Wednesday, 11 June 2014

Toulouse Lautrec And Gustave Courbet Paintings

By Darren Hartley


Toulouse Lautrec paintings of dancehall performers and prostitutes are personal and humanistic. They reveal the sadness and humor hidden behind rice powders and gaslights. Their influences were long lasting. To say the least, there would be no Andy Warhol, if there was no Lautrec.

In one of the dissolute Toulouse Lautrec paintings, known as The Streetwalker, Toulouse used oil thinned with turpentine on cardboard. This rendered visible his loose, sketchy brushwork. The transposition of this creature of the night to the bright light of day signalled Toulouse's fascination with sordid and dissolute subjects.

Yvette Guilbert and Jane Avril, two of Toulouse's favourite cafe concert stars were featured in one of his Toulouse Lautrec paintings, Divan Japonais. Yvette appeared at the upper left corner of the composition, with her head cropped at the top edge, her body elongated, wearing her trademark clothes.

Gustave Courbet paintings were done in an emphatically realistic style, particularly in reference to a group of artwork that included The Stonebreakers and A Burial at Omans. The unvarnished realism of Gustave's imagery was dismissed and derided by critics for the ugliness of his figures they described as peasants in their Sunday best.

In one of Gustave Courbet paintings done on monumental canvas, The Painter's Studio, Gustave featured figures on the left, suggesting the various social types that appear in his canvases and figures on the right, portraying his friends and supporters. The meaning behind his unfinished painting remains enigmatic to this day.

It was during the 1850s that Gustave Courbet paintings went beyond the Omans subjects that had established his reputation. Among these paintings was a portrait of actor Louis Gueymard and society portraits on commission. There was the more intimate Jo, La Belle Irlandaise, a fusion of portraiture and genre painting.




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