “Danse Modernes” in La Danse: comment on dansait, comment on danse.(Paris:

Garnier Frères, 1899): 285. Translated in part in Price, Cancan!, 63-64. “A cette époque, La Goulue pouvait avoir 18 ans; petite, rose, poupine et bien en point, elle dardait hors du corsage sombre, largement décolleté, ses épaules nacrées et sa tête mutine plantée de cheveux d’or, dont la lourde torsade, roulée très haut, prenait des aspects de cimier…Coiffure à laquelle elle est restée fidèle…A peine en train, ses joues s’animent comme des pêches mures ses chevaux fous voltigent en fil de “vierge folle”. Pas de méthode, pas d’ordre, mais un sentiment sûr du rythme et une inconstestable franchise de gaîté. Ses bras se lèvent insoucieux des indiscrétions de la bretelle tenant lieu de manche; les jambes fléchissent, bringueballent, battent l’air, menancent les chapeaux… Sans contester la valeur de la Goulue, on peut affirmer qu’une grosse part de sa célébrité revient à ses qualités de fille fraîche, appétissante, fière de ses charmes et trop hardie à les montrer. Constamment elle cherche le geste suspect, de la main, du pied, de tout le corps, elle le trouve, elle l’impose et le public applaudit. La Goulue est une enchanteresse.”

11

She provokes by displaying her bare flesh as far as it can be seen amongst the magnificent jumble of underwear, intentionally allowing a liberal amount of naked skin to be visible between her garter and the first flounce of her knickers, which slide up when she extends her leg. The transparent material barely covers the rest. She observes the fascination this provokes, gradually stirring it up through movements each more risqué than the last, and encouraging unhealthy curiosity to stretch to frantic searching, making the most of the effects of shadows in the pink areas glimpsed through gaps in the lace.16

Clearly, La Goulue had a reputation founded on her sex appeal, an image that she intentionally

cultivated and spread through both textual and visual media. An example of the latter, an

illustration from Le Courrier Français (1889) by Lunel, depicts the interior of Élysée

Montmartre during the performance of the quadrille (fig. 3). Off to the right stands Valentin, his

face in profile and his hands resting on his hips. Next to him, and closer to the center, is La

Goulue. Unlike Valentin, who appears to stand still, La Goulue is depicted in mid-motion. Her

right hand is lifting up her petticoats to reveal her jauntily-lifted right leg exposing her knickers

to the sea of onlookers. The organization of the composition is designed to make the viewer feel

a part of the spectacle—a common device used by Toulouse-Laturec in his compositions

including La danse au Moulin Rouge.

As these descriptions of La Goulue attest, her public image was not solely a creation of

Toulouse-Lautrec’s; his representations both derived from, and fed back into, existing textual

and visual images of La Goulue. My aim in this chapter is to analyze the dancer’s role in making

her own self-representation, so as to highlight her role in the making of the panels for her fun fair

booth. As the panels themselves recall in both their style and their content, Toulouse-Lautrec and

La Goulue each were controversial figures in their own right. Toulouse-Lautrec revolutionized

the art world by introducing contemporary subject matter with a focus on specific celebrities,

rendered in an increasingly abstracting style. La Goulue publicly staged a new brand of

femininity that exploited, and capitalized on, the popular association between lower-class women

16 Price, Cancan!, 87.

12

and sexual availability. It is important to note that both of these personae played on various

social and cultural anxieties that were intrinsic to the zeitgeist of fin-de-siècle Paris. Toulouse-

Lautrec became a key figure in the marketing of actual celebrities, and it is through these works

that female performers such as La Goulue could advance their careers as well as alternative

feminine identities.

La Goulue’s “Disruptive Acts”

As I note above, writings on Toulouse-Lautrec cast La Goulue in a supporting role to the

artist himself, and frequently present her as a foil to Jane Avril (1868-1943), another popular

dancer frequently depicted by Lautrec in both posters and paintings. In part, this denial of La

Goulue’s agency may have to do with her controversial, highly sexualized persona. What is

known about her personality and actions seems, in light of today’s conventional conception of

female agency, to adhere to a stereotype often associated with female performers—as scandalous

and sexual figures that enforce rather than disrupt cultural stereotypes about women. While other

women certainly courted a similar association, they did so more hesitatingly. In contrast, La

Goulue did so with gusto—hence her nickname, which alludes to her over-indulgent persona and

behavior. In other words, La Goulue does not fit with today’s notions of female agency.

Jane Avril, on the other hand, is more easily reconciled with our conception of female

agency. Avril’s agency is founded primarily on her refusal to become a contracted performer at

the Moulin Rouge, which allowed her more artistic freedom.17 Her dances, moreover, contrasted

with the riotous quadrille with their slower tempo and waltz music.18 When Avril performed, her

17 Catherine Peldley-Hindson, Female performance practice on the fin-de-siècle popular stages of London

and Paris: Experiment and Advertising, 95. 18 Pedley-Hindson, “Jane Avril and the Entertainment Lithograph,” 116; Female performance practice on

the fin-de-siècle popular stages of London and Paris: Experiment and Advertising (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

13

dances were remarked upon for their combination of ethereal detachment and subtle sensuality as

well as her artistically-crafted costumes.19 Her signature move was called “the fan” and involved

a back-bend with an extended leg that would show off her carefully curated multicolored

petticoats.20 In addition, Avril preferred to associate herself with artists and writers rather than

fellow performers. A few scholars have, in particular, explored her working relationship and

friendship with Toulouse-Lautrec as creative and collaborative relationships in which both

figures contributed to each other’s artistic output. Catherine Pedley Hindson, a scholar in

performance studies, is one such scholar who specifically looks at the artistic relationship

between Jane Avril and Toulouse-Lautrec, establishing artistic legitimacy and agency for the

female performer.21 This line of inquiry has been based on Avril’s penchant for commissioning

posters from Lautrec, including Jane Avril (1893; fig. 4) and La Troupe de Madamoiselle

Églantine (1895; fig. 5), to advertise her numerous spectacles.22

In contrast to the reception of Avril and her interactions with Lautrec, scholars have

tended to discuss La Goulue simply as a fascination of the artist, focusing on his works of her

and the fame he achieved from the incorporation of specifically low-class celebrities and avant-

garde aesthetics into his oeuvre. Only a minority of scholars have recently begun to further

elaborate why this success was possible from a socio-historical standpoint. This standpoint

explores a myriad of factors beyond the canonical conception of Toulouse-Lautrec’s artworks,

which consistently privileges the artist over any other formative figures or events. Although

Pedley Hindson focuses on Jane Avril in particular, she extends her line of inquiry to include

19 Pedley-Hindson, Female performance practice on the fin-de-siècle popular stages of London and Paris:

Experiment and Advertising, 96. 21 Pedley-Hindson, “Jane Avril and the Entertainment Lithograph,” 107-123.

22 Ibid.

14

female performers in general. Most importantly, she recontextualizes the dance hall as a

potentially liberating space for the female performer, and argues that the performer was a

product of and a contribution to commodity culture.23 In other words, the development of a

commodity culture in France led to the development of a new type of celebrity—one that was

more accessible to a range of people from various backgrounds and genders, and was prized not

for heroic feats but for their sensationalism. Although these women, including Jane Avril and La

Goulue, were sexualized to varying degrees, their celebrity status enabled them to obtain certain

freedoms that had been withheld from French women for centuries. In addition, these celebrities

contributed to the commodity culture through the use of their images to sell products and

entertainments and by breaching the private sphere through their fashionability and the rise of a

new type of collecting practices including the collecting of lithographic posters, limited edition

prints and inexpensive cartes de visite featuring famous celebrities.24

Similarly, Mary Weaver Chapin’s dissertation “Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Café-

Concert: Printmaking, Publicity and Celebrity in Fin-de-Siècle Paris” discusses the commodity

culture of the fin-de-siècle and the interdependence between advertising and the celebrity.

Chapin, however, specifically focuses on the importance of these cultural phenomena in relation

to Toulouse-Lautrec and his celebrity muses, including La Goulue. Chapin supplies an

impressive amount of biographical information on La Goulue, and advocates for her role in the

fabrication of Lautrec’s depictions of her.25 That being said, her dissertation still places greater

emphasis on Toulouse-Lautrec devoting only one chapter to exploring the cancaneuse and her

23 Pedley-Hindson, Female performance practice on the fin-de-siècle popular stages of London and Paris:

Experiment and Advertising. 24 Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Café-Concert: Printmaking Publicity and Celebrity in Fin-

de-Siècle Paris,” 93. 25 Ibid., 74.

15

role in the creation of his images.26 In order to account for La Goulue’s agency, one must

understand the extent to which La Goulue defined herself in contrast to the normative fin-de-

siècle female.

In order to discuss La Goulue’s integral role in the construction of her public identity—as

opposed to being fully defined for her by Lautrec and others—it is fruitful to consider Mary

Louise Roberts’s conception of the various forms that feminism took in late nineteenth-century

French culture. Using Marguerite Durand (actress, suffragette and founder and editor of the

female-operated journal La Fronde) and Sarah Bernhardt (the most iconic stage actress of the

period) as her primary examples, Roberts argues for the consideration of non-normative

womanhood as a potential act of subversion. She suggests that although the actions of these new

women can be interpreted in various lights, at once subversive and conservative, their actions

have the potential to be viewed as “disruptive” in ways that could inspire change in the lives of

other women.27 It is important to note that these women had a more widespread effect than

previous generations, since their image, and thus their “disruptive acts,” were disseminated

through the various media that marked the emergence of a mass culture of the fin-de-siècle.

While Roberts focuses primarily on the newspaper, cartoons and publicity photographs, the

entertainment lithograph or poster should be counted among these new media.

Each woman discussed in Disruptive Acts defined herself intentionally in contrast to

some aspects of normative female behavior, while simultaneously, and sometimes contradictorily

parodying aspects of normative female behavior to her own benefit. Roberts characterizes this

26 While Chapin does mention the panels they are relegated yet again to a footnote. Instead, she focuses on

Toulouse-Lautrec’s more well-known images of La Goulue including Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, La Goulue entering the Moulin Rouge and La Goulue and her Sister to name a few.

27 Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France, (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 2002).

16

mode of feminism as symptomatic of the need to make female agency more palatable within the

patriarchal, culturally conservative atmosphere of fin-de-siècle France. These new women had

the potential to reveal the falsity of the immutable concept of woman. That is, they exposed the

fin-de-siècle concept of gender as essentalizing by demonstrating (both individually and

collectively) that there were many different identities available to contemporary women. For

example, Bernhardt cultivated a persona that mimicked aspects of French conventional

femininity through the exaggeration of “feminine” traits, such as frivolity and self-adornment.

Durand emphasized her sexuality and beauty in order to counter the stereotype of the new

woman as asexual or manly.28 Furthermore, Durand’s paper, La Fronde, presented a

contradictory, multi-vocal conception of women that undermined the naturalized concept of

woman. Both Bernhardt and Durand, in different ways, exemplify Roberts’s concept of the

“disruptive” woman. Each had the power of public visibility, which allowed them to toy with

various gender roles—exposing the latter as “a naturalized set of cultural conventions” rather

than truth, and thus achieving an unprecedented degree of autonomy for fin-de-siècle women.29

Like those “disruptive” women, La Goulue exploited the commodity culture of her time,

manipulating what Roberts describes as “an already blurred boundary between reality and

illusion in order to ‘play’ at identity and escape the confines of convention.”30 As a result, she

also had the potential to expose conventional femininity as a choice rather than a fate.31 Although

La Goulue did not achieve the enduring fame that Bernhardt enjoyed, she did experience a brief

28 Ibid., 187. 29 Ibid., 243. 30 Ibid. 241. 31 Ibid., 241.

17

period of stardom in Paris and abroad, as is evidenced by Yvette Guilbert’s recollection of the

cancaneuse:

La Goulue was pretty and amusing to watch in spite of a certain vulgarity—blonde with her bangs hanging down to her eyebrows. Her chignon, piled high on the top of her head like a helmet, ended in a single coil firmly twisted at the nape of her neck to ensure that it would not fall down while she danced. The classic rouflaquette, or ringlet, dangled from her temples over her ears, and from Paris to New York, by way of the dives of London’s Whitechapel, all the wenches of the period imitated the style of her hair and the coloured ribbon around her neck.32

The above quote not only attests to La Goulue’s popularity, but also paints a picture of her iconic

style: a top knot and beribboned neck, motifs that surfaced repeatedly in Lautrec’s images of the

performer. Like Bernhardt and Durand, La Goulue cultivated a powerful public identity by

utilizing innovative media of the fin-de-siècle. That identity, premised upon her overt sexuality

and proletarian roots, at once reinforced the stereotypes assigned to her gender and class, but also

retained a subversive potential. Indeed, as a female performer, La Goulue automatically and

intentionally transgressed social and gender boundaries: she and other female performers

presented potentially dangerous, alternative lifestyles that offered the promise of autonomy and

social mobility to female spectators.

Commodity Culture and the Display of Women

It is through the new forms of commodity culture that rapidly took hold during the

nineteenth century that La Goulue and her ilk gained access to new public arenas: both the literal

stages of Montmartre and the virtual stages of the mass media gave the dancer venues from

which to broadcast her subversive persona, which could then gain greater public exposure than

previously possible. As numerous scholars have noted, late nineteenth-century visual culture was

linked with the image of the sexually available female figure, employed to sell commodities

32 Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, 190-191.  

18

ranging from products to entertainments. By extension, the publicly visible woman, who was

often a member of the lower classes, was seen as a product available for consumption by men.

This deviated significantly from the perceived proper role of women as wife and mother—

qualities that were viewed as intrinsic to the female sex. In other words, the relegation of women

to the private sphere was predicated on the belief that all women were inherently maternal and

oriented to their familial roles because this was determined by nature, as Roberts notes:

Women were thought to posses a maternal instinct that made them inherently nurturing and self-sacrificing. Their “natural” place was in the familial home, where they also served as the bedrock of social morality. These qualities of maternalism and moral sensibility were believed to be essential rather than contingent. They were said to be fixed in the body and to bind women across class, race, and time--hence their natural status… Besides acting as wife and mother, a woman’s chief role was decorative—to serve as an ornament for the men in her life.33

This association of women with the private sphere and their designated role as mother and wife

was problematic when it came to lower-class women who had to work outside of the home in

order to support themselves and their families. The public visibility of such women induced

anxiety within France’s patriarchal society, for it threatened to reveal the long-established gender

binary as pure ideology rather than something fixed and determined by nature. Furthermore, as

women were considered “the bedrock of social morality,” those who went against what was

deemed acceptable, normative behavior were seen as deviants who endangered the values and

way of life of the bourgeoisie.

Active and autonomous, the female performer in particular threatened to dissolve the

feminine mystique of that period. Normative fin-de-siècle femininity was predicated on the

qualities of passivity and stillness, qualities that the female performer transgressed with her

33 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 3. Emphasis mine.

19

energetic, physically vigorous body.34 What is more, it was thought that through her visibility the

female performer had the potential to influence other women, specifically women of the

bourgeoisie, many of whom enjoyed watching performances of these “disruptive” women.35

While such public exposure can be (and has been) viewed negatively as exploiting women, it can

also be seen as tool through which fin-de-siècle women could challenge and dismantle the

restrictive socially and sexually inscribed roles of their epoch.

The poster became an important tool through which women could stage controversial and

counter identities in a public forum—one that had the potential to reach both a mixed social and

gendered audience. The advent of this mass medium only heightened the anxieties that female

celebrities had the capacity to provoke, since an influx of images and descriptions of subversive

women (both fictional and real) were available throughout Paris. They were pasted on city walls,

written about in popular newspapers and novels, and eventually breached the sphere of fine art—

thanks to Toulouse-Lautrec.36 The illustrated poster, known for its commoditization of female

sexuality, was, in particular, a highly contested, controversial medium because it, above all other

media, encroached upon everyday experience: pasted on walls all over Paris, the poster was

ubiquitous and unavoidable.37 As Karen Carter notes, misgivings about the poster were founded

on the belief that

34 Pedley-Hindson, Female performance practice on the fin-de-siècle popular stages of London and Paris,

37-38.  

35 Elisabeth K. Menon, “Images of Pleasure and Vice” In Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture,” in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001): 37-71.

36 Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and the Café-Concert: Printmaking, Publicity, and Celebrity in Fin-

de-Siècle Paris,” 46. 37 Ruth Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s, (Hanover: Dartmouth

College Press, 2014); Karen Carter “Unfit for public display: female sexuality and the censorship of fin-de-siècle publicity posters,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8:2 (2010).

20

the excitation of vision through images would be the means by which inherently modest and virtuous women would be exposed to knowledge of their own sexuality and thereafter presumably choose to abandon their traditional values and roles in society…the threatening aspect of the censored poster was not simply its public display or viewing of large-scale images of females, but the internalization of sexual knowledge, from which bourgeois women had to be protected. If posters could act as the ‘mirrors of Nana’ [Nana, a popular novel written by the naturalist Émile Zola, is centered on the exploits of Nana, a prostitute who rises to the status of a high-class courtesan during the Second Empire], then women it was feared would be contaminated by an image of unbridled female sexuality, which could be read by women as a construction of sexual subjectivity.38

While Carter’s discussion of overtly sexualized women in poster art remains broad and generic,

the poster artist Jules Chéret’s ethereal “cherettes” (female figures used to represent Parisian

gaiety and nightlife) come to mind. However, this novel fin-de-siècle concept of the sexualized

female as commodity extends to representation of actual women—representations that posed a

larger threat to bourgeois values because they represent actual women who are defying the

naturalized role of women within French society. It is in this sense that La Goulue’s embrace of

her own unbridled sexuality can be interpreted as an act of female agency and empowerment.

For, as an actual woman, she served as tangible proof that such a form of womanhood existed—

and as an image, she threatened to spread this form of womanhood by the contagion that Carter

describes.

The depiction of actual women on posters became a crucial marketing tool implemented

by the Parisian entertainment industry to sell their various spectacles and performers to

passersby. While the entertainment industry flourished from the eroticization of women, it also

provided an environment in which women could obtain unprecedented freedoms, including

social mobility and autonomy. For example, although La Goulue ended her life in poverty, she

financially benefited from the circumstances of her time—the advent of modern media that

38 Carter, “Unfit for public display: female sexuality and the censorship of fin-de-siècle publicity posters,”

118.

21

allowed for greater public exposure of the female celebrity. As aforementioned, La Goulue

earned close to four thousand francs weekly to perform at the Moulin Rouge. This is an

extravagant sum, considering that the typical working-class woman earned an average of three

francs a day (twenty-one francs weekly assuming they worked a seven-days a week).39 This

combination of fame and financial profit is what permitted the female celebrity to breach social

boundaries. Toulouse-Lautrec played an important role, however, in facilitating the reach of

these vedettes by introducing the concept of publicity posters. In so doing, he provided a vehicle

through which female performers, including La Goulue, could disseminate their images to a

wider audience not only increasing their fame but also potentially spreading their mode of

feminism.

However, the autonomy and social mobility that came with the success of female

performers like La Goulue was not without its ramifications. Associated with the lower class, the

female performer was linked with the prostitute because of her public visibility.40 Therefore, the

public woman elicited a two-fold response: she was both anxiety-inducing because of her

autonomy and perceived social mobility, but also pleasurable since she was thought of as

possessing loose morals, a cunning nature, and attractive looks. It is through these qualities that

the female performer transgressed normative female behavior, and established herself as a threat

to the French way of life in which women were meant to be subservient. La Goulue not only fit

within this category, but also heightened her dismissal of women’s “natural” role in society

through her excessively bold, brash personality.

39 James McMillian, “Gender at Work: Women Workers and the Sexual Division of Labour ” in France

and Women 1789-1914 (London: Routeledge, 2000): 166-167. 40 Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and the Café-Concert: Printmaking, Publicity, and Celebrity in Fin-

de-Siècle Paris,” 31.  

22

The association of popular dancers with prostitution was so common that it became a

major theme in popular novels, including one that was based on La Goulue, as well as in popular

journals. For example, a popular cartoon by Ferdinand Bac from La Vie Parisienne titled

Femmes Automatiques: Ce q’on y met, ce qu’il en sort (Automatic women: you get what you pay

for; 1892; fig. 6) highlights the association between mass culture and the feminine, and

underscores the widely-held belief that public women were commodities themselves. The

illustration depicts a selection of women with “legitimate” careers, ranging from a chambermaid

and barmaid to a famous actress, in a coin operated museum setting. The setting and captions

present a thinly-veiled assumption that these women moonlight as prostitutes and therefore are

available for consumption primarily by bourgeois men—identifiable in the cartoon by their

attire. Among these women is a cancaneuse of the Moulin Rouge, depicted performing a grand

écart that causes her skirts to spread out around her and the strap of her top to slide off of her left

shoulder.41 A bourgeois man ogles her from behind a rope, and it seems no coincidence that his

eyesight is in line with the woman’s nether regions. A caption located beneath the illustration

drives home Bac’s comedic but misogynistic illustration of the working class cancaneuse:

“Great skill is required to be able to throw her three or four coins because she does not remain

still a moment. One has to know how to handle her, as she is always foulmouthed. If you cannot

land on the sensitive spot, it is better to give up.”42

Although only one example of popular images of the cancan, Bac’s Femmes

Automatiques demonstrates the fin-de-siècle belief in the association of working-class women

41 Elisabeth K. Menon, “Images of Pleasure and Vice” in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, 51. 42 Translated in: Menon, “Images of Pleasure and Vice.“ La Vie Parisienne, March 19, 1892, 160-161. “Au

Moulin Rouge: Beaucoup d’adresse pour arriver à lui lancer ca pièce de trois ou quatre, car elle ne reste pas un moment tranquille. Il faut savoir s’y prendre, car elle est toujours très mal embouchée. Si vous ne tombez pas juste à l’endroit sensible, il vaut mieux y renoncer.”

23

with prostitution, and the media’s promotion of this association.43 La Goulue was no exception to

this stereotype, and even courted the association through her intentionally vulgar dances, semi-

pornographic photos, and antics, such as “forgetting” to wear her undergarments or knocking the

top hats off of patrons.44 This bawdy sensuality was central to her unique, eccentric persona. For

a woman of her social status and inferior background, La Goulue seemingly reinforced the

stereotype that lower class women possessed loose morals and engaged in and solicited uncouth

behaviors. However, her well-known haughty disposition and refusal to adhere to social norms

could be interpreted as an act of female agency by virtue of her flagrant disregard for the

bourgeois conceptions of womanhood. As aforementioned, mass culture and media played a

large part in the assertion of female agency during the fin-de-siècle, as the Queen of Montmartre,

La Goulue was neither short of spaces in which to assert her agency through female

exhibitionism nor mass media (articles in journals, photographs, posters, and other artworks)

through which she could proliferate and disseminate her subversive actions beyond the confines

of Montmartre’s nightlife—infiltrating not only Haussmann’s Paris but also the private sphere.

Maintaining Spectacle: La Goulue’s Cultivation of a Public Image

While the emergence of the modern celebrity presented opportunities previously

unavailable to women, it was also a notoriously unstable and ephemeral position. The transient

nature of modern celebrity made the advertising image—especially the illustrated poster—

central to remaining in the public limelight by virtue of its ability to reach the masses.45 So,

while media such as the lithographic poster and photography were important to the entertainment

43 Çelik and Kinney “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Exposition Universelles,” 44. 44 Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and the Café-Concert: Printmaking, Publicity, and Celebrity in Fin-

de-Siècle Paris,” 72. 45 Pedley-Hindson, “Jane Avril and the Entertainment Lithograph,” 107.

24

industry in general, it was just as important, if not more so, to individual celebrities who could

use them to establish wider public recognition and a distinct image. The existence of numerous

advertisements and other media featuring La Goulue reveal that she was in fact actively shaping

a unique public identity early in her career—one that Toulouse-Lautrec would follow within his

works—making their relationship not only collaborative but reciprocal and mutually beneficial.46

In particular, publicity photographs of La Goulue, which range in theme and tone from

the sensual to the semi-pornographic, date from as early as the late 1880s—some time prior to

her association with Lautrec (fig. 7). One such photograph shows her wearing a gown

emblazoned with iconic symbols of Montmartre—mice, cats and windmills (fig. 8). Symbolic of

Montmartre’s agrarian past, the windmill became associated with the area and two of the dance-

halls, the Moulin de la Galette, which had a functioning windmill, and later the Moulin Rouge,

which featured a more theatrical than functional red windmill decorated with electric lights.47

The cat is an obvious reference to Rodolphe Salis' cabaret Le Chat Noir, which opened in 1881

and functioned as both a nightclub and artistic salon patronized by a plethora of Montmartre

celebrities including Toulouse-Lautrec, Aristide Bruant, Jane Avril, Yvette Guilbert and Paul

Signac.48 This publicity photograph marks La Goulue as not only a member of this counter-

culture but one of its key “faces,” symbols, or metonyms. Another set of photographs illustrates

not only La Goulue’s centrality to Montmartre’s image, but also her anti-establishment nature.

Taken by Louis Victor Paul Bacard around 1885, these images show La Goulue dressed in

cancan attire with the addition of a crown possibly to identify her as the Queen of Montmartre or

46 Mary Weaver Chapin, “Toulouse-Lautrec and the Culture of Celebrity,” in Toulouse-Lautrec and

Montmartre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 49; Pedley-Hindson, Female performance practice on the fin-de-siècle popular stages of London and Paris, 124.

47 Heller, Toulouse-Lautrec: The Soul of Montmartre (New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1997): 57.

48 O’Conner, Nightlife of Paris: The Art of Toulouse-Lautrec, 11.

25

the Queen of Cancan.49 Shown with her undergarments exposed, eating and drinking in an

unladylike manner, La Goulue is the epitome of her nickname “The Gluttonous One.” These

images, in particular the one where she is shown with her legs casually splayed over the arm of a

chair, holding a cigarette (then associated with libertinism) in her right hand and a glass of wine

in the other (fig. 9), visually illustrates the debauchery and subversiveness for which Montmartre

stood.

Through the use of publicity images, such as the ones described above, La Goulue had

already established an identity for herself and gained a reputation in Montmartre before

Toulouse-Lautrec emblazoned her pantaloon-clad derrière on the iconic poster Moulin Rouge: La

Goulue (1891; fig. 10). Not only do those images show an early acknowledgement on the part of

La Goulue of the importance of self-marketing within the media available at the time; more

importantly, they show that Lautrec was following, rather than initiating, this already-established

image. As Mary Weaver Chapin keenly observes, “the sheer number of advertising images of her

[La Goulue] suggests that she had ascertained the role of the media in promoting her act and was

an active participant in her own marketing.”50 Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the

degree to which Toulouse-Lautrec’s artistic innovations contributed to the wider dissemination

of La Goulue’s image.

As aforementioned, Toulouse-Lautrec already began creating private and public images

of La Goulue (cartoons for Bruant’s Le Mirliton as well as early paintings) in the late 1880s.

However, none of his public images exclusively featured La Goulue or his iconic visual language

until Moulin Rouge: La Goulue. Presumably commissioned by Joseph Oller and Charles Zidler,

49 Ibid., 14.   50 Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and the Café-Concert: Printmaking, Publicity, and Celebrity in Fin-

de-Siècle Paris,” 74.

26

co-founders of the Moulin Rouge, Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster combined the latter’s innate

knowledge of marketing with the fin-de-siècle fascination for the notable individual.51 Featuring

an actual star, rather than generic bubbly female apparitions for whom Jules Chéret was revered,

Moulin Rouge: La Goulue redefined modern entertainment advertising. Beyond the inclusion of

an actual star, the poster’s grand scale—it comprised three sheets of paper and measured

approximately six and half feet by three feet and three inches—made it stand out from the other

advertisements displayed in the Parisian streets.52

Scholars often discuss the sexual innuendoes present in Toulouse-Lautrec’s first poster,

but rarely do they connect this to La Goulue’s self-fashioning, and the potential for her impudent

sexuality to constitute a form of agency. La Goulue wanted to embody the debauchery of

Montmartre’s underbelly. Toulouse-Lautrec’s sexualized portrayal of her thus not only alludes to

La Goulue’s well-known antics but also cements the identity she carefully cultivated. In other

words, the success of Lautrec’s celebrity works relied on his vivid avant-garde aesthetics as well

as rendering the subject easily recognizable through depicting both their defining features and

facets of their persona. As Catherine Pedley-Hindson notes, the relationship between artist and

female celebrity was not only collaborative but also reciprocal—both were invested in the

success of the advertising image. She notes that “lithographers needed to capture and present a

sense of what it was that made this particular dancer, singer or actress ‘vivid and distinct’

amongst the period’s ‘amazingly various aggregation of brilliant and fascinating

51 There are two theories about the commissioning of Moulin Rouge: La Goulue. The first is that Joseph

Oller and Charles Zidler directly commissioned Toulouse-Lautrec to produce a poster for their dance hall. If this is the case their power and influence should be considered when discussing this work. However, the second possibility is that Moulin Rouge: La Goulue was the product of a competition held by Oller and Zidler. This theory carries some weight since Pierre Bonnard produced a sketch for a Moulin Rouge poster featuring an anonymous cancaneuse and the phrase “tous les soirs” in 1891 as well.

52 Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s, 45.

27

personalities.’”53 In other words, a successful advertisement required the ability to convey the

rare individual qualities and unique performance aspects established by the star in question into

the poster. Therefore, while La Goulue may not have commissioned Lautrec’s prior images of

her, these earlier works and the panels both emphasize not only Lautrec’s artistic talents but also

La Goulue’s self-fashioned public persona.

Collaboration: The “Queen of Montmartre” and her “peintre officiel”

Scholars have tended to view Lautrec’s depictions of celebrities as relatively

homogeneous in style as well as subject. This view overlooks the degree to which Lautrec

portrayed celebrities in specific and differing ways, which speaks to the collaborative nature of

producing images of a celebrity for mass consumption. Furthermore, the variety of celebrities for

which Lautrec produced images evidences his willingness to work with the distinctive public

persona cultivated by each one. A salient example of Lautrec’s canny awareness of the

importance of establishing an easily recognizable image, the panels reinforce La Goulue’s

distinctive persona.

It is widely acknowledged that Lautrec’s images of La Goulue often present her as hyper

sexualized; perhaps the most conspicuous examples are Moulin Rouge: La Goulue and La

Goulue entering the Moulin Rouge (1893; fig. 11). Both works unmistakably depict La Goulue,

and neither the painting nor the poster present conventionally flattering or idealized depictions of

the cancaneuse. The composition of the former places La Goulue’s behind front and center, and

alludes to her sexual availability through Valentin’s curved right thumb and left hand place near

his groin. The latter depicts La Goulue close up, casting an imperious look on her face that

53 Pedley-Hindson, Female performance practice on the fin-de-siècle popular stages of London and Paris,

124.

28

accentuates her squinty eyes, and foregrounding a plunging, décolletage-revealing neckline that

contrasts dramatically with the high necklines of the dresses worn by other women in the image.

Although frank images that present an embodied vision of La Goulue, these images

adhere to La Goulue’s self-fashioned identity. This reading goes against the interpretation that

Toulouse-Lautrec intentionally depicted celebrities in an unsympathetic, scrutinizing manner, or

conversely that he approached them sympathetically or cast them in an idealizing light. Though

seemingly different from one another, these two ways of approaching the artist’s pictures of

celebrities are in fact quite similar, insofar as they only account for Toulouse-Lautrec’s

motivations; they do not take into account that the success of his works are partially determined

by his ability to represent the celebrity’s public persona. This facet of his works is reflected in

the parallels between the Louis Victor Paul Bacard’s photograph of La Goulue (c. 1885; fig. 12)

and La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge. The date of the photograph suggests that it was taken

when La Goulue was a performer at the Élysée Montmartre—that is, eight years before

Toulouse-Lautrec painted La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge in 1893. Shown frontally, with

her right hand balled into a fist resting on her hip, while her left lifts her skirts revealing

stocking-clad legs, La Goulue gazes imperiously outward in the photograph. Lautrec’s painting

presents La Goulue accompanied by her sister on her right and a fellow dancer, possibly La

Môme Fromage or Grille d’Égout, on her left entering the Moulin Rouge. The positioning of La

Goulue’s body is almost identical to Bacard’s photograph. Her arms have been slightly adjusted

so that they are linked with those of her companions rather than resting on her hip. Toulouse-

Lautrec’s painting is more cropped, creating a feeling of intimacy and immediacy that Bacard’s

photograph lacks, since it presents a full frontal view of the star from a distance. Bacard’s

representation showcases La Goulue’s role as a cancan dancer whereas Toulouse-Lautrec’s work

29

is more intent on capturing La Goulue’s famed personality. The parallels between Bacard’s

photograph and La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge reveal that Toulouse-Lautrec was not

solely using direct observation to craft his images of La Goulue, but also drawing inspiration

from a mélange of earlier media—media that La Goulue had already begun using to “brand”

herself.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s images of female celebrities do not, therefore, adhere to one set

formula. His images are individualized to fit the persona crafted and promulgated by that

celebrity. Lautrec’s individualization of figures is best illustrated by a comparison of the works

analyzed thus far in this chapter with his images of Loïe Fuller (1864-1901), an American

expatriate living in Paris known for her dances that involved special effects designed by the

dancer herself. Unlike La Goulue, Fuller projected a chaste, de-sexualized public identity. In

part, this choice was motivated by Fuller’s desire to be acknowledged as a legitimate artist, an

emphasis manifest in choreography that provided an alternative to both popular dances such as

the quadrille naturaliste and the ballet.54 Although many of her dances were physically rigorous

like the cancan, they intentionally disembody her rather than accentuating the body through the

titillation of the reveal of undergarments and skin.

Acknowledging Fuller’s desire to identify as an artist rather than a mere entertainer, in

1893 Lautrec produced a series of unique, limited-edition prints (approximately sixty

impressions) of Fuller’s Serpentine Dance, titled Miss Loïe Fuller (fig. 13). The Serpentine

Dance involved large swathes of fabric manipulated by poles with slightly curved ends that

elongated her reach enabling her swirl the fabric around her body in abstract gestures (fig. 14).

Using hand-tinted gelatin filters, Fuller had different colored light effects projected onto the

54 Juliet Bellow, “Dance in Debussy’s Paris: Refiguring Art and Music” in Debussy’s Paris (Northampton:

Smith College of Art, 2012): 52.

30

fabric as she danced.55 Lautrec’s prints reflect the ephemerality of Fuller’s dance and its abstract

nature. The most abstract representation of a celebrity produced by Lautrec, Fuller’s figure is a

primarily a colorful, curvilinear shape set against a dark background. In comparison to the

publicity posters produced of Fuller around the same time for the Folies Bergère, which depict

Fuller swathed in transparent, body-revealing fabric (figs. 15 and 16), Lautrec’s prints adhere to

Fuller’s conception of herself. An earlier oil on cardboard work from 1892, titled At the Music

Hall: Loïe Fuller (fig. 17), highlights Lautrec’s change in perspective towards the representation

of Fuller. The sketch depicts a more corporeal representation of the dancer. However, in

comparison to the Folies-Bergère posters, she is still represented chastely with the majority of

her body concealed in voluminous fabric, indicated by a series of black contour lines. The fact

that Lautrec never produced a publicity poster for the star but a series of limited-edition prints

speaks to his sensitivity to Fuller’s wish to distinguish herself as an artist. More expensive than a

poster, a print was a better medium in which to convey and encourage Fuller’s public reception

as an artist.

Although less apparent, Lautrec’s sensitivity towards the performer’s self-constructed

public identity is also visible in his works that depict La Goulue, especially the panels. Unlike

Fuller, La Goulue had no desire to be recognized as an artist. Instead, she was satisfied with her

reputation as fin-de-siècle sexpot, an identity that helped her to become successful in

Montmartre. This identity is reflected in Toulouse-Lautrec’s artworks that depict her as well as

the earlier-discussed publicity photographs. Unlike Fuller, whom he only depicted in limited

edition prints, Toulouse-Lautrec depicted La Goulue in a range of media, including paintings,

prints and posters. This range captures everything from La Goulue’s “personality” to her self-

55  Naoko Morita, “An American in Paris: Loïe Fuller, Dance and Technology,” in A Belle Epoque?: Women in French Society and Culture 1890-1914, 113-123 (Berghahn Books, 2006).  

31

sexualization. For example, in the left panel, he shows La Goulue bent over with her hands

concealed by her skirts but most likely resting on her thighs clearly flashing her knickers to the

audience. This is also the case in his first poster, Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, where La Goulue is

not only revealing her knickers to the viewer. Unlike his depictions of Fuller, Toulouse-Lautrec

produced both commercial and non-commercial works of La Goulue.

In 1892, a year prior to his print of Loïe Fuller, Toulouse-Lautrec produced a limited-

edition print of La Goulue titled At the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue and Her Sister (fig. 18). This

print differs drastically from Miss Loïe Fuller. La Goulue is shown not performing but rather

strutting around the Moulin Rouge—a choice that reflects her well-known imperious attitude.

Although her body lacks modeling, La Goulue is more corporeal than Loïe Fuller’s abstracted

form. While Fuller is presented as a solitary figure suspended in space, La Goulue is situated

within a semi-realistic space surrounded by other figures that create a sense of depth in the

overall composition. Although comprised of black contour lines and bold areas of flat color, like

the other figures in the composition, La Goulue contrasts greatly with the acrid yellow

background and the black somber color of her sister’s conservative dress by virtue of the pastel

color palette of her skin and dress. The juxtaposition of La Goulue with her sister underscores

her sexual appeal and the raciness of her attire—the low back and sensual color playing off her

sister’s frumpy, matronly style. However, Toulouse-Lautrec’s choice to show La Goulue from

behind is similar to the gesture made in Miss Loïe Fuller and At the Music Hall: La Loïe Fuller.

In so doing, he reveals his confidence in his short-hand style that reduces the visual

representation of a celebrity down to a few essential, selective characteristics without rendering

them unidentifiable.56

56 Chapin has pointed out that Lautrec’s print, At the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue and her Sister, intentionally

recalls his earlier painting La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge.

32

Returning to La danse au Moulin Rouge and La danse mauresque, the panels similarly

reveal Lautrec’s assuredness that La Goulue, who is shown at a distance in the right panel and

with her face slightly obscured in the left, is still distinguishable. In both works, she is

recognizable by the same characteristics Lautrec emphasized in his previous works of her—her

black choker, strawberry blonde topknot, racy garments and squinty eyes. The left panel,

specifically, depicts a rosy-cheeked La Goulue in the midst of performing one of her can-can

routines, while the right shows her high kicking in an “oriental” inspired costume and setting.

(Chapter three will more fully analyze the possible motivations and effects of La Goulue’s

“Moorish” dance.) Despite the supposed differences in the performances—one is meant to be a

danse du ventre and the other a regional (French) working-class dance—La Goulue is still

unmistakably identifiable. Toulouse-Lautrec’s synthesis of her characteristic features makes her

easily recognizable in all of his medias—posters, prints and paintings. It is no coincidence that

these features were aspects of the celebrity’s identity that became associated with her and

imitated by other women as recalled by Yvette Guilbert in her memoir. These markers of identity

were ones that La Goulue developed early on in her career, as is evidenced by the numerous

photos, illustrations, posters and paintings in which she is depicted with the same unique

defining features.

The dance hall, like the stage, was a venue where women could performatively stage their

gendering, and thereby reveal the eternal feminine as a choice rather than a destiny. Although the

opposite of bourgeois cultural values, Montmartre’s lowbrow raciness appealed to the

bourgeoisie as a spectacle that was simultaneously attractive and revolting. A cancaneuse and

one major face of this Parisian underworld, La Goulue—marked by hyper-sexuality and deviant

behavior—disrupted the bourgeois conception of what it meant to be female. She did not

33

necessarily intentionally decide to be subversive, but the dance hall, which encouraged her

eccentric behavior, provided lower class women such as herself with an opportunity for financial

and social gain that otherwise would not have been possible.

La Goulue’s subversive persona was also facilitated by the emerging mass culture of

Paris, which increased the public visibility of such “deviant” women. She used a variety of

modern media in order to disseminate her image—the newspaper, publicity photographs, posters

etc even prior to Toulouse-Lautrec’s intervention. A relatively anonymous artist at the beginning

of their relationship, Toulouse-Lautrec capitalized on La Goulue’s success, strategically

employing her image, and later other celebrities, that would attract attention to himself and his

artworks.57 La Goulue’s decision to commission Toulouse-Lautrec for her fun-fair booth, at a

time when she was attempting self-employment in the spectacle business, is telling. Toulouse-

Lautrec was indispensable to La Goulue, not only because he had achieved artistic recognition

throughout Europe, but also because his works present a mixing of media drawn from high-

cultural and sub-cultural sources. In so doing, La Goulue’s image was disseminated in a

multitude of socially and culturally inscribed venues that the performer would not have been able

to infiltrate on her own. The formal and iconographical implications of Toulouse-Lautrec’s

hybridity will be further explored in the subsequent chapter.

57 This is not to suggest that Toulouse-Lautrec’s fame was established solely through his use of La

Goulue’s image and persona. His adept knowledge of marketing factors and his innovative aesthetics played an integral role the success of his first major work Moulin Rouge: La Goulue.

34

CHAPTER 2

BETWEEN PAINTING AND POSTER: TOULOUSE-LAUTREC’S

MIXING OF MEDIA

In this chapter, I focus on how Toulouse-Lautrec approached the unusual commission he

received from La Goulue, using the panels to revisit the relationship between two strains of his

work in the 1890s: painting and lithographic poster. Though the subject of the panels—a popular

Parisian entertainment—is typical of Lautrec, their format is unique within his oeuvre, insofar as

they blend the genres of oil painting, publicity poster and mural or architectural decoration.

While this mixing or hybridization of media—and the cultural values associated with those

media—is present to some degree in much of Toulouse-Lautrec’s artistic production, nowhere

else in his oeuvre do we see the high art medium of oil painting and the low-status art of the

poster converge so fully as they do in these works.58

Typically divided into separate categories, Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters and paintings are

rarely discussed in direct relation to one another. When scholars do acknowledge the interplay

between his works in these two media, they often implicitly or explicitly assert a hierarchy

between the two, valorizing Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings in comparison with his lithographs,

which often are characterized as derivative of his paintings in both content and style.

Furthermore, while Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings occupy the hallowed sphere of “fine art,” the

posters are perceived as both utilitarian and frankly commercial. For example, in Toulouse-

Lautrec: The Soul of Montmartre, Reinhold Heller argues that Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster Moulin

Rouge: La Goulue was derived from the earlier painting At the Moulin Rouge: Training the New

Girls (fig. 19; 1890). Yet, when Heller discusses La Goulue’s panels, he only connects them to

58 Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts” in Modern Art in the Common Culture

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996): 3-38.

35

the contemporaneous painting Au Moulin Rouge (fig. 20; 1892/1895), which was never publicly

displayed; he therefore ignores the references the panel makes to Lautrec’s posters including

Moulin Rouge: La Goulue.59 Heller does point out that Toulouse-Laturec’s posters may subvert

or extend existing concepts of art, but he does not take a definite stance on this matter.60 Other

scholars, including David Sweetman, Zenep Çelik, and Leila Kinney, have acknowledged that

Toulouse-Lautrec’s works often reference his other works, but none of these authors attributes

much importance to this “habit.”61 Mary Chapin most fully addresses Toulouse-Lautrec’s

investment in both media, and his unique ability to “straddle two worlds at once and to negotiate

boundaries that thwarted other artists of his time, such as the gulfs between art and commerce

applied and fine art, caricature and synthesis.”62 While she acknowledges Lautrec’s duality,

Chapin focuses primarily on his posters. She relates the latter to his desire for publicity and, by

extension, his need to appeal to a wide market of consumers, including the Montmartre locals,

more sophisticated patrons drawn to Montmartre by its numerous spectacles and the literary and

artistic avant-gardes.63 Chapin does not address how Toulouse-Lautrec’s multimedia practice

subverts the hierarchies that traditionally assigned the medium of oil painting a more elevated

status than the lithographic print.64

59 Heller, Toulouse-Lautrec: The Soul of Montmartre; Heller, “Rediscovering Henri de Toulouse Lautrec’s

At the Moulin Rouge,” Art Institute of Chicago (1986): 116. 60 Heller, Toulouse-Lautrec: The Soul of Montmartre, 72.

61 Sweetman, Explosive Acts; Zenep Çelik and Lelia Kinney, “Ethnography and Exhibtionism at the

Expositions Universelles,” 52.

62 Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and the Café-Concert: Printmaking, Publicity, and Celebrity in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,” 79.

63 Ibid., 81.

64  Ibid.      

36

Thus although the connection between Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings and posters is quite

visually apparent, that connection is rarely addressed as a meaningful aspect of the artist’s

practice. This chapter argues that it is impossible to disentangle Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings

from his posters: his work in both media can only be fully comprehended in relation to one

another. Lautrec intentionally and emphatically maintains his connections to both fine art and

commercial worlds, maintaining the privilege and prestige of the former while benefitting from

the edginess and wider audience of the latter. Because Toulouse-Lautrec’s panels for La Goulue

straddle these two media, an analysis of this work can help us see how the artist at once reaffirms

and dissolves the arbitrary distinctions between them. A composite work, the panels exemplify

Thomas Crow’s observation, in his essay “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” that

“the most powerful moments of modernist negation have occurred when the two aesthetic orders,

the high cultural, and subcultural, have been forced into scandalous identity, each being

continuously dislocated by the other.”65 The panels Lautrec made for La Goulue demonstrate

this duality in their very structure as well as in their aesthetics and their iconographic program.

On each of these levels, the panels blur the boundaries between the elite and the sub-cultural;

they simultaneously benefit from, and cast doubt upon, social and institutional hierarchies of

high and low.66 In the merging of two very artistically and culturally distinct media, Toulouse-

Lautrec asserts a subversive identity—one analogous to La Goulue’s.

Panels as Poster

Given the function of the panels for La Goulue—as an advertisement for her act—the

clearest analogue for these works would be Toulouse-Lautrec’s work as a designer of publicity

65 Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” 25-26.      

66 Ibid., 3-37; Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-gardism

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).  

37

posters for La Goulue and other well-known performers of this period. Lautrec’s focus on

contemporaneous scenes in Montmartre’s café-concerts, dance halls and circuses aligned him

with the Naturalists, a group of artists and writers interested in the objective depiction or

description of everyday subject matter.67 His interest in vernacular subject matter, specifically

celebrity culture and Parisian nightlife, and his desire to create a public impact led to his interest

in the publicity poster, a medium uniquely positioned to reach a wide and varied mass audience.

A visual comparison with his posters of the 1890s elucidates Lautrec’s incorporation of his

commercial art practices into the formal and iconographic program of his panels for La Goulue.

The most famous of these posters is his 1891 poster for La Goulue’s can-can act, titled

Moulin Rouge: La Goulue. His first foray into lithography, the six-foot-tall poster depicts La

Goulue, identifiable by her signature topknot and black neck ribbon, performing the can-can in

front of a silhouetted crowd with her dramatically cropped partner Valentin in the foreground.68

A highly successful work, Moulin Rouge: La Goulue made Lautrec an overnight sensation and

launched his poster-making career.69 In the subsequent decade, Lautrec produced thirty such

posters, a number that suggests the significance of this practice to his career as an artist

(admittedly, though, this number is not as large as the approximately one thousand posters of the

most famous artist working in that medium during the period, Jules Chéret).70 Toulouse-

Lautrec’s interest in lithography enabled him to explore alternatives to traditional artistic modes

67 Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, 198. The Naturalists were an artistic movement characterized by their

refusal to idealize and their objective to elevate modest subject matter (often depictions of the working class) to the level of historical events.

68 Chapin, “Toulouse Lautrec and the Culture of Celebrity,” in Toulouse Lautrec and Montmartre, 46-63 (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005): 51-53.

69  Sweetman, Explosive Acts, 257.     70 Pedley-Hindson, “Jane Avril and the Entertainment Lithograph,” 108.  

38

and media, alternatives that not only enabled him reach a wider and more diverse audience, but

also established his reputation as a radical, unconventional artist.

Importantly, Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters also effected a stylistic transformation in poster

art by introducing avant-garde painterly aesthetics—chiefly, bold, flat colors and simplified

compositional arrangements—to the genre. This transformation is most evident through a

comparison of Lautrec’s work with that of his contemporary, Chéret. Whereas Chéret’s posters

featured crowded compositions, a plethora of detail, and a wide range of subtly gradated hues,

Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters employed a reductive system in which the composition was made

from a combination of negative space; bold flat areas of stenciled color; and strong black contour

lines.71 In addition, Lautrec also liberally and strategically utilized cropping and unusual

viewpoints, creating an illusion that the scene extends beyond the work itself—putting the

viewer “inside” the depicted scene in ways that Chéret’s posters do not. Furthermore, Lautrec

worked, of his own volition, with a narrow, restricted color palette and often merged figure with

ground, flattening out the depicted figures and space.72 The use of these formal devices in his

posters links them with a variety of avant-garde painting styles of the fin-de-siècle.

To highlight both the similarities and the differences between these two poster artists, we

can compare Chéret’s Bal au Moulin Rouge (1889; fig. 21) with the aforementioned Moulin

Rouge: La Goulue. Both works were commissioned by Charles Zidler as advertisements for the

Moulin Rouge dance hall.73 It is important to acknowledge that, although the artists differed

stylistically, Toulouse-Lautrec was indebted to Chéret for his discovery of new printing

71 Carter, "The Spectatorship of the Affiche Illustrée and the Modern City of Paris, 1880-1900," 11-17.

72 Cate, “The Popularization of Lautrec,” in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Images of the 1890s, 72-92 (New

York: Museum of Modern Art, 1985): 78.

73 Heller, Toulouse-Lautrec: The Soul of Montmartre, 64.  

39

techniques, which allowed for a greater gradation of color. Without Chéret’s contribution to

lithography, Lautrec’s bold four-color composition in Moulin-Rouge: La Goulue would have

been impossible to achieve.74 Chéret’s Bal au Moulin Rouge depicts a group of vivacious female

figures parading around on donkeys, an act featured at the Moulin Rouge. Chéret depicts the

largest female figure of his composition in bright colors, while the rest are depicted in grisaille,

using both scale and palette to draw the viewer’s eye. Lautrec adapts this selective use of color,

but radically simplifies his composition: though Chéret’s ancillary figures are in a muted

grisaille, they still congest the composition, whereas Toulouse-Lautrec uses a dynamic contour

line, filled in with flat black, to indicate a multitude of figures without distracting the viewer’s

attention from the focal point (in this case, La Goulue). Toulouse-Lautrec’s simplification of

form and palette gave his posters greater clarity in a bid to attract the constantly bombarded and

therefore distracted gaze of the Parisian passerby. These aesthetic innovations marked a turning

point in Lautrec’s career towards the implementation of the commercial and popular culture into

his oeuvre while simultaneously reinvigorating and popularizing avant-garde aesthetics by

staging them in a new arena—the street.

If we examine Toulouse-Lautrec’s panels for La Goulue alongside his posters, we can

see striking formal and iconographic similarities that are intended to not only jolt the viewer into

recalling Lautrec’s earlier posters and his reputation as the radical painter of Montmartre.

Moreover, these parallels also underscore the commercial function of the panels as an

advertisement for La Goulue’s performance. Though the panels are made with oil paint, Lautrec

attempts to replicate here his characteristic poster style: the panels employ a minimal use of

color, relying instead on the graphic effects of negative space and black contour lines. Whereas

Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings typically feature crowded dance halls replete with descriptive

74 Pedley-Hindson, “Jane Avril and the Entertainment Lithograph,” 109.  

40

detail, the panels’ simplified, monochromatic backgrounds more closely align them to poster

works such as Moulin Rouge: La Goulue and Jane Avril. Like the posters, the background of the

panels are constructed entirely from black contour lines, with the exception of the lights which

are made of quick, thick strokes and daubs of white paint. The receding orthogonal lines in both

the panels and the posters are the only elements, besides the figures, that suggest a depth of

space, albeit minimally. This contrasts with Lautrec’s paintings, such as At the Moulin Rouge

and La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge, which feature more realistically-defined spaces and

intricately detailed figures. Furthermore, the panels are not bursting with a variety of garish,

saturated colors: instead, he uses a restrained palette that connotes the limited number of hues

employed in his lithographs.

Indeed, as in his posters, Toulouse-Lautrec’s panels employ color to draw the viewer’s

attention to the star performer, trading on the cult of celebrity to attract viewers.75 With the

exception of a few accessories adorning the spectators, Lautrec has concentrated his use of color

on the figure of La Goulue in both panels, making her the focal point of both compositions. In La

danse au Moulin Rouge, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the colorful figure of La Goulue, even

though she shares the foreground with her dance partner Valentin. Her white skin, green and

white skirts, pink-striped blouse and strawberry-blonde top knot stand in stark contrast against

the less modeled, mostly monochromatic figures in the background. The shading (although

minimal) on La Goulue’s face and neck contrasts sharply with her body, which is made up of a

series of paint strokes of various widths and texture through which the canvas is visible. This

juxtaposition further emphasizes the poster-like qualities of the panel, enhancing its flatness.

Despite her relatively small scale in La danse mauresque, La Goulue is yet again made the focal

75 Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and the Café-Concert: Printmaking, Publicity, and Celebrity in Fin-

de-Siècle Paris.”

41

point through a dense concentration of color. Here the contrast is even greater, because although

the spectators in the immediate foreground are life-size, they are less corporeal than La

Goulue—being made up primarily of contour lines and negative space. This technique of using

color to generate a dramatic composition and to direct the viewer’s eye was uncommon in

Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings, but it became common practice in his publicity posters. The

panels, like Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, deemphasize both the setting and surrounding figures

through a conservative use of color and detail in order to direct the viewer’s attention to the main

spectacle, in this case La Goulue, who takes center stage. However, as I address in the next

section, the panels are not as stylistically economical as Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters: in this way,

the work intentionally maintains one foot in the genre of poster art, the other in painting.

Panels as Paintings

While Lautrec clearly meant viewers to see the panels for La Goulue as a sort of poster,

he also emphatically retained their associations to oil painting—and thus to the realm of high art.

The medium he employed, oil on canvas, intrinsically aligns the panels with the fine arts: unlike

his posters, these are one-of-a-kind pieces, not made for mass reproduction and wide distribution.

However, Lautrec established a push and pull between high and low in his use of the medium of

painting. For he used as his support a particularly low grade of canvas that is heavy and textured,

not smooth and even as would be the convention for this medium. He also gave this canvas a

wash of brown paint, thus making it appear to be of base, lowbrow materials such as cardboard

or paper.76

It is also important to note that the panels are iconographically resonant not only with

Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster work, as detailed in the previous section, but also with his paintings of

76  Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, 409-410.  

42

this period. Painted five years prior to the panels, Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge:

Training of the New Girls by Valentin le Désossé presents numerous similarities to the left panel

La danse au Moulin Rouge. Both works feature La Goulue’s partner Valentin, and present his

head in strict profile. Furthermore, Training of the New Girls discloses Toulouse-Lautrec’s early

interest in the motif of the spectator, with emphasis placed on the female figure in the

foreground: her large relative scale and bright pink clothing competes with Valentin and his

protégé for the viewer’s attention. This potential distraction is intentionally eliminated in the

panel, thus placing greater emphasis on La Goulue; importantly, unlike the anonymous dancer in

Training of the New Girls, La Goulue is also an identifiable celebrity. Although not to the same

extent as the panels, Training of the New Girls also features identifiable figures that frequented

the demimonde as well as stylized versions of the Moulin Rouge’s famous electric lighting.

Additionally, both the panels and Training of the New Girls include dramatically cropped

figures. In the case of the latter, the figure is exiting the picture plane on the left, whereas the

figure in La danse au Moulin Rouge is entering the scene. These figures generate not only a

sense of movement, but also of ephemerality—Toulouse-Lautrec has created the illusion that he

has captured a specific moment in time.

The left panel also makes a clear reference to Toulouse-Lautrec’s painted works, in

particular his La Goulue and Valentin-le-Désossé (1889-90; fig. 22).77 Although slight

adjustments have been made to La Goulue’s figure in the panel, such as the tipping up of her

head to reveal her face and neck, her depiction adheres closely to the earlier painting. The major

difference between the two images of La Goulue is the implication of motion conveyed in La

danse au Moulin Rouge by her stance and flurry of skirts. Valentin, by contrast, presents an

77 O’Conner, Nightlife of Paris: The Art of Toulouse-Lautrec, 54.    

43

amalgamation of the two earlier depictions. His wide stance, suggestive of the notorious

flexibility that enabled him to perform splits, appears in the left panel as well as in the painting.

However, he is shown in profile, not en face, and his hands are shown splayed out at either side,

rather than behind his back.78 The repositioning of his arms and the exaggeration of his stance

animates Valentin as a participant in the dance rather than a mere observer. In creating an

analogue between these works and the panels, Toulouse-Lautrec encourages the viewer to recall

his history and prestige as an avant-garde painter known for his scenes of montmartrois nightlife.

In addition to these various iconographic references to Toulouse-Lautrec’s own paintings,

the panels for La Goulue also declare their partial allegiance to the realm of high art through

analogy with the work of the painter’s avant-garde contemporaries, especially Georges Seurat

(1859-91). Although Toulouse-Lautrec’s style is quite different from the methodical, systematic

Neo-Impressionist approach Seurat used in his paintings, other aspects of the panels—

specifically, the simplification of form, the flattening of space, and the interest in popular

subjects—are shared by both artists. Seurat’s painting Parade de Cirque (1887-88; fig. 23), for

example, features a crowd very similar to those found in Toulouse-Lautrec's panels. Although

Toulouse-Lautrec’s spectators are identifiable figures, while Seurat’s are social types, both can

function as stand-ins for the viewer—especially in the case of Toulouse-Lautrec’s La danse

mauresque, where the spectators are life size. Both artists also emphasize and abstract the

lighting of their respective venues. Lautrec uses white orbs to represent the electric lighting of

the Moulin Rouge, whereas Seurat’s painting features stylized bursts of light to represent the

flame of gas lamps.

78 The frontal depiction of Valentin in La Goulue et Valentin le Désossé is unusual in that it depicts a

frontal view of Valentin’s face which Lautrec habitually depicts in profile.

44

These iconographic parallels reveal that both Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec were

interested in creating paintings about viewing and viewers of popular culture, a preoccupation

that connects their paintings with posters and other entertainments. Seurat’s investment in the

viewing of popular culture is most evident in the aforementioned Parade de cirque, which

depicts a parade, or sideshow, to lure customers into paying to see the spectacle within.

Similarly, Toulouse-Lautrec’s panels and earlier works emphasize viewership. The panels,

however, take this connection to entertainments and posters one step further, as they not only

depict spectacle but also function as one: the panel’s function is akin to a parade and poster, as it

was designed with the intent to publicize La Goulue’s act and to entice spectators. In “The

Spectator of the Affiche Illustrée and the Modern City of Paris, 1880-1900,” Karen Carter

discusses the lithographic poster of the late nineteenth century as not simply a vehicle to instruct

and inform but also a means to “exhort, sell, convince and appeal.”79 These characteristics of the

lithographic poster correspond to the commercial function of parades, whose function was to

solicit customers by using a variety of brash enticements. As Carter notes, “the accentuation of

form and colour in poster imagery, therefore, has been linked to its emerging function of

advertising goods and entertainment in the burgeoning consumer economy of the Belle

Époque.”80 Although paintings such as Seurat’s Parade de Cirque and Toulouse-Lautrec’s

panels are not forms of mass media like posters, they employ a similar visual rhetoric in order to

“harpoon the eye.”81 The implementation of visual aesthetics akin to the poster in painting

highlights the increasingly fluid boundaries between styles that resulted from the new “free” art

79 Carter, "The Spectatorship of the Affiche Illustrée and the Modern City of Paris, 1880-1900," 12.   80 Ibid.,11. 81 Cited and translated in: Carter “The Spectatorship of the Affiche Illustrée,”16. Emile Straus ‘Psychie des

affiches,’ La Critique I, no. 19 (December 5, 1895). “Mais en dehors de la facilité technique, il est ardu de faire l’affiche, conception intégrale et retenante, séries de rythmes et colorations savantes, exécutées logiquement pour l’harponnier l’oeil.”

45

market of the fin-de-siecle; at the forefront of this new market, Toulouse-Lautrec sought to

capitalize on it through his unique hybridization of media.

The Status of Posters and Paintings

A partial explanation for Toulouse-Lautrec’s decision to join paintings with posters lies

in the broader art-institutional history of this period, in particular a fin-de-siècle anxiety about

the status of art relative to other cultural forms and pastimes. Prior to the late nineteenth century,

the French Academy and Salon were critiqued for the hegemonic control exercised by the

government over both entities, and for their overly conservative values. The rise of avant-garde

movements in the second half of the nineteenth century challenged this hegemony; artists took

innovative aesthetics and modern subject matter into new venues, including the “Impressionist”

exhibitions and an emerging group of dealer-run galleries. As Patricia Mainardi succinctly

explains in The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic, there were two

models of exhibition available to artists, “the ‘severe’ exclusive Salon dominated by the

Academy and based on tradition and privilege, versus the ‘free-market’ exhibition through which

artists hoped to gain fame and fortune.”82 Ultimately, the French Salon and Academy became

obsolete in the late nineteenth century. This was the result of a myriad of factors, including the

privatization of the Salon in 1880, due in part to its inability to sustain itself within a capitalist

economy; there was also the need for artists to establish themselves in accordance with this new

economy, which required a “commercially viable system of art distribution.”83 Toulouse-Lautrec

seemed to indicate his low opinion of Academic art in an early work that directly parodies Pierre

Puvis de Chavannes’s (1824-98) Sacred Wood Dear to the Arts and the Muses (1884; fig. 24). In

82 Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 2.  

83 Ibid., 4.  

46

this work, Toulouse-Lautrec inserted a contemporary group of figures into Chavannes’s

harmonious scene of classically-draped muses: Lautrec includes himself (urinating with his back

to the viewer) along with acquaintances and fellow artists who disrupt and defile the tradition

that Chavannes represents (fig. 25).

The antiquated values of French art institutions such as the Salon and Academy led to a

re-evaluation by critics and artists of the low status accorded to the applied arts, including

posters. This unique set of circumstances encouraged Toulouse-Lautrec’s merging of

commercial and fine art. In part, this reconsideration was necessitated by the new need for artists

to draw attention to their work, since they could no longer rely on government support and

commissions to acquire a living and a reputation within the art world. As Ruth Iskin notes in The

Poster: Art, Advertising, Design and Collecting, the street was a liberating venue for artists

because it was the furthest removed from “the sanctioning implicit in dedicated art spaces,

whether official or not.”84 Furthermore, it granted greater accessibility and visibility to an artist’s

work, placing it within everyday experience; and, “unlike the Salon juries, poster commissioners

did not care to safeguard the standards of academic painting.”85 At the end of the nineteenth

century, it became necessary for artists to employ techniques associated with popular culture,

since their success relied more heavily on the opinion of the general public than ever before.

Whereas the ‘poster king,’ Chéret, sought to elevate his posters to the realm of high art

through a Neo-Rococo style conjured up from the works of Antoine Watteau and François

Boucher, Lautrec deliberately aligned himself and his art with the demimonde of Montmartre and

84 Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design and Collecting 1860s-1900s, 42.     85 Ibid., 42.  

47

the cheap, popular aspects of posters.86 This is reflected in Toulouse-Lautrec’s preferences in

painting materials, specifically cardboard and paper—both more ephemeral than traditional oil

paintings. Moreover, while Lautrec exhibited his posters in the street, he also engaged in

unusual display practices. He exhibited posters and oil paintings together on numerous

occasions, such as at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, Les XX in Brussels, and the Goupil

Galleries in London.87 By introducing posters into a gallery setting alongside paintings, rather

than separately or in different forums, Lautrec carried the concept of the democratization of art

into his display practices. Furthermore, Lautrec would sell the lithographs that he displayed on

the streets of Paris in limited print without text and autographed with his signature, testing the

limits of what could be perceived as a viable art form.88

Conceivably, Lautrec may have drawn his inspiration for some of these practices from

Seurat, who had begun to transgress the hierarchies among media in the 1880s. As Norma

Broude has argued, Seurat’s pointillist style may itself derive from the distinctive look of mass-

produced chromotypogravure, an earlier form of mass printing popular in the mid-1880s that was

replaced by chromolithography in the 1890s.89 Although Seurat did not conform to the

mechanization of mass production in practice—since his works are still handpainted and not

mechanical or uniform—his works invite viewers to make an implicit comparison to mass-

produced images. Broude characterizes the importance of this comparison to Seurat and his

works, stating,

86  Bradford R. Collins, "The Poster as Art; Jules Chéret and the Struggle for the Equality of the Arts in Late

Nineteenth-Century France," Design Issues (1985): 44-48.

87 Sweetman, Explosive Acts, 281; Cate, “The Popularization of Lautrec,” 82; Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and the Café-Concert: Printmaking, Publicity, and Celebrity in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,” 89.

88 Heller, Toulouse-Lautrec: The Soul of Montmartre, 72.   89 Norma Broude, "New Light on Seurat's "Dot": Its Relation to Photo-Mechanical Color Printing in

France In the 1880's," in Seurat in Perspective, 163-175 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall Inc. , 1978).

48

it was, in fact, precisely the ‘mechanical’ aspect of the technique so foreign to contemporary notions of fine taste and ‘high art,’ that, in these terms, may ultimately have proved attractive to Seurat, whose radical political leanings and ‘democratic’ predilection for popular art forms had already become important formative factors in the evolution of his attitudes toward his own art.90

Broude is referencing the influence of not only chromotypogravure but also the influence of

Chéret’s posters on Seurat’s works.91 In comparison with Seurat, Lautrec was able to take this

democratization further by actually producing works through the process of mechanical

production due to the invention of chromolithography in the 1890s. However, like Seurat,

Lautrec also incorporated these influences into his paintings and prints, especially the panels for

La Goulue. In so doing, Toulouse-Lautrec radically and publicly challenged the age-old

hierarchy between “high” and “low” art, revealing these distinctions to not only be passé but also

arbitrary. This artistic gesture bolstered his reputation as an outrageous decadent who had little

regard for France’s hegemonic culture, and preferred to align himself with the counter-culture of

Montmartre.

The conflation of high and low within Toulouse-Lautrec’s panels is not anomalous, for

his oeuvre reveals a sustained interest in the intersection of these two genres. However, within

the panels Lautrec has cohesively fused these genres. The figures presented in both panels are

typically not only friends of Toulouse-Lautrec’s but also figures he represented in other paintings

and/or posters. The most easily identifiable figure, who recurs habitually in Toulouse-Lautrec’s

works, including both panels, is Jane Avril. However, Lautrec also had previously depicted

Maurice Guibert, Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran (his cousin) and Oscar Wilde at least once prior to

the panels. Beyond the figures, Lautrec includes small motifs such as the electric lighting of the

Moulin Rouge, as well as a barely-visible contrabass in the upper right hand corner of La danse

  90  Ibid., 173.    

91 Ibid., 173-174; Robert Herbert, “Seurat and Jules Cheret,” Art Bulletin (1958): 156-158.

49

au Moulin Rouge (fig. 26) that recalls not only his Jane Avril poster but also the work of Seurat,

such as Le Chahut (fig. 27). Seurat—and Degas before him (fig. 28)—employed the contrabass

as a repoussoir element to establish a plane between the viewer and the stage simultaneously,

creating a sense of depth and flattening the picture plane as in Le Chahut. In contrast, Lautrec

uses the device anachronistically in both Jane Avril and La danse au Moulin Rouge.92 In Jane

Avril, the contrabass has been incorporated into the decorative Art Nouveau style border. This

incorporation causes the contrabass to fluctuate between repoussoir and decorative ornament. In

La danse au Moulin Rouge, the device has simply become a miniscule—yet significant—motif

in the upper right-hand corner. Although it no longer serves its traditional function, through its

inclusion, Lautrec is not only referencing his Jane Avril poster but also the work of Seurat and

Degas. Iconographically, compositionally, and formally, the panels present a mixture or hybrid

of elements drawn from both medias, painting and posters.

When La Goulue wrote to Lautrec in 1895, she presented him with a perfect opportunity

to exercise full artistic license, bringing the two related strains of his practice into a single,

unified artwork. Compendia of his previous works, the panels refer to his posters and his

paintings, even as they blur the distinctions between those two media. This mixing of genres

illustrates Toulouse-Lautrec’s emphatic desire to not only participate in commercial art, and thus

to reach a mass audience, but also to reconcile popular culture with the avant-garde world in

which unique one-of-a-kind artworks were still valued. This combination of high and low

aesthetics in his oeuvre, especially the panels, shows how Lautrec adapted his art to the

burgeoning mass culture of Paris at the fin-de-siècle. With this hybrid approach, he could appeal

to a mixed audience that encompassed the working-class passerby and the avant-garde aesthete.

92 Robert L. Herbert, “Later Paintings, 1886-1890” in Seurat Drawings and Paintings, (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2001): 113-118.

50

While the panels reflect the division between fine art and popular art, they simultaneously unify

these realms through a joint evocation of mass culture and the recent allegiance of some avant-

garde painters to popular motifs. This merging is paralleled by the intended audience, which is

divided by two social distinctions (bourgeois and proletarian)—but also made cohesive through a

common mass culture. As a result of their inability to adhere to one fixed category, Toulouse-

Lautrec’s panels disrupt and threaten the concept of cultural and artistic hierarchies. Chapter

three will expand upon these issues by addressing the value of eccentricity and radicalism to both

Toulouse-Lautrec and his muse La Goulue through an analysis of the iconographic program of

La danse mauresque—a program that invokes signifiers of Orientalism as mean through which to

convey social and cultural deviancy.

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CHAPTER 3

DANCING ON THE FRINGE: CULTURAL OTHERNESS AND

LA DANSE MAURESQUE

“Disgust always bears the imprint of desire. These low domains, apparently expelled as ‘Other,’ return as the object of nostalgia, longing and fascination. The forest, the fair, the theatre, the slum, the circus, the seaside-resort, the "savage": all these, placed at the outer limit of civil life, become symbolic contents of bourgeois desire.”93

This chapter focuses primarily on the right panel of the fun fair booth, known as La danse

mauresque: a work whose imagery and title associate it with Orientalist discourses and colonial

politics of the fin-de-siècle. Its pendant, La danse au Moulin Rouge, depicts a more believable

scene (though it, too, plays fast and loose with reality). La danse mauresque, by contrast, is far

less straightforward. The panel appears to portray a spectacle that viewers could expect to

encounter within the booth—La Goulue performing a “Moorish” dance or danse du ventre

(belly dance). However, while the panel does show La Goulue in an exotic-looking costume, she

is performing the high kick of the cancan rather than a movement that is congruous with variants

of the belly dance at the fin-de-siècle. The two figures in the upper-right register of the picture

seem designed to offset the artificiality of La Goulue’s performance: with their darker physical

characteristics (skin and facial features), ornamented bodies, and Arabic musical instruments

(tambourine and goblet drum), they function as signifiers of the “Orient.”

La danse mauresque highlights and exaggerates the titillating exoticism of La Goulue’s

persona, evidently in an attempt to attract customers to her booth—her first major entrepreneurial

endeavor following her departure from the Moulin Rouge. La Goulue needed to stand out; the

booth, and the panels that advertised it, were designed to capitalize on a widespread European

93 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1986): 191.

52

fascination with “Oriental” subjects, associated with sensuality, exoticism and decadence.94

Though the “Orient” (a term used to refer to a variety of real-world and imaginary locations) had

been a staple of French art for many decades, the public’s fascination with this subject picked up

steam in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In part, the popularity of the “Orient” in art

of this period stemmed from the increasing prominence of “exotic” subjects and entertainers at

the Expositions Universelles staged in 1878 and 1889.95 The popularity of these “exotic” exhibits

challenged both artists and performers to incorporate “Oriental” subjects and motifs into their

oeuvre as a maneuver to equal or rival the Expositions in popularity.

Within art-historical scholarship, La danse mauresque has only been discussed briefly as

an example of European appropriation and commoditization of the “Orient.” In Zeynep Çelik

and Lelia Kinney’s article “Ethnography and Exhibitionism,” for example, the authors discuss

the presentation and interpretations of the belly dances staged at the Expositions Universelles.

They chart the connection between such exhibits and the Parisian entertainment industry’s co-

optation of the danse du ventre; the latter versions complete the commercialization of the genre

by dropping the veneer of scientific analysis and didacticism that accompanied the Expositions.96

Taking Çelik and Kinney’s essay as a starting-point, this chapter will associate La danse

mauresque with La Goulue and Toulouse-Lautrec’s shared public image: associating themselves

with the “Orient,” the two aimed to present themselves as culturally marginal, thrillingly exotic,

and daringly decadent.

94 Edward Said, “Introduction” In Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978): 1-28. 95 Annegret Fauser, “Belly Dancers, Gypsies, and French Peasants,” in Musical Encounters at the 1889

Paris World’s Fair (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2005); Zenep Çelik and Lelia Kinney, “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles.”

96 Zenep Çelik and Lelia Kinney, “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Exposition Universelles.”

53

La Goulue’s decision to perform a “Moorish” dance in 1895 was not unusual. She was

taking advantage of an existing trend in popular culture: the belly dance had become one of the

most popular forms of entertainments in Paris by the mid-1890s. By following this French craze

for exoticism, she hoped to secure the success of her first solo business venture, and in so doing,

to maintain her fame. In other words, her choice to advertise her performance as a “Moorish”

dance (even if it looked strikingly like a quadrille naturaliste) speaks to her desire to capitalize

upon popular tastes. While the quadrille, La Goulue’s trademark dance, had become a sensation

in the late 1880s, by the mid-1890s, it was passé, having been displaced by other genres,

including the danse du ventre.97 As chapter one discussed, the transitory nature of such popular

phenomena was symptomatic of the rise of modern celebrity and mass culture—people and

genres constantly were being displaced by new fads, fashions and up-and-comers. In order to

sustain her fame, La Goulue needed to reinvent herself and her act. She attempted to do so by

fusing “Oriental” motifs with her signature style and dance moves. This cultural appropriation of

the “Orient,” in particular the belly dance, is reflective of a wider, nationalistic taste for

exoticism, spurred by the Expositions staged by both the governments of the Second Empire and

the Third Republic.

Described by scholars of this period as “Salomania,” the European fascination with

eroticized performances of France’s racial and national “Others” endured well into the twentieth

century; performances of the “Orient” infiltrated both high and low culture, including plays,

operas, artworks and women’s fashions.98 This fad was named after the popularization of the

biblical character Salomé, popularized as a dancing femme fatale in multiple media during the

97 Heller, “Rediscovering Henri de Toulouse Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge,” 114-135.

 98 The term Salomania comes from the biblical character Salome. In return for the head of John the Baptist,

she performed a dance for King Herod. In the late nineteenth century, she became the quintessential femme fatale.

54

fin-de-siècle. Her dance of the seven veils, as it was later called, was performed by Sarah

Bernhardt in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (published in French in 1891), and in two separate versions

by Loïe Fuller.    The Salomé phenomenon not only speaks to the conflation of the real and

fictional characteristics of Orientalism, but also the European association of the “Orient” with

hyper-sexualized performance. As noted above, this vogue for cultural manifestations of the

“Orient” was directly imbricated in the politics of French imperialism. The nineteenth century

marked the zenith of France’s colonial expansion, an expansion that was both fueled by, and

represented in, public displays of France’s colonial holdings at the Expositions Universelles of

1878, 1889, and 1900.

A byproduct of “Salomania,” La Goulue’s “Moorish dance,” as depicted in Toulouse-

Lautrec’s La danse mauresque, demands a more through reading: in what follows, I consider the

influence of French colonialism on popular culture and the entertainment industry as crucial

influences on La Goulue’s cultural appropriation and commoditization of the danse du ventre. A

metonym for Montmartre, La Goulue was renowned not only for her eroticized exhibitionism,

but also for her perceived Frenchness, and her proletarian background. For these reasons, her

transition from the quadrille—a dance celebrated as representation of working-class French

culture—to the “foreign” danse du ventre may seem mystifying. However, as the panels

themselves suggest, the quadrille naturaliste and the danse du ventre were not so distinct as they

might initially appear. By 1895, as I note above, variants of the danse du ventre were so widely

practiced in France that the genre could be perceived as both French and “exotic” at the same

time. Moreover, both dance forms signified eccentricity, marginality and decadence during the

fin-de-siècle. Through its invocation of Orientalism, La danse mauresque is reflective of both

55

Toulouse-Lautrec’s and La Goulue’s continuing desire to align themselves with the subversive,

the deviant and the exotic as a way to keep the public limelight fixed on them.

French Colonialism and the Expositions Universelles

La Goulue’s sudden (if partial) turn towards the exotic in 1895 directly related to French

imperial and colonial politics of the period, and the relation of the latter to the nation’s cultural

self-presentation as a world power. By the fin-de-siècle, France was one of Europe’s largest

colonial empires, with numerous holdings in Africa and Asia.99 France’s turn to colonial

expansion during the second half of the nineteenth century was fueled by economic turmoil at

home, competition with other world powers abroad, and a desire to reassert the country’s

military strength after the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of

1870-71. Colonialism also helped to create a sense of national solidarity in the aftermath of the

Paris Commune and the factionalized early years of the Third Republic. French colonialism, like

its counterparts elsewhere in Europe, was predicated on the belief in a mission civilisatrice: the

conviction that it was France’s right and duty to bring “civilization” to the countries it colonized,

and that its colonial subjects benefited from their affiliation with France.100

The country’s increased investment in its colonial mission infiltrated French popular

culture, generating an unprecedented fascination in cultural “Others.” Nowhere was the influence

of colonialism on French popular culture more visible than in the Expositions Universelles where

France’s colonial holdings (along with other “non-Western” cultures) were put on display for the

entertainment of a primarily European audience. In particular, the 1889 Exposition Universelle

spurred the popularization of the belly dance during the final decade of the nineteenth century.

99  Before  the  twentieth  century,  France  and  Britain  had  the  largest  colonial  networks.  In  part  the  power  dynamic  between  Britain  and  France,  fueled  both  countries  desire  to  colonize.    

100 James P. Daughton, “Introduction: Empire in the Age of Discord,” In An Empire Divided: Religion,

Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914, 3-24 (Oxford University Press, 2006).

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Commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the 1789 revolution and the subsequent

establishment of the First Republic, the Exposition Universelle of 1889 was especially colored

by nationalistic self-awareness and pride. The exhibition’s structure placed emphasis on France’s

colonial conquests: as in 1878, this Exposition mediated visitors’ encounter with colonial

territories and subjects through “scientific” displays of recently-acquired colonies, as well as

other non-European countries deemed “exotic,” such as Egypt, Japan, and Persia.101 Located on

the Ésplanade des Invalides, the colonial exhibits were located far from the center of the fair,

which took place on the Champ de Mars and Trocadéro (fig. 29). This layout illustrates Meg

Armstrong’s observation that ethnographic exhibits at the World Fairs (in both Europe and

America) often were separated geographically from the exhibits of nations considered to be

modern and “civilized.” This structure complemented “the scientific realism of evolutionary

hierarchies of race, providing an illustration of an irrational babel of backwardness, in contrast

with the future oriented rationales of progress evident in the exhibits of the industrialized white

nations.”102 Not only were the 1889 colonial pavilions located separately from the European

exhibits, but also the “indigenous” architecture of the former contrasted starkly with the

ostentatious architecture of the French state-sponsored buildings—the latter a hybrid of Art

Nouveau and Neo-Baroque styles.103 The ethnographic exhibits also often featured “indigenous”

people demonstrating crafts (ones viewed as archaic or old-fashioned), aspects of daily life, and

dances purportedly representative of each culture.104 These performances of racial or national

101  Ibid., 132-136.   102 Meg Armstrong, “A Jumble of Foreignness: The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century France,”

Cultural Critique (1992): 201. 103 It is also worth noting that the Hôtel des Invalides, where Napoleon I is buried, overlooks the Esplanade. 104 Annie Coombes, “Ethnography and national and cultural identities,” In The Myth of Primitivism:

Perspectives on Art,189-214 ( London: Routeledge, 1999): 192; Sweetman, Explosive Acts, 201.

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difference served to create an aura of authenticity that comingled with an atmosphere of

spectacle and exhibitionism that pervaded the fair.

One of the most popular representations of the cultural “Other” at the Exposition of 1889

was the danse du ventre, performed both on the Champ de Mars and the Ésplanade des Invalides.

These performances took place in the ethnographic displays, including the rue du Caire, the

Algerian pavilion, and the Tunisian pavilion. Although the belly dance had been featured at

earlier Expositions Universelles, it became a sensation in 1889. An article in Le Petit Journal

describes the myriad locations where a fairgoer could witness a performance of the danse du

ventre:

Gérard de Nerval [Nineteenth century poet and author of the travelogue Voyage en Orient] declared that one would dream of paradise when one saw the almées dance. Visitors to the Exposition now can offer themselves this dream a considerable number of times in a single day, if they have not had their fill after the first performance. At the Ésplanade des Invalides and the rue du Caire, there are in effect seven or eight café-concerts, whether Egyptian, Moroccan, Algerian or Tunisian; the dance of the almées constitutes the basis of the show in each. One can recognize an African concert from afar; even before one can clearly make out this Moorish house, that minaret or this tent made out of oriental carpets which become visible at a distance of about fifty meters, you can hear bizarre sounds escape though the openings of the moucharabias, the half-open windows, the gaps of the curtains; it is the nouba, a strange music at same time squalling, monotonous and melancholic, the obligatory accompaniment of the almées, who would not agree to dance with any other orchestra. One has to resign oneself to listen to the one if one wants to see the other, and they are worth being seen.105

105 Translated in: Fauser, “Belly Dancers, Gypsies, and French Peasants” in Musical Encounters at the 1889

Paris World’s Fair, 226. “Gérard de Nerval déclarait qu’on rêvait le paradis voir danser les almées. Ce rêve, les visiteurs de l’Exposition peuvent se l’offrir un nombre considérable de fois dans une même journée, à condition de n’en avoir pas été rassasiés après le premier spectacle. Tant à l’Esplanade des Invalides que dans la rue du Caire, il ya en effet sept ou huit concerts égyptiens, marocains, algériens ou tunisiens; dans tous, ce sont les danses d’almées qui constituent le fond du spectacle. Un concert africain se reconnaît de loin; avant même d’avoir distingué nettement cette maison mauresque, ce minaret ou cette tente faite de tapis d’Orient qui se profilent à une cinquantaine de mètres, vous entendez des sons bizarres sortir par les ouvertures des moucharabiés, par l’enrebâillement des fenêtres, par l’écartement des portières; musique étrange, à la fois criarde, monotone et mélancolique, c’est la nouba, l’accompagnement obligatoire des almées, qui ne consentiraient pas à danser avec un autre orchestre. Il faut se résigner à entendre l’une si on veut voir l’autre, et elles valent la peine d’être vues.” Gérard de Nerval’s Voyage en Orient was a travelogue of his journey to the Levant that was published in 1851. It also includes Oriental stories, customs etc. and was one of Nerval’s most popular works. In Voyage en Orient Nerval dispels some myths about the Orient while reinforcing some or creating altogether new myths.

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Although the anonymous author enumerates the various cultures performing the belly dance, the

article makes no distinctions between the Egyptian, Tunisian, Moroccan or Algerian variants of

the danse du ventre. This universalization of the form reflects the broader tendency toward

cultural homogenization in Orientalist discourse. As we shall see, however, the co-optation of the

belly dance by the entertainment industry would place even less emphasis on authenticity,

highlighting instead the sensualized exhibitionism it connoted.

A pen and ink sketch from 1889 of one “Fathma” confirms Toulouse-Laturec’s presence

at one of the café-concerts that featured the danse du ventre. Titled Souvenir from the Exposition

Universelle: La Belle Fathma, the sketch depicts a young woman from the neck up (fig. 30). Her

dark hair is piled on her head and offset by the light-colored headdress that she wears. Lautrec

also highlights her jewelry, including a pair of hooped earrings and a decorative headpiece that

drapes across the top of her forehead. The title, La Belle Fathma, suggests that the subject of

Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawing may be the belly dancer Rachael Bent-Eny, who went by that name

when she performed in the Tunisian café-concert at the 1889 Exposition Universelle.106

By contrast, no records exist to confirm that La Goulue came in direct contact with any of

the belly dancing performances at the 1889 Exposition. In Explosive Acts, David Sweetman

places both Jane Avril and La Goulue at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, specifically at the

Café Egyptien—the former as a ticket seller and the latter modeling her “Moorish” dance from

the belly dance of an Egyptian almée known as Aïoushcé.107 However, Sweetman lacks

compelling evidence to support these claims. Regardless, La Goulue’s “Moorish” dance was

The French term Almée originally referred to an Egyptian belly dancer however it became a general term used to reference all belly dancers.

106 In Explosive Acts, Sweetman argues that Toulouse-Lautrec was inspired by Aïousché (Aïoucha) at the Café Egyptien and that he made several sketches of her, however he provides no visual evidence.

107 Ibid., 203.

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influenced by the popularity of these performances either directly or indirectly. The popularity of

belly dances led to extensive media coverage as well as numerous imitations—equally

inauthentic, adulterated versions—that the dancer almost certainly would have known.108 While

this familiarity with one or another version of the belly dance establishes various possible

precedents for La Goulue’s “Moorish” dance, the question still remains: why would La Goulue, a

woman celebrated for her working-class French background, abandon the quadrille naturaliste, a

regional popular dance, in favor of a purportedly “Oriental” genre?

The Parisian Entertainment Industry: Appropriating the danse du ventre

As the danse du ventre became integrated into the Parisian entertainment industry during

the 1890s, its practitioners seized on perceptions of the genre as overtly sexualized. This

reputation made the dance all the more appealing to figure like La Goulue, who sought to

capitalize not only on her brazen sensuality, but also the appeal of the peculiar and exotic. As

Kinney and Çelik observe,

The belly dance survived on different soil by aligning with a part of the entertainment industry that capitalized upon and domesticated eccentricity...the belly dance was situated within the orbit of popular dancing, and its organization and personnel came to resemble that of the entrepreneurial sector of dance in Paris. The emergence of stars’ of the belly dance is one indication of its incorporation into this aesthetic economy.109

In other words, the belly dance, as showcased at the Exposition Universelles, was easily

assimilated into the repertoire of venues such as the dance hall because it was seen as deviant

and different—qualities central to La Goulue’s existing public image.

Undoubtedly, the perception of the danse du ventre as a carnal dance is what made it an

appealing offering at venues such as the Élysée Montmartre and the Moulin Rouge. Reflecting

108 Ibid., 203-204. 109 Çelik and Kinney, “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles,” 42.  

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on European appropriations of the belly dance, Jean-François Staszak poses the question: “when

did the term exoticism become interchangeable with the term eroticism” after its first appearance

at the Exposition Universelle of 1889?110 One of the most important factors that Staszak notes is

that, within the entertainment world, the authenticity of the dance ceased to be of importance as

long as it remained enticing. Furthermore, although some successful attempts were made to

actually incorporate more authentic influences into the choreographies of some belly dances,

more often, [the appropriation of the “non-Western” belly dance] is part of a perceived yet shoddy exoticism and more or less explicit eroticism of the show. Suggestive veils, partial nudity, free and audacious moves, put the sensual body on stage, breaking with the canons of traditional European dance… and bourgeois decency. It would be the first form of erotic dance, if not striptease.111

Important to the slippage that Staszak cites is the fact that the acceptance and popularity of the

belly dance built upon existing forms of erotic dance in France, particularly the quadrille. As I

discuss in chapter one, the quadrille was considered to be a very risqué, if not semi-

pornographic, dance: it involved titillation through the provocative revelation of undergarments

and skin. Like the eroticized belly dance, the quadrille naturaliste broke with traditional

European dance forms, and was intentionally designed to fascinate and to offend its bourgeois

spectators.

In merging elements from both dances into one hybrid performance in 1895, La Goulue

clearly noted the parallels between the perceptions of these two dance forms. The associations of

the belly dance with deviancy and sexuality must have appealed to her because it reinforced the

110 Jean-François Staszak, “Danse exotique, danse érotique. Perspectives géographiques sur la mise en

scène du corps de l’Autre (XVIIIe-XXIe siècles),” Annales de Géographie, 117e Année, No. 660/661 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2008), 130.

111 Ibid., 134. Emphasis mine. “Certains succès tiennent au réel renouveau chorégraphique d'inspiration non-occidentale. le plus souvent, il relève d'un exotisme perçu dès l'époque comme de pacotille et surtout de l'éroticisme plus ou moins explicite du spectacle. Les voiles suggestifs, la nudité partielle, les gestes plus libres et audacieux mettent sensuellement en scène le corps, en rupture avec les canons de la danse de tradition européenne...et de la pudeur bourgeoise.Il s’agirait des premières formes de danse érotique, si ce n’est de striptease.”

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existing image she had established in the Montmartre dance halls—despite the potential risk of

further marginalizing herself. In 1890, La Goulue began performing a dance advertised as a

danse du ventre at the Élysée Montmartre, alongside a partner with the “exotic” name La

Macarona. After her time at the Élysée Montmartre, La Goulue occasionally performed a variant

of the danse du ventre at the Moulin Rouge.112 An illustration from this period by Louis Legrand

for Le Courrier Illustré depicts a youthful La Goulue accompanying La Macarona in a “belly

dancing” performance at the Élysée (fig. 31). Portrayed in the background, La Goulue is dressed

in an “Oriental” style: she wears a decorative vest paired with a full skirt and “exotic”

adornments including a veil, which she lifts above her head. Her arms, decorated with metal

bands, also are elevated above her head with her palms touching, a position that suggests the

subtle undulating movements associated with the belly dance. Although in similar attire, La

Macarona is the more dynamic figure in the composition. Her raised left arm and bent right arm

behind her back visually conveys a twisting bodily movement. However, it is important to

acknowledge the difference between visual representations of dance and actual dance practice:

the connotations of a “belly dance” deployed in Legrand’s image may not reflect La Macarona

and La Goulue’s actual dance practices. Nevertheless, the image is a testament to the increasing

demand for “exotic” dances in Paris, and it establishes La Goulue’s early adoption of “Oriental”

forms of entertainment.

Further evidence of La Goulue’s knowing adoption of popular Orientalism is provided in

a contemporaneous photograph by Louis Victor Paul Bacard of the dancer in “Oriental” clothing

(fig. 32). Shown in full length, La Goulue is positioned with her body in profile but her head

turned towards the viewer. Her positioning is very similar to La Macarona’s in Legrand’s

illustration. The only marked differences are the veil that she is holding with her left hand, and

112 Sweetman, Explosive Acts, 204.

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that her right arm is elevated in front of her chest (rather than draped behind her hip) with the

palm facing outwards. Her costume features an elaborate vest and matching full-length skirt tied

with a tasseled rope and decorated with beading. Around her stomach is a seemingly too tight

and unflattering belt of the sort used by professional belly dancers to enhance the undulating

movements of the torso and direct viewer’s attention to that crucial body part. Although La

Goulue still wears her signature topknot, this “French” hairstyle is adorned with an “exotic”

headpiece comprised of circular metal pieces and a tassel that cascades down the left side of her

face. An “Oriental” carpet and a background of palm fronds reinforce this veneer of exoticism.

La Goulue’s costume was actually a close approximation to those worn by the belly dancers at

the Exposition, as we can see in an illustration of Aiousché’s performance at the Café Egyptien

(fig. 33), and in a photograph of three anonymous almées who performed in the Egyptian café-

concert, from Delort de Gléon’s “L’architecture arabe des Khalifes d’Egypt à l’Exposition

Universelle de Paris en 1889 (fig. 34).” Aiousché’s costume, and those worn by the other

Egyptian almées, featured long skirts paired with embellished vests over tight-fitting chemises,

accessorized with an array of adornments including necklaces, armbands and headscarves.

However, it is worth noting that La Goulue is displaying slightly more skin—her upper arms are

exposed, whereas the almées typically wore undershirts or long-sleeved vests.113

If we turn to Toulouse-Lautrec’s portrayal of La Goulue in La danse mauresque, we see

yet a further deviation from the costumes worn by belly dancers at the Exposition. Her

décolletage-revealing black corset, fuller skirts and black stockings are more in keeping with

French fashion. However, she retains some loosely “Oriental” elements here, including a gold-

113 This exposure of flesh would only increase in early 20th century with the popularization of the bedleh

belly-dancing outfit, which was composed of a bra, body stocking, and skirt. A prime example of this style is Maud Allan’s costume for A Vision of Salomé (1906), which featured a transparent skirt and bejeweled bra. Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young, Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasty (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2005), 20-21.

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embroidered red vest and pointed slippers. In comparison, the female musician on the right looks

more like the performers at the Exposition. She is wearing a white chemise with a vest and long

skirts paired with a headscarf, red pointed slippers and a plethora of gold embellishments.

However, her arms are also uncovered. The clothing of her fellow percussionist is also very

similar to that worn by the male musicians who performed at the Café Égyptien and the Café

Tunisien in 1889 (fig. 35). As this comparison shows, Parisian entertainers—including La

Goulue—exaggerated the eroticism that French viewers associated with the belly dance.

A 1902 photograph of the exterior of La Goulue’s booth (fig. 36) shows that the architect

highlighted the inclusion of “Oriental” characters in La danse mauresque with other signifiers of

difference, including allusions to Islamic architecture of the Near East. The photograph shows

the booth’s lighted, arched entryway, painted with faux columns and flanked by the panels.

Above the entryway is a cutout of an onion-shaped dome with wire crescent moon and star

motifs—a noticeable imitation of the “indigenous” architecture of the rue du Caire and other

pavilions at the Exposition Universelle. The interior of the booth, as depicted in La danse

mauresque, reveals a similar attempt at replicating an “Oriental” aesthetic. La Goulue is shown

performing on a dais decorated with crescent moons, similar to the one depicted in the

aforementioned sketch of Aïousché.

There are, however, marked and telling differences between La Goulue and Aiousché’s

performances. These differences demonstrate the refashioning of the belly dance through its

further assimilation into the repertoire of the Parisian entertainment industry. La Goulue’s

accompanists allude to musicians who performed alongside or with the belly dancers at the

Exposition. But those performers tended to be all-male, whereas La Goulue’s panel includes one

female musician. Furthermore, the gaudy setting depicted by Lautrec declares its origins in the

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entertainment industry, whereas the pavilions at the Exposition were associated with a pseudo-

anthropological accuracy. Another way in which La Goulue’s act declared its spectacular,

artificial qualities was the incorporation of colored lighting effects, visible in the blue aura that

emanates from La Goulue’s figure. This element may allude to Fuller’s dances, which

incorporated dazzling light effects that transformed her on stage. In other words, La Goulue’s

booth amalgamated elements drawn from a variety of successful performances, bringing together

the quadrille naturaliste, electric lighting technology, and the “primitive” sexual allure of the

exotic. Both the setting in the panel and the booth’s façade underscore the hybridity of La

Goulue’s performance by similarly repackaging a Parisian entertainment with “Oriental” motifs.

As the case of La Goulue tells us, Parisian entertainers and viewers did not place much

value on authenticity as regards the belly dance. Instead, as we see in La Goulue’s booth and

Lautrec’s picture of it, such “exotic” entertainments combined fantastical evocations of the

“Orient” with lascivious displays of female exhibitionism. Whether accurate or not, Toulouse-

Lautrec’s depiction of La Goulue in La danse mauresque plays on a widespread tendency to link

the “Orient” with loose morals. By building on these associations, Lautrec demonstrated his

understanding of the identity that La Goulue staged for herself, and his willingness to advance it.

La danse mauresque: Embodying and Exploiting the Exotic

Through the metaphor of the “exotic” in La danse mauresque, Toulouse-Lautrec visually

cemented La Goulue’s cultural difference—and, by extension, his own. La Goulue’s commission

presented Lautrec with the opportunity to capitalize on their intertwined identities, making

parallels between identifiers of Orientalism and Montmartre bohemianism, including

licentiousness, foreignness, spectacle and deviancy. Evidence of Toulouse-Lautrec's interest in

“exotic” dances, we may profitably connect this sketch both with the artist’s fascination with

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dancers and with his penchant for cross-cultural cross-dressing. This pastime has been

documented in numerous photographs, which show Lautrec sporting a Japanese kimono; wearing

Jane Avril’s signature clothing; dressed as an “Arabian” man (fig. 37); and as an “Oriental”

female percussionist much like the one he depicted in La danse mauresque (fig. 38).

La Goulue’s self-Orientalization—her intentional appropriation of signifiers of the

“Orient”—was a calculated move to reinforce her existing image as a provocative and outlandish

dancer. By performing a dance marketed as a “Moorish dance,” La Goulue repackaged herself in

a slightly updated form, capitalizing on the sexual appeal of the “Other.” As I discuss in chapter

one, La Goulue intentionally fashioned herself as a marginal, “disruptive” figure in order to

accrue publicity—a strategy that many female performers used. La Goulue’s performance style

mixed sensuality and outrageous acts, transgressing social norms. Her appropriation of the

“exotic” parallels her earlier exploitation of her lower-class background. In other words, La

Goulue took on the guise of the cultural other in order to benefit from the French stereotypes of

the “Orient” much like her prior exploitation of the French association between proletarian

women and sexual availability. In the panels, Toulouse-Lautrec visually conveys this by

juxtaposing La Goulue as a cancaneuse at the Moulin Rouge with her new “Oriental” façade.

Lautrec invites comparison between the two “places” depicted, Montmartre and the

“Orient,” as well as the two La Goulues. Both “places” were associated with foreignness,

licentiousness and debauchery. These qualities appealed to La Goulue and to Toulouse-Lautrec

as markers of difference that both could capitalize on in order to stand out in the mass culture of

Paris. In some respects, Montmartre itself was an outlier, but by the mid-1890s, it had become

more mainstream. By invoking the “Orient,” La Goulue and Toulouse-Lautrec brought

themselves back to the cultural margins.

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This emphasis on geographic extremities as sites of cultural difference is underscored by

Toulouse-Lautrec’s selection of spectators in the foreground of La danse mauresque—each of

whom represents a different facet of nonconformity. All of the figures in the immediate

foreground have close ties to Montmartre, and were a part of Toulouse-Lautrec’s inner circle. On

the right is Felix Fénéon: a known anarchist, he had been arrested the year prior to the panels’

conception for the bombing the Foyot Restaurant, a popular dining spot for politicians.114 In the

center of the group is Avril, who, like La Goulue, represents the non-normative female because

of her public presence. However, Avril also had acquired, much to her disdain, a reputation of

mental instability. A one-time patient at Salpêtrière Hospital, Avril had garnered the nicknames

Crazy Jane and La Mélinite, after an explosive.115 The accounts of her dance practices are often

colored with rhetoric that alludes to her unstable mental health. To Avril’s left is Oscar Wilde.

An inflammatory figure like Fénéon, Oscar Wilde was awaiting trial for homosexuality in

England when plans were being made for La Goulue’s panels. The publicity surrounding his trial

meant that the Parisian public would have been well aware of Wilde’s predicament. His

inclusion in the panel is two-fold—he represents the deviant sexuality that Montmartre and its

denizens encouraged. As the author of Salomé, he also elicits associations between La Goulue

and the character Salomé, the quintessential “Oriental” female. In between Avril and Féneon is

Toulouse Lautrec himself, an unusually overt inclusion.116 With his back to the viewer, he is only

identifiable by his short stature and bowler hat. The importance of this grouping of spectators

serves a dual purpose—they generate interest in La Goulue’s act serving as endorsements but

114 Sweetman, Explosive Acts, 322-323. Although it is now barely visible, Lautrec depicted Fénéon smoking a cigarette, which was symbolic of bohemianism but even more so of the act Fénéon committed for he lit the bomb with his cigarette.

115 Nancy Ireson, Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge, 17 and 50; Pedley-Hindson,

Female performance practice on the fin-de-siècle popular stages of London and Paris: Experiment and Advertising, 97.

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more importantly they reinforce the panels mockery of social and cultural normativity.

The inclusion of these figures helps La danse mauresque to mobilize signifiers of

Orientalism, glorifying social and cultural deviancy. This glorification in turn served to reaffirm

Toulouse-Lautrec and La Goulue’s identities as fellow members, propagators, and symbols of

the demimonde and its associations with radicalism, degeneracy and bohemianism. While La

danse au Moulin Rouge also serves as a representation of the counter-culture to which Lautrec

and La Goulue subscribed, through its “Oriental” aesthetic and charged spectators, La danse

mauresque clarifies the degree to which eccentricity was essential to both Toulouse-Lautrec and

La Goulue’s public personae, and therefore, their fame.

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CONCLUSION

As I have shown, the panels La danse au Moulin Rouge and La danse mauresque, are the

product of a collaboration between Toulouse-Lautrec and La Goulue. By the time of their

making, La Goulue had already constructed a public persona that not only made her one of the

most sought-after dancers in the late 1880s and early 1890s, but also gave her, as a lower-class

woman, an unprecedented degree of agency. Retrospectively, it is easy to see their relationship

as one-sided: either viewing La Goulue as a victim exploited by Toulouse-Lautrec for personal

gain, or, conversely as a parasite who used Toulouse-Lautrec for his artistic skill and innate

sense of marketing. However, the ephemerality of fin-de-siècle celebrity culture, and the

increasing obsolescence of traditional exhibition venues like the Salon, cultivated if not

necessitated their relationship with one another. Toulouse-Lautrec capitalized on La Goulue’s

success by using her image to create the groundbreaking poster Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, an

image whose success, although partially indebted to Lautrec’s new aesthetic formulae, was also

secured by La Goulue’s infamous reputation. By associating himself with La Goulue, Lautrec

acquired overnight fame; by associating herself with Lautrec, La Goulue perpetuated her

popularity. Their relationship was symbiotic.

Toulouse-Lautrec would continue to court an association with Montmartre and its

inhabitants—bolstering his own fame and creating a distinctive, unique niche within the art

market of the fin-de-siècle. In his works depicting modern celebrities, Toulouse-Lautrec

balanced the need to represent a recognizable person with his abstracting, avant-garde style. One

of his favorite, oft-repeated subjects, La Goulue benefitted from the extra attention Lautrec’s

works brought her. The dancer was far from unaware of the role Lautrec’s works played in

maintaining her fame; the panels show that La Goulue understood the value of having Toulouse-

Lautrec as her “peintre officiel.”

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A collaborative work, the panels pay tribute to Toulouse-Lautrec’s career as an artist. An

amalgamation of his earlier works dedicated to Montmartre nightlife and its eccentric cast of

characters, the panels function as compendia or a visual evocation of the works, in multiple

media, that collectively make up his oeuvre. However, they are equally representative of La

Goulue’s history. Read one way, the left panel showcases La Goulue’s rise to fame while the

right points to her present and perhaps her future. Merging the Élysée Montmartre with the

Moulin Rouge, La Danse au Moulin Rouge shows La Goulue at the height of her fame, while La

danse mauresque depicts her “new” act, endorsed by none other than Lautrec himself, who is

one among several famous spectators in the foreground.

More generally speaking, the panels also serve as an homage to the radical, antibourgeois

culture that was fostered in Montmartre. The center of bohemianism and deviancy, Montmartre

was the counterpoint to the more conservative, hegemonic culture of central Paris. Literally

located on the city’s margins, Montmartre marketed its entertainments with reference to its

revolutionary, proletarian background. It became a stronghold for those who did not adhere to

the strictures of bourgeois propriety—including artists, performers, and political activists.

Although commissioned by La Goulue to serve as an advertisement for her specifically,

Toulouse-Lautrec used the commission to glorify the broader counter-culture to which he and La

Goulue both subscribed. He accomplished this through the association of La Goulue’s funfair

booth with the Moulin Rouge, a symbol of Montmartre’s recent history, and with,the “Oriental”

spectacles then popular there. In so doing, he revealed one crucial aspect of fin-de-siècle

celebrity—the need to define oneself against bourgeois values, through the exploitation and

appropriation of various signifiers of difference. As this thesis has shown, both La Goulue and

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Toulouse-Lautrec engaged in these self-sensationalizing practices, cultivating identities as

eccentrics—identities that were reinforced through their association with each other.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Note: Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations are not reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center, Art Department, Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, D.C. Figure 1: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La danse au Moulin Rouge (Dance at the Moulin Rouge), 1895, oil on canvas, 3,160 x 2,980 mm, Paris, France: Musée D’Orsay

Figure 2: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La danse mauresque (The Moorish Dance), 1895, oil on canvas, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay

Figure 3: Lunel, “Le Quadrille à L’Élysée Montmartre” in Le Courrier Français, 1889, illustrations

Figure 4: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1893, lithograph

Figure 5: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Troupe de Madamoiselle Églantine, 1895, lithograph printed in three colors on machine wove paper, 27 7/16 x 31 ½ inches, New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Figure 6: Ferdinand Bac, “Femmes automatiques: Ce qu’on y met, ce qu’il en sort,” La Vie Parisienne, 1892

Figure 7: Louis Victor Paul Bacard, La Goulue and Grille d’Egout bare-chested, c. 1885, albumen paper from a collodion glass negative pasted on cardboard, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay

Figure 8: La Goulue wearing a Montmartre themed dress decorated with windmills, cats and mice

Figure 9: Louis Victor Paul Bacard, Series of photos of La Goulue seated in a chair at a table, 1885, albumen paper from a collodion glass negative pasted on cardboard, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay

Figure 10: Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, 1891, lithograph, 74 13/16 x 45 7/8 inches, New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Figure 11: Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge (La Goulue entrant au Moulin Rouge), 1891-92, oil on board, 31.25 x 23.25 inches, New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art

Figure 12: Louis Victor Paul Bacard, La Goulue frontally in a dance pose, c. 1885, albumen paper from a collodion glass negative pasted on cardboard, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay

Figure 13: Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Miss Loïe Fuller, 1893, lithograph, 381 x 275mm, Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago

Figure 14: Isaiah West Tauber, La Loie Fuller, 1897, aristotype, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay

Figure 15: Jules Chèret, Loïe Fuller at the Folies Bergère, 1893, lithograph, 48 1/2 x 34 1/2 in, New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art

Figure 16: Jean de Paléologue (Pal), La Loïe Fuller, Folies Bergère, c. 1894, lithograph, 48 x 33 inches, Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Figure 17: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Music Hall: Loïe Fuller, 1892, oil on cardboard, 46 x 32 cm, private collection

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Figure 18: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue and her Sister (Au Moulin Rouge: La Goulue et sa soeur), 1892, lithograph printed in six colors, 17 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches, New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Figure 19: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge: Training the New Girls (At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance), 1890, oil on canvas, 45 1/2 x 59 inches, Philadephia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art

Figure 20: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Au Moulin Rouge (At the Moulin Rouge), 1892/1895, oil on canvas, 48 7/16 x 55 1/2 inches Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago

Figure 21: Jules Chéret, Bal du Moulin Rouge, 1889, lithograph, 48 7/8 x 34 5/8 inches, Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Figure 22: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue et Valentin-le-Désossé (La Goulue and Valentin the Boneless), 1887, oil on cardboard, 24 x 19.75 inches, private collection

Figure 23: Georges Seurat, Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque), 1887-1888, oil on canvas, 39.25 x 59 inches, New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Figure 24: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Le Bois sacré cher aux arts et aux muses, 1884, oil on canvas, 93 x 231 cm, Chicago, IL: Art Institute Chicago

Figure 25: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Parody of Puvis de Chavannes’ “The Sacred Wood Dear to the Arts and the Muses,” 1884, oil on canvas, 67 11/16 x 149 5/8 inches, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum

Figure 26: Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Detail of Contrabass from La danse au Moulin Rouge, 1895, oil on canvas, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay

Figure 27: Georges Seurat, Le Chahut, 1889-90, oil on canvas, 67 x 55.5 inches, Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum

Figure 28: Edgar Degas, Café-Concert aux Ambassadeurs, 1876-77, pastel on monotype, 37 x 26 cm, Lyon, France: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Figure 29: Plan of the 1889 Universal Exposition Paris, France. Top register is the Champs de Mars and Trocadéro. Bottom register on the right is a detailed map of the attractions on the Esplanade des Invalides and on the left is a map showing the geographical location of the various fair ground sites.

Figure 30: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Souvenir de l’Exposition Universelle: La belle Fathma, 1889, pen and ink drawing, 17.3 x 10.7 cm, Vienna, Austria: Albertina Museum

Figure 31: Louis Legrand, “Tuesdays at the Elysée Montmartre. The belly-dance by La Goulue and La Macarona,” engraving, published in Le Courrier Français, 1890

Figure 32: Louis Bacard, La Goulue facing frontally, full length, dance pose, test on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative pasted on cardboard, circa 1885, Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay

Figure 33: Adrien Marie Aiousché performing at the Café Egyptien on the rue du Caire

Figure 34: Unknown, Three performers of the Café Egyptien, photograph from Delort de Gléon’s “L’architecture arable des Khalifes d’Egypte à l’Exposition Universelle de Paris en 1889,” 1889

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Figure 35: “Concert Égyptien:”Abou Halaka, 40 years old, musician from album of forty anthropological photographs presented at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris

Figure 36: La Goulue's fun fair booth with Lautrec's panels La danse au Moulin Rouge (left) and La danse mauresque (right). Photograph taken for Le Figaro at the Neuilly Fair and published in 1902

Figure 37: Photograph of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec dressed as an “Arab” man

Figure 38: Photograph of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec with his friends Claudon and Nussez in costume, 1884, Albi, France: Musée de Toulouse-Laturec

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