Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Felix Feneon, and the Art & Anarchy of the Fin de Siecle

by David Sweetman

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is known as the disfigured and dangerously self-destructive artist who recorded prolifically the louche world of sexy night-club dancers, lounging whores, and drunken bohemian merriment. Both in his life and art, he is thought to embody the climate of inebriated hilarity and excess of the fin de siecle. But as David Sweetman, the noted biographer of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, shows in this definitive work, there was another Toulouse-Lautrec, a committed and concerned man who moved in a secret community of anarchist revolutionaries, whose work betrayed a deep concern for human suffering, an artist who etched his sympathy for fallen women and lesbians into his portraits, and who remained loyal to the disgraced Oscar Wilde when the poet was abandoned and reviled by most. Sweetman's enlightening study of Toulouse-Lautrec has uncovered a man whose alliance with radicals and outspoken social critics (such as Felix Feneon) is implicit in his work.

Toulouse-Lautrec was also a man on the cutting edge of radical art. He helped design the sets for the play "Ubu Rio," which, with its foul language and politically subversive imagery, stirred up a frenzy of public outrage and condemnation yet changed the course of theatrical history. Toulouse-Lautrec also created seminal works in the field of graphic art; his posters advertising performances and artistic events were often stolen from their public posting places and reappeared in the living rooms of middle-class homes, making his posters "the Trojan Horse of modern aesthetics."

Toulouse-Lautrec's seemingly endless capacity for debauched revelry and his larger-than-life persona are undeniable. Yet hisart is as complex as he was, more varied and disturbing than it has been perceived in our century. Sweetman has introduced in "Explosive Acts" an altogether new way of looking at Toulouse-Lautrec, who, along with Oscar Wilde, Felix Feneon, and their cross-Channel cohort of artists, theorists, and writers, was responding to many of the same social issues and political currents we now face at our own turn of the century.

Genres: Art, History, Biography, Nonfiction

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

As fan of the works of Lautrec and Wilde, I was hoping this book would shed some new historical perspective on their lives and work. And while it does do that to a point, I was disappointed and ultimately annoyed with how many assertions of the author were being presented as conclusions, irrespective of how much evidence there was for that, or not. The number of "certainly", "of course", "very likely" and other biased lead-ins to statements attributing motives, feelings, and conclusions on the part of people long since dead and for which there was insufficient basis to draw any conclusion of the sort were too many to ignore--especially when many of them were used as a basis for the author's follow-on editorial. Sweetman himself acknowledged that he had "lived the life of Riley" and was a self-described, self-indulgent dilettante. The amount of projection of his own life and preferences are unavoidably noticeable, to the detriment of the enjoyment of at least this reader.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book that brought me into the world of the Impressionist artists. Before I read the book the paintings were paintings, and afterwards I understood how they were art.

[Lanny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is shockingly goood! The premise of the book oddly, wonderfully, fete-ish-istically, being suggested by a Parisian news article written by Georges Duthuit in 1926
about what was basically a tent advertisement or 'funfare decoration' painted by Toulouse Lautrec for Louise Weber
the dancer known as La Goulue (The Glutton) who had become too fat to dance at the Moulin Rouge and who was trying to start a new, more "portable" career as a spruced up belly-dancer in 1895. The painting had been lost but had been found and was being cut up in 1926 into pieces and sold as individual works. The great thing is, the painting has Oscar Wilde, Felix Feneon and Toulouse all in the same frame. That same frame is the one David Sweetman begins to savor and to draw out the connections between these 3 very different and yet similiar artists.
This is good! Chock full with pictures I've never seen.
I can't put this down!!

[Arthur Lake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly readable, highly speculative. The "radical" Toulouse-Lautrec the author believes in passionately is mostly founded on wishful thinking: hard evidence is lacking and circumstantial evidence is weak.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely well-researched, thorough explorations into context (artistic, social, political, ...)

Notes:
48 touched everyone, the fortitude and good humor he stoically maintained
58 Zig-Zag Notebook … His cousin was undergoing leg treatments similar to his ... to distract her he made a visual diary, cartoons of wild happenings & cheeky snippets of observation to amuse her. … presumably a nod towards Caprices et Zig-Zags, Gautier’s accounts of his travels.
Better to be hard than self-pitying
61 no hint of political or artistic theorizing
84 secret works, for select friends (Degas)
86 the ballet was a brothel by other means
128 Le Chat Noir Aristide Bruant a stocky, handsome, foul-mouthed character
Insulted customers, crudely and loudly
144 signs of congenital syphilis … late 1800s, 15% of French deaths Manet, deMaupassant
Credit syphil w/spread of publishing … prior, bibles after, tracts on illness
146 mercury + potassium iodide treatment risk: black teeth
150 use of zinc plates, instead of stones, for lithography flexible sheets illustrations could be run on hi-speed printing press, like the rest of the publication
162 Coutelat du Roche, a mildly comic character, was hired by management to forestall any threat of intervention by the police, by acting as an inspector of the performance. Put simply, Du Roche’s role was to peer up the dancers’ skirts as they made their high kicks to ensure that they were wearing knickers -- not always the case! But while earning himself the nickname Pere la Pudeur, or Father Modesty, the inspector was pretty easy going and had a habit of looking away at the crucial moment.
(cf pro wrestling referees)
169 Maupassant avenged himself by deliberately infecting others (cf AIDS)
178 low sexual attraction ringmaster brandishing whip as he holds bareback rider in a Svengali-like gaze, while she simpers nervously back at him
200 Moulin Rouge built, recruited Lautrec to publicize
Part Two, Oscar Wilde … Pisarro the most openly anarchist
240 Lady Windermere, happiness is best served by the maintenance of deception, not the exposure of blunt truth
275 wrestlers sketch
282 instead of light-hearted decadence, Lautrec’s paintings are about the aftermath of pleasures, melancholy and weariness … the end of the party
296 avant garde theater, SmellaVision
299 La Loie straddle worlds of High and Low art

[Ace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought myself somewhat familiar was Lautrec and the myths that have been associated with his story but, as it turns out, I didn't know much at all. Explosive Acts presents the life of Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as glimpses into the lives of contemporaries, Oscar Wilde and Felix Feneon, along with descriptions of the political, social and cultural issues that affected France during his life-time. An eye-opening read, for me, I think I'll check out other books by David Sweetman.

[Loree]

I'm not in love with this book yet... I'm going to put it down for awhile and see if I can get into it at a later date.

art & anarchy?

[Karyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!

[Tim Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good biography of the key characters in their setting.