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Toulouse-Lautrec: THE monthly illustrated journal La Vache enragée, founded by the artist Adolph Willette, took its name from a novel by Emile Goudeau about a struggling artist in Montmartre. The phrase "enraged cow" had become slang for rebellious bohemianism, the idiomatic expression for the hardship and struggles endured by young artists. |
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| In Lautrec's poster the bespectacled old man being chased down the hill out of Montmartre represents the academic establishment. The poster's cartoon-like style and pierrots (fools) are references to Willette's own work. The journal, its accompanying Vachalcade—a hurly-burly procession through the streets on March 17, 1896—and the poster were created in the same spirit of antiestablishment buffoonery as such zany Montmartre institutions as the Club des Hydropathes, the Chat Noir café, the Société des Incohérents, and the Bal des Quat'-z-Arts. This last, the annual ball held by the art students, featured a so-called "cavalcade" of costumed artists and nude models, who set out late at night from the Moulin Rouge and arrived in the morning at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It was the prototype of Willette's Vachalcade, and the antiacademic parade of the artists, as well as the flavor of montmartrian humor in general, set the tone of La Vache enragée. La Vache enragée |
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