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Friday, August 19, 2016

LAUTREC GRAFFITI

LAUTREC GRAFFITI


One of my passions over the last few years has been my cartooning and documenting the graffiti (I prefer to refer to it as free street or alley art) in my city. That having been said, it was only recently that I discovered that one of my favorite artists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — was also a graffiti artist and cartoonist. Now, I have seen graffiti on buildings, in alleyways, in Montmartre that people will insist were done by Lautrec…but I think not. He did from time to time scrawl drawings or caricatures on the walls of various bistros and such (as did Utrillo), but no alley art has ever been documented. What there are however, are drawings done by a very young Toulouse-Lautrec on the walls of the orangery (a greenhouse where orange trees are grown) at the Château du Bosc dans l’ Aveyron, one of the family estates were the artist spent many vacations from early childhood right up until the time of his passing, portraying his early impressions of horses (a passion of his) and various relatives or people he knew as a child.

I have not been able to accurately date the following pencil sketches although I believe they, with the exception of one, predate his first tragic fall, breaking his left leg, on May 30, 1878. Already by the age of thirteen, Henri had shown a strong interest and a developing talent for drawing. My belief that these drawings predate 1878 is based on the fact that some of the sketches are located very high up on the walls, done no doubt with the assistance of a ladder — a height inaccessible to Lautrec for many years thereafter. Thus, they are perhaps among the earliest preserved Lautrec drawings.


The one drawing that I think is from a different time, done by an older Henri, is the last drawing in the series, of circus performers, no doubt done from memory, from a circus he may have visited with his mother some time later. Notice that the style is much more refined than the other graffiti in both style and detail.















(Photographs courtesy of Aoi Tokugawa)







1 comment:

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