A vivid tableau of fin de siècle Europe
Review of Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénẽon and the Art & Anarchy of the Fin de Siècle by David Sweetman
This is one of those books that sets an extremely rich scene: where the participants met in a unique moment, how they interacted, and what became of them. Where it is weaker is in their personalities and psychological motivations as well as the meaning and impact of what they did. The context of the times is described very well, but less so how the artists influenced art history and what legacy they established. I started off absolutely mesmerized but my enthusiasm waned after 400 pages.
Lautrec is one of the most important post-impressionists. Apprenticed in establishment painting techniques, he experimented in his own way as a peer of Gaugin and van Gogh. Like them, he chose a niche milieu, in his case for the attention that it generated but also because he fit into the lowlife popular culture that at the time was flourishing in urban France. It was a world of alcohol and spontaneity, immediately accessible to the audience rather than the rarified aristocratic tastes of say, opera or ballet. He was a prolific worker, gradually succumbing to alcoholism and perhaps syphilis in his mid-30s. I have always felt fascinated by his work, which appears flashy yet has an astonishing depth of character, as if each painting implied a rich narrative.
I suppose he was rebelling against his so-called aristocratic background, but again, his inner life is not the subject of this book. Lautrec was sickly, possibly suffering from a genetic condition of fragile bones due to the inbreeding of this class. His father was an eccentric sportsman-hunter and pseudo-aristocratic layabout, largely absent and uncaring while his mother doted on Henri and worried about him incessantly. He had a financial cushion but achieved genuine success in many of his undertakings.
Two other characters are covered, Wilde and Fénéon. Félix Fénéon was a petit bureaucrat and anarchist, who had a genius for the Zeitgeist. He stood at the center of this culture, finding and nurturing talent, editing an influential journal (La Revue Blanche), and eventually falling afoul of the law for terrorist bombing that was never proven. Oscar Wilde was a singular personality and talent at least equal to Lautrec, whose homosexuality led to his humiliation and imprisonment in the UK. Their careers are fun to follow, but this treatment is about the surface and their actions, not their psychological makeups.
Sweetman writes with an extremely sure hand and has a wonderfully dense writing style. I read the book rather slowly to savor it. Unfortunately, I felt increasing disappointed that it didn’t go deeper. There isn’t much that is original, except perhaps the synthesis of sources on their milieu. Why did so much innovation appear at this moment? What did it mean? Where can we see the influence today? There are no answers to these questions, but it is still a lot of fun to learn what happened to the models that I have admired since childhood in Lautrec’s paintings.
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