Nobody Did It Like Toulouse

“In its prolonged romp through the (eighteen-) ‘80s and ‘90s, Paris scarcely knew what it was excited about,” wrote cultural historian Roger Shattuck in his book “The Banquet Years,” published in 1955.

“Was it a liberation? A revolution? A victory? A last fling? A first debauch? Amid the externals of funerals and fashions, the city knew only that it was having a good time and making a superb spectacle of itself.”

A slice of that spectacle has been re-created in the exhibition, “Toulouse-Lautrec and French Posters of the Belle Epoque,” now at the San Diego Museum of Art. In his installation, Malcolm Warner, the museum’s curator of European art, wisely took a cue from an 1898 photograph by Eugene Atget showing a typical Parisian street slathered with posters advertising dances, concerts, bicycles and various other au courant forms of amusement. Warner cleared out two of the museum’s cavernous galleries, painted their walls a deep dark green, and hung 60 exuberant posters at eye level and higher, up to a height of around 15 feet.

It’s a dramatic gesture, as museum installations go, and it suits the work, the period and the artists marvelously. Most of these advertising images were designed to appeal across wide and busy streets--if they didn’t seize the eye with bold form or enticing imagery, they would be overwhelmed by the surrounding handbills.

Toulouse-Lautrec excelled at this kind of attention-grabbing, and the current show underlines his already remarkable reputation by situating his posters among others of the same period. No one else here managed to create images as gripping yet simple, as genuine yet dramatic. Certainly not Jules Cheret, with his efflorescent, fluttering images of the veiled dancer Loie Fuller. Nor Alphonse Mucha, whose florid yet graceful patterns varied little in tone whether the product advertised was cigarettes, bicycles or biscuits.

Others did grasp the flavor of that ripe, restless age, however. Adrien Barrere’s poster, “Delmarre,” engages the viewer directly in a wry invitation to dance. Against a field of brown butcher paper, a man in formal dress squats slightly, stiffly. His eyebrows raised, tongue sandwiched between closed lips, he gazes obliquely at the reader of the poster, summoning her to join him for a round of the quadrille. The caricaturish quality of the figure makes for a clever, jaunty ad.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s large, single-figure images have a similar punch, but their tone is far less contrived. In one poster, the comedian Caudieux seems to saunter lightheartedly right off the page. In another, the cabaret entertainer Aristide Bruant presents his back, a massive black silhouette, to the viewer, but casts a smirk over his shoulder. In such images, Toulouse-Lautrec has become a collaborator of sorts, clinching his subjects’ superb sense of comedic or dramatic timing.

Of the nearly 20 artists represented in this show, Toulouse-Lautrec best avoided the cliches of advertising that persist to this day--the languid, semi-erotic poses of beautiful female models, the forced enthusiasm of women demonstrating the efficacy of a certain lamp oil or the new thrill of the bicycle ride. Toulouse-Lautrec showed his subjects not always at their best, their most polished and composed, but at characteristic, fleeting moments during the course of their performances or ordinary behavior. In his prints, art and life fuse effortlessly; his portraits are snapshots, caught on the fly.

Warner gathered these works from a handful of local collectors as well as from the museum’s Baldwin M. Baldwin collection of Toulouse-Lautrec works, donated in 1987 and exhibited in other guises in recent years, including a large-scale show of paintings, prints and drawings in 1988.

What this show brings to the fore is function: these posters were advertisements that also became popular collector’s items in their own time, especially in reduced form. Today, with so much contemporary art critical of its own commodity status and with commercial art dismissed altogether from the canon of “fine art,” this show has great instructional value in addition to its visual appeal. It suspends our allegiances to the hierarchies of high and low art forms and, in so doing, freshens our perspective of all art, past or present.

* San Diego Museum of Art, Balboa Park, through Nov. 22. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday 10-4:30.

Eros, the god of love from whom we derive the term erotic, has long been present in Rococo renderings of love. Often he hovers, cherub-like, over an enamored couple while they pause flirtatiously in a picturesque wood. Also known as Cupid, he wears his bow and arrow as symbolic tools of his trade, for taking aim and placing yet another set of victims under his spell.

In Brent Riggs’ sculptural installation, “The Spirit of Loveliness in Youth,” now at SOMA Gallery as part of IN/SITE 92, Eros has none of the cherubic charm of these romantic representations. Instead, he comes on as a disembodied machine, a fine-tuned instrument whose power is more ominous than seductive. His tell-tale accouterments, the bow and arrow, are mounted on a white wall and rigged to a motor and chain so that the arrow slowly and continuously slides back and forth as if readying for the perfect shot.

The arrow aims at the opposite wall, where a foot-operated air pump has been mounted near eye level. It, too, is operated by an electric motor, which causes it to repeatedly suck in air, then expel it. A black rubber hose hangs down from the pump and reaches nearly to the floor, where a small speaker plays the amplified sound of the air’s release. This heavy exhale, a breathy, haunting sound, charges the space with an unsettling tension, exacerbated by the repeated motions of the ever-threatening arrow.

This is love?

Though Riggs, a local artist, gives no hint of cynicism in his brief, descriptive wall label for “The Spirit of Loveliness in Youth,” the work speaks for itself. There is nothing either lovely or youthful about these mechanical contraptions. If meant to evoke the condition of love, they do so in a harsh, depersonalized way, suggesting the motives of love as dangerous, even violent. As disheartening and disturbing as such a notion is, it makes Riggs’ work just that effecting.

* SOMA Gallery, 343 4th Ave., through Oct. 11. Open Tuesday through Thursday 11-6, Friday 11-8, Saturday and Sunday 12-5.