Painter of the Half-World

Toulouse-Lautrec by Gerstle Mack. Knopf. $5.00

At the time of his death in 1901, after scarcely more than a decade of mature activity, Toulouse-Lautrec had made for himself a distinctive place among French artists. A contemporary of Cézanne and Gauguin, of Renoir and Degas, he was an inferior painter as compared with any one of the four, though not without a characteristic slight originality of his own. It was Degas whom Lautrec idolized, and to whose more Japanesque paintings his best work may be compared. But there is a hint of journalistic haste, an unconsidered sketchiness, which marks him as a secondary master. Even that finest picture of his in America—finest perhaps of all his major paintings—the Au Moulin Rouge at Chicago, is not free from posteresque short-cutting. It was as a designer of posters that he excelled all his contemporaries, that he will continue to stand as a monumental figure.