At the NGA, Toulouse-Lautrec & Montmartre

This is a much more pointed discussion of T-L&M than ran on the Bloomberg wire. That piece was shorter and much more descriptive.

Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre sounds like the title of an interesting book, which it is. Unfortunately, the museum exhibit of the same title on view now at the National Gallery of Art, is not a poor accompaniment to the book. 

The blockbuster show, stuffed with about 250 objects, provides a snapshot of a bohemian Paris neighborhood by placing the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) at its center. It is a pithy exhibit, a sanitized version of place, full of mediocrities. Amazingly, the most bohemian, wild neighborhood in end-of-the-century Paris comes off as a bore.

That's too bad, because Montmartre and Lautrec are rich subjects. Lautrec was a syphilitic alcoholic, a neighborhood artist-mascot who, in part, promoted his favorite entertainers with his work. He sketched dancers, the middle-class partying with their 'other women,' and created promotional posters that are among the most famous advertising images of all-time. Several Lautrec posters are here, including one that promotes the Moulin Rouge with both typographical flair and a blonde dancer kicking up her heels surrounded by, mostly, men.

While the best work in the exhibit is a few of the 123 Lautrecs, most are minor, uninteresting works. An exception is Lautrec's delicate, nine-inch-by-six-inch portrait of Carmen Gaudin (at left), in which a burst of light gives Gaudin's hair fiery life.

The exhibit is broken into a series of themed galleries such as 'Advertising Montmartre,' 'Café-Concerts,' and 'Dance Halls.'  Most of the work selected hints at Montmartre's hedonism but does so with restraint. The NGA's installation is consistent with its curating: All of the themed galleries have English names, save one. 'Maisons Closes' is a gallery about Montmartre's whorehouses.

Only one of the show's ten rooms is a knockout. A room of artists' takes on American dancer Loie Fuller succeeds at capturing the interplay between performers, partiers and artists that made Montmartre a legendary home to creative folk. Fuller's act was based on manipulating flowing, translucent gowns while dancing. Many artists tried to capture her mix of action and sensuality, and Lautrec's lithographs did it best. Fourteen (borrowed from nine different institutions) are on view, each featuring the same image of Fuller, but with Fuller surrounded by different colors. Each individual lithograph seems a near-abstraction, but when viewed together they almost seem to move.

There are hints in the show that guest curator Richard Thomson recognized that most rooms in the show needed a boost. While Thomson's catalogue essay says that his intent was to capture the Montmartre of Lautrec's 1885-1895 heyday, the show is spiked with Picassos, Manets and Degases from outside that time period.

But why? Once you've bent the calendar for Picasso, who was four years old when the show theoretically starts in 1885 and who didn't even visit Paris until five years after the show's window ends, why not also bend it for Matisse, who made hundreds of drawings of Montmartre?

The strained inclusions reveal this show for what it is: a hoped-for blockbuster that has sacrificed a tight theme in an attempt to attract crowds. ("A Taste of Montmartre" buffet brunch is available at the NGA on weekends during the show, and you can buy a pewter statue of Fuller – whose dances were all about light and flowingly flimsy skirts --  in the gift shops.)

This exhibit is a missed opportunity. Blockbusterhood and quality need not mutually exclusive aims: A 2004 Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition of the poster art of Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries covered the same time period and many of the same artists. The result was a fantastic show that drew crowds. The NGA's show will merely draw crowds.