Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Until October 1st, in MASP São Paulo you can visit the exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec em vermelho (Toulouse-Lautrec in Red), which presents some of Toulouse-Lautrec’s most celebrated artworks depicting the Parisian nightlife, with its cabarets, cafés, concert halls, and brothels, and its characters, such as prostitutes, bohemians, and dancers.
The Divan, which you can see there, portrays the entrance salon of a luxurious Parisian brothel on the Rue des Moulins that Toulouse-Lautrec frequented in the mid-1890s. With its high-back sofas upholstered in scarlet velvet, the salon’s decoration served as a suggestion for the show’s title, red also being a color associated with sexuality and pleasure.
Toulouse-Lautrec was an assiduous frequenter of Montmartre, a bohemian district in the north of Paris, which survived the urbanistic transformations of Mayor Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891), whose reforms transformed Paris into an elegant and organized city. The artist’s free movement between the brothels and cabarets, both during the day and at night, allowed him to forge relations of friendship and confidence with the managers and workers of the places, providing him with a singular perspective, based on affective links apart from any moralizing stance, concerning these people and their lives.