Toulouse-Lautrec:
Divan Japonais
Click on the poster for a larger reproduction

LAUTREC'S stroke of genius as a poster designer was to bring to the task the bold coloring and flat unmodelled forms of Japanese color woodcuts - and the idea is nowhere more apposite than in this image advertising the Divan Japonais.

This was a Montmartre cabaret decorated in a fashionably Asian style (see Japonisme). Lautrec shows the dancer Jane Avril and the critic Edouard Dujardin watching a performance by Yvette Guilbert, the famous singer, who is recognizable by her black gloves. All three were friends of the artist.

Avril is elegantly composed, chicly dressed, and withdrawn. Her cultivated tastes and interest in art and literature place her comfortably in the company of the intellectual Dujardin. Distractedly touching his cane to chin, he is interrupted in mid-thought by Jane's shapely silhouette. As usual, Lautrec focused on the dramas enacted by the audience, and here perfectly captures the ambivalence of the pair's feigned interest in the performance and their private, conflicting thoughts hovering just below the surface of social refinement.

The poster represents a complete summary of Lautrec's artistic interests and sources. Compositionally it is an exact opposite of Edgar Degas' landmark painting The Orchestra of the Opera (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Degas' influence is implicit throughout Lautrec's art, but Divan Japonais is a direct borrowing.

Stylistically, however, Lautrec looked to sources in Japanese prints: the use of diagonals, compartmentalized color, curvilinear silhouettes, and the flattening of space.

Finally, the presence of Dujardin makes reference to his writings on abstraction in Japanese art. Dujardin's writings summarized the principles of Lautrec's art, and Lautrec's poster gives a pictorial synopsis of both the critic's views and the concerns of avant-garde painting. Viewed in this way, Divan Japonais poses itself as a provocative brain-teaser, full of cryptic "signs" and not-too-serious references to the intellectualism of modern art that percolated at the café tables and was poured out in the journals.

Divan Japonais
1893; Desloge 90; W P11; D 341
Lithograph in four colors. 30 15/16 x 23 7/16 inches.
Text by the artist; artist's signature lower right.
Gift of the Baldwin M. Baldwin Foundation, 1987:21

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