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DESCRIPTION:
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This is the poster advertising the publication of Lautrec's series Elles (consisting of ten sheets with a frontispiece and a cover), one of the high-points of nineteenth-century art. It was the pictorial epilogue to what the artist had experienced in the maisons closes of the Rue des Moulins, the Rue d'Amboise and the Rue Joubert. ‘They' are ‘women to my liking,' as he used to say cynically, and he often lived with them for weeks at a time during the years 1892 to 1895, a constant witness of their daily lives, of their suffering and intimacy. Attentively he noted their monotonous routine at the wash-stand, ‘in the humble pose of bodily hygiene,' as Huysmans called it, at breakfast, waiting for customers or during the medical inspection. These places on the periphery of society seemed to him ideally suited for a social allegory, in which the ‘unavoidable myth' could emerge, albeit in half-reflections, through images of transience and the attributes of Venus and Luxuria.
Lautrec showed the prostitute marked by the meaninglessness of her acts-gone are the poses of the desirable temptress-and he gave back to his Olympias and Nanas their humanity, as he showed them in their daily routine; the grandes cocottes are now humbled women ‘who cast off their decency with their clothes,' abandoned, their value as goods lowered, and seeking among their own kind a partnership denied to them with men. Yet Lautrec does not take a direct moral stand. His sense of decency lies hidden in the graphic detail, in the beauty and reserve of the color in these sheets printed on differently tinted papers, their drawings in black, in olive green, red chalk and dark violet, in some cases underlaid with a tinted ground.
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