Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec seeks to capture the…

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec seeks to capture the effect of the movement of the figure through wholly original means.

For example, his contemporary Edgar Degas (whose works, along with Japanese prints, are a principal influence on him) expresses movement by carefully rendering the anatomical structure of several closely grouped figures, attempting in this way to depict but one figure, caught at successive moments in time.

Toulouse-Lautrec, on the other hand, employs freely handled line and color that in themselves convey the idea of movement.

Lines are no longer bound to what is anatomically correct; colors are intense and in their juxtapositions generate a pulsating rhythm; laws of perspective are violated in order to place figures in an active, unstable relationship with their surroundings.

A common device of Toulouse-Lautrec is to compose the figures so that their legs are not visible. (Though this characteristic has been interpreted as the artist's reaction to his own stunted, almost worthless legs, in fact the treatment eliminates specific movement, which can then be replaced by the essence of movement. The result is an art throbbing with life and energy, that in its formal abstraction and overall two-dimensionality presages the turn to schools of Fauvism and Cubism in the first decade of the twentieth century.)