I didn’t care for this book, but it did help me cement that I don’t care for this artist.
The book itself first: The book is written by someone who absolutely adores the artist, which I would like better if I liked the artist. The author spends a lot of time and florid prose discussing individual works, whether paintings or prints, from the Lautrec’s oeuvre, but the images he discusses are generally not close to the discussion, so if you want to look at what he’s talking about, you have to flip forwards or backwards. If the images appear at all. However, it’s definitely distracting and makes one–by “one,” I mean “me”–less likely to look at the images during the discussion. And the discussion is more complex and nuanced than the art itself.
Frankly, I have finally found a scapegoat that bridges the gap between art and comic book and such presented as art: Toulouse-Lautrec. The art is generally simple, easily changed to prints without too much loss of depth (and the prints and posters might have been why we might know of this fellow). He’s been heavily influenced by Oriental art, as was all the rage in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So although other artists of the period liked it, but he never really doesn’t mature much beyond that influence. Lautrec died young, and some of his later work started showing some depth and maturity. So maybe he would have been more of an artist that I would approve of if he’d lived longer.
So, to sum up: This is a poorly organized, overwritten art book about an artist I don’t particularly care about. Although I might pick up other books on Degas and Manet, and I’ll certainly pick up more general Impressionist and French art books and will glom onto any Renoir books I come across, I won’t bother with more Toulouse-Lautrec.
