Skating Professional Beauty Mlle Liane de Lancy at the Palais de Glace 1896

Curator: This is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s pencil drawing "Skating Professional Beauty Mlle Liane de Lancy at the Palais de Glace", dating from 1896. Editor: Oh, this feels intimate, doesn't it? Like we've caught a glimpse of something unguarded. There’s a sense of hurried energy to the lines—quick, searching strokes. I like it a lot. Curator: The composition leverages a very economic use of line, relying almost entirely on contours and some strategic hatching to delineate form. Note the negative space—how crucial it is in defining the figures and the objects on the table. Editor: It's interesting how he’s used the density of lines to convey the different textures and light. Look at that crazy, swooping feather in her hat! It almost mocks the bourgeois formality represented by the top-hatted gent at the left. There is such an attitude. Curator: I agree. The "sketchiness" contributes greatly to its immediacy. Lautrec uses line to depict movement; the suggestion of light on surfaces, the angles of the face and body. It emphasizes a kind of raw, lived reality, one not concerned with formal idealization. Editor: And that almost caricatured gentleman, looking a bit like a disgruntled walrus... His glare adds a wonderfully cynical edge. One feels as if these figures are utterly aware they are putting on a show, that the café, even the whole "sport" of skating, is performance. It has that feeling that art deco bars sometimes get--some of my favorites in Berlin or Mexico City come to mind. Curator: Indeed. While labeled as Post-Impressionist, one sees Lautrec engaging in some sophisticated structural relationships here, as the various strokes form meaning through shape, rather than detail, and one cannot separate this pencil drawing from the full body of Lautrec’s stylistic development at the close of the nineteenth century. Editor: This glimpse of cafe life at the Palais de Glace leaves a sense of having witnessed something authentic beneath all the plumage. This has the feel of real humanity--uncomfortable, perhaps a little ridiculous, but certainly never dull. Curator: It is the very brilliance of this portrait that it operates as something so real and full through such sparse structure. Editor: Beautifully put, I think it gives me chills every time.