Jouets De Paris 1901

Toulouse-Lautrec made this cover illustration, Jouets de Paris, using lithographic crayon and spatter. His energetic strokes are totally visible. You can see him thinking through the image, not afraid of the false starts, the over-markings, and the blotted lines. The figure is a marvel. It’s a kind of spectral Pierrot, a character from a Commedia dell’Arte. Lautrec renders him, or her, in quick, cartoonish strokes. What gets me is that you can really feel the powdery drag of the litho crayon across the surface of the stone. Look at the way the crayon catches on the texture of the page, creating this wonderful spatter-y, granular effect. Lautrec was so good at caricature and capturing likeness, he was like the John Singer Sargent of the dance hall. Yet, his work, like Philip Guston’s, speaks to the idea of art as a process, a site of emergence, rather than just a depiction. For me, it opens a space where meaning isn’t fixed but always in motion.