Lautrec’s dancing muse

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), diminutive aristocrat and radical artist, was roundly travestied in John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge, and at once entered the popular imagination as an atrociously romanticised figure doomed for early death.

Lautrec was a great poster designer, able to see through the endless possibilities and permutations of pose to the characteristic gesture (just this side of caricature) that defined personality. The use of thin paint made his paintings at times more like drawings, as the first image in the exhibition demonstrates. Here is Jane Avril, dancing on one leg, the other held high and kicking out, her clothes flowing and swirling through the expertly varied application of gouache. She was described by contemporaries as the ‘tempestuous tulip’ or an ‘orchid in a frenzy’, and as ‘combining the motions of a jig and an eel’. By all accounts, her lanky, rapid movements and trance-like mien were disturbing and fascinating, and although she was considered an eccentric rather than a classic beauty, there was a strong undertow of sexuality to her performance which made it compelling.

A substantial part of this exhibition is devoted to Jane’s story, and the discovery that she actually suffered from St Vitus’ dance. Indeed she was admitted to the Salpêtrière hospital for nervous diseases, where Professor Charcot preached the virtues of hypnotism and Sigmund Freud was a student, when she was 14. It was there she discovered that dancing helped her condition, even if it didn’t cure it. Fate seemed to take a hand, and she became a dancer by profession. One of her many nicknames was ‘La Mélinite’, after an explosive, a sobriquet she disliked perhaps because it reminded her of the Salpêtrière, which had once been an arsenal. Nancy Ireson, the exhibition’s curator, notes, ‘To read between the lines of Avril’s memoirs is to suspect that “difference”, though an element of her fame, was something of a burden.’