Moulin Rouge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moulin_Rouge

naturally I'm a lot lazier in most ways than Eddie....(and of course that means I'm just a stupid fuk-head)

so I'm just posting a link

I think I went on a trip with the 'law' firm Berrenson's Solicitors (Gloucester Road) where we took in a moulin rouge type of experience

it was all a heady cross-channel muddle of sleepless nights and mild flirtations as far as I can remember....and taking in croissants and coffee in some early morning place - fun was had by all

they got rid of me pretty soon after that.....hehehe

but high-kickin' girls are a legitimate angle in this thread......

anyone have any experiences with them

I think they were pretty hot on Broadway or in Vegas

at one time

I love it, looks great fun. In the olden days I don't think they wore any drawers

my first reaction to that was

I haven't had another reaction.....I doubt I will....that's downright funny.....hehehe

do you remember Knickerless Parsons?

Hanging with Toulouse Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge.

Toulouse-Lautrec gallery at the Palais de Berbie - review

Gallery housing the world's largest collection of the painter's work reopens after renovation

Harry Bellet

Guardian Weekly, Tuesday 24 April 2012 14.01 BST


Masterpiece ... detail of Au Salon de la Rue des Moulins, by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Photograph: Francis G Mayer/Corbis

"The mother of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, wishing to perpetuate the memory of her son and secure for his birthplace the attraction, instruction and benefit of this essential part of his work, has resolved, Monsieur Mayor, to leave it to the town of Albi." The letter dates from October 1919. The town council accepted the offer and in July 1922 the then minister of public education and fine art officially opened the Toulouse-Lautrec Gallery at the Palais de la Berbie, once the official residence of the bishops of Albi. Now, 90 years later, after extensive renovation, the world's largest collection of the painter's work has reopened.

It is one of France's oldest public bodies, its statutes having been established in 1923. In keeping with the wishes of the family, the museum acquired a moral right to the artist's work and a duty to preserve it. The present curator, Danièle Devynck, receives regular applications for all sorts of reproductions. She is quite happy to allow books, or even sweet-boxes, to reproduce the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, but she refused to let a brand of condoms use his name. It has to be said, though, that the request was relevant: Toulouse-Lautrec died on 9 September 1901, aged 37, carried off by syphilis and alcohol abuse.

Born on 24 November 1864, Henri was a descendant of the Tapié de Céleyran family, on his mother's side. From his father he would have inherited the title of Count of Toulouse-Lautrec. He might have enjoyed the life of a provincial aristocrat had he not met the painter René Princeteau. His father, Alphonse, also collected the works of the cartoonist Forain. Princeteau was a friend of Charles du Passage and John Lewis-Brown, both of whom drew and painted horses.

The visit starts in the main courtyard of the palais, which now leads to the museum entrance and then to the first rooms. Here the exhibits are connected to the themes explored by Toulouse-Lautrec, ranging from his early paintings inspired by the landscape around the family home at Céleyran, near Narbonne, but also horses – his first and fatal passion. After two falls, in 1878-89, in which he broke both legs, they stopped growing. Apparently this was also due to excessive inbreeding among the counts of Toulouse.

This infirmity almost certainly explains his interest in brothels, the next theme in the exhibition. Here are some of his masterpieces, including two versions, side by side, of Au Salon de la Rue des Moulins, painted in 1894. They feature the inmates of the famous Parisian brothel waiting for customers on sofas similar to those in the museum.

The floor above displays the recently discovered floor in the 13th-century parish hall. The exhibition continues with several rooms devoted to Paris night-life, of which Toulouse-Lautrec was a keen observer. Indeed his paintings are testimony to the inner solitude of the habitual customers of bars. Here too are his posters, of which the museum owns 31. His remarkable talent makes him a worthy successor to Degas. He had a distinct liking for low-angle pictures, not wholly explained by his short stature. This approach is particularly flattering for his subjects: Aristide Bruant, Jane Avril and Yvette Guilbert tower over us in dazzlingly inventive compositions.

This impression is confirmed by the rest of the exhibition, which is devoted to his drawings and prints. Some are majestic, others affectionate and revealing the genuine empathy between artist and model. A few sketches recall another side of his character, his apparent lack of inhibition, which led to him being put, at his parents' request, in a Neuilly clinic.

Was this a side-effect of the diseases that finally killed him? No doubt, but another factor was his sense, not of class, but of caste. Despite his bohemian existence and his low-life acquaintances, Toulouse-Lautrec was proud of his background. One anecdote is sufficient to illustrate this point. In 1898, at an opening in London, he was fast asleep curled up on a sofa when the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) passed by. As a true gentleman, or perhaps because he shared the painter's love of Parisian pleasures, Bertie would not allow the owner of the gallery to disturb him. When Toulouse-Lautrec finally surfaced the dealer accused him of being disrespectful, to which he retorted: "But he's only a Hanoverian".

This article originally appeared in Le Monde

Toulouse-Lautrec and the real story of the Moulin Rouge

Nowhere is the sad, strange seediness of 1890s Montmartre more sharply portrayed than in Toulouse-Lautrec's supercharged paintings – as an exhibition at the Courtauld shows

Jonathan Jones

The Guardian


True colours ... Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge (1892-93). Photograph: Robert Hashimoto/The Art Institute of Chicago

The Moulin Rouge, a dance hall in late 19th-century Paris, has been depicted in more than one film. I feel compelled to add "and sensationalised". But looking at the way the nightclub's famous habitué Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed the fin-de-siècle denizens of nocturnal Montmartre, it's clear that film-makers have been sanitising the story. Neither Baz Luhrmann nor John Huston came anywhere near the true wildness and strangeness of the real Moulin Rouge.

You can see the original, raw reality of Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge in an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, which closes on 18 September 2011. Summer visitors to London should put it on their itinerary, especially as the £6 admission also gets you into this gallery's small-but-exquisite collection of artistic masterpieces, which includes Manet's highly relevant A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.

The exhibition concentrates on the sickly southern-aristocrat painter's friendship with a thin, nervous dancer called Jane Avril. Hospitalised for mental illness as a teenager, Avril was mocked by some as a crazy dancer whose legs spun all over the stage while her face remained a mask of misery. But in Toulouse-Lautrec's portraits and posters, she is at once intensely lonely, mysterious and – blatantly – his object of desire. The bony beauty of Avril blazes eerily in his supercharged vision. The power of Toulouse-Lautrec is that the more seedy and unglamorous he makes places and people look (for he is a savage realist, and faces in his pictures are waxen with pain) … the sexier it all is.

Truth is far stranger than fiction in this exhibition. Toulouse-Lautrec's 1892-5 painting At the Moulin Rouge has been loaned from the Art Institute of Chicago. It's a masterpiece. In the foreground, a huge green face, caught in the spooky lights, menaces you. At a table beyond, a gathering of bohemians and dancers whiles away the night. In the background is the dancer La Goulue, while the room itself melts into a curtain of abstract colour. The scene is somehow more exotic and more exciting than any recreation in popular culture. In his portraits of Avril inside or outside this and other Montmartre haunts, her bleak beauty seems impossible for any actor to recreate.

The explanation is twofold. First, Montmartre was a dangerous place in the 1890s and yet the memory of it, preserved as it is today as a tourist attraction, is soft and nostalgic. This was a world pitched between the brothel and the hospital – there was nothing coy or cosy going on. Second, the way Toulouse-Lautrec depicts his chosen milieu is modernist. His portraits teeter towards abstraction, even as they record violent reality in acid colours. His posters, certainly, are truly abstract.

Toulouse-Lautrec's Montmartre was an intense place, but his art adds another dimension of fantasy and feeling. The cocktail is a delicious artistic poison. See this, and lose your innocence.