Orsay

The bed

Henri from Toulouse-Lautrec.

"It's superior to everything, nothing can compete with something so simple, there's nothing better, that's desire." Toulouse-Lautrec has a look full of elegance on these loves that are not his.

Here they are in beautiful sheets. Under an orangey whiteness, they look at each other tenderly. Shifted to the right, they fold intimately. Restricted space, shared heat, condemned perspective, point of view too close, even indiscreet of a familiar. By what processes does the composition introduce us with open eyes into this brothel?

A significant part of the provocation at Toulouse Lautrec comes from the subjects treated; We know that he spent a lot of time drawing and painting in the brothels, where he loved depravity, full of color, fertile in tragico-burlesque events and in human truth. This truth he was going to seek where she was, in the bed of others if necessary, as is the case where he painted two lesbians almost asleep. But Lautrec knew how to make himself accepted by interposed painting, by the intelligence and education he had received in his family environment. His sense of friendship and his humanity have certainly protected him from many avatars. To show a homosexual couple in a bed was at the time an extravagant thing to the extent that this scene can be seen only in a situation of accidental voyeurism where voluntary

So perverse. It is at once a scabrous scene, yet Lautrec makes a song of love, to the glory of sensual pleasure, youth and life that was said at the time "bohemian".