Toulouse-Lautrec was twenty-eight or twenty-nine when he painted The Sofa. He was working steadily and fast and well. It had been two or three years since his first extraordinary poster for the Moulin Rouge—featuring the dancer called “La Goulue” and what a friend of Toulouse-Lautrec’ s described as her “inspired leg” —went up all over Paris and made the painter famous over-night. He had a flair for motion; he had an insistent, sexual line. Just at the same time that he started designing posters, in 1891, he began to draw in the brothels, the maisons closes, of Paris. The Sofa, painted in 1893 or 1894, is one of the dozens of paintings and drawings of prostitutes that he made during this period. He was always enormously productive—he left more than 5,000 drawings and sketches and more than 700 finished oil paintings—but during this time the work seemed to veritably flow out of him. He had come completely into his method and his style. He would go every night for weeks to see the actress Yvette Guilbert perform and he would produce from these nights of study a drawing, pared down to essences, a gesture, perfectly characteristic of her, drawn with the sure, undulating line perfectly characteristic of him. He painted circus performers, cabaret scenes, the nightclubs of Montmartre, and the maisons closes. There was a kind of ruthless logic to what would have been seen by the aristocratic world of his family as his increasingly debased choice of material. He was drinking a lot. He was working well.
On Friday nights I go to the Metropolitan Museum. The museum has ten Toulouse-Lautrecs; the one I return to is The Sofa. I’m drawn to it, and it makes me anxious, and I’ve been trying to figure out why. In the painting, two women lie on a green sofa in front of a green background. The green has something to do with spring and something to do with artificial light. The woman closest to the viewer lies on her back. She wears a pale pink chemise that is pulled up above her thighs. The woman lying behind is on her side, elbow crooked, head resting on her left hand. Her shirt is a faded, acid blue, setting off her orange-red hair. There is a twist to the left corner of her mouth. Her sex and legs are exposed; she leans up against the other woman. Either Toulouse-Lautrec had trouble seeing them, or he chose to paint certain distortions. The woman in blue has no right arm, just the line of a large right shoulder under her blouse; her left arm is half the length of the other woman’s arm. The awkward space between their legs appears to be the result of the woman in blue having bent one of her legs, but you can’ t see that leg clearly. Their flesh is flaccid, exceedingly pale in color, with yellow undertones; the eye hovers over the folds of their skin and their blouses. Both women have long black stockings; their feet dangle beyond the lower left corner of the painting. They seem unaffected by the fact that they are being painted.
“Do you know what it is like to be haunted by colors?” Toulouse-Lautrec once said to a friend. “To me, in the color green, there is something like the temptation of the devil.” The green of the background, the same green as the sofa, has been applied in vertical strokes with spaces between them; these strokes resemble grass, though the painting does not look like a landscape at all. In the 1880s Toulouse-Lautrec frequently painted women seated in the garden of his friend Forest, but he was not interested in landscape. “Only the figure exists,” he is supposed to have said, “the landscape is only and cannot be anything but an ingredient; the strict landscape painter is a villain. The landscape only serves for the better understanding of the character of a figure.” Quite often, the women in the garden paintings had red hair. He was always attracted to redheads—he said they had a particular smell—and he liked the contrast of the red with the yellow-green of the smudges of foliage. He used paint that had been mixed with a lot of turpentine: it went on faster; working with paint became like drawing. In The Sofa, the heavily turpentined oil paint looks fleshy like pastel. The painting isn’t on canvas, but on cardboard, which shows through as a bare, matte brown. The light seems like indoor light, but there are almost no shadows.
People walk confidently across to The Sofa, drawn, I think, by some sense of sex which they do not realize is what is drawing them until they stand in front of the painting and are, vaguely, embarrassed. Some turn immediately; others make visual excuses, staring at the cardboard corners, the explanatory card to the right, the texture of the paint. The first time I saw The Sofa, about six years ago, in an exhibition of works by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec at the Met, I made all these feints and dodges, and then, finally, looking at it, I had a strong urge to take my pencil, press it into the cardboard, and make a hole. At the time, I interpreted this as the desire to liberate the women from their claustrophobic world, though, from the image of the pencil and the hole, you may perhaps be able to construct an alternate interpretation.
On this first viewing I learned from the card next to the painting that Toulouse-Lautrec had taken the models home with him and painted them lying on his own green sofa, in his studio. I assumed that they felt trapped in their own Déjeuner sur l’ Herbe: naked, like the woman in Manet’s painting, sitting on the grass, only here the grass isn’t even real grass, the way it is in the Manet, it’s just the mottled green sofa. The Manet, which Toulouse-Lautrec would have known well, is remarkable for its artificiality, for the posedness of the nude woman. The Sofa does not feel posed at all, which seems more dangerous. I was worried about the vulnerability of the women in the painting. I wrote an angry essay about Toulouse-Lautrec’s manipulation of his subject; I imagined a wooden door at the back of the painting, through which they could escape.
Toulouse-Lautrec brought them back to his studio because the light was better, and they could pose with fewer interruptions, except when he stopped to mix drinks at the bar he had set up at one end of the room. At his studio, he stood on a stepladder. In the brothels themselves, Toulouse-Lautrec mostly made drawings, in pencil, colored chalk, or gouache. These he could do quickly while the trade went on around him. The drawings, like many of his portraits of cabaret stars, give the impression of looking up-the subjects seem as if they might be on stage.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a dwarf. He was four feet and eleven inches tall and his bones were weak. His dwarfism seems to have been the result of his long-lineaged family’s proud commitment to intermarriage. The Toulouses had been an important family for nearly a thousand years; one of their ancestors, Raymond IV, and his personal force of a hundred thousand men had been a key factor in capturing Jerusalem on the first crusade in 1096. The Toulouse-Lautrecs saw no reason to let the prestige, or the money, out of the family. The painter’s grandmothers were sisters, and his mother’s brother married his father’s sister. Three of his cousins were dwarves with similar bone problems; one spent her entire life in a baby carriage. Lautrec had trouble walking; he broke both his legs as a child. With his cane, he could drag himself painfully along. At one point, when he was drinking quite heavily, he had a hollow cane in which he stored a tube of brandy or absinthe. He had thick lips and a wide nose, and he drooled. His torso and arms were of a standard size, but his legs were short. He had stubby fingers. Every biographical description of him mentions his beautiful, extremely dark eyes and his pince-nez. He didn’t hide his appearance. Sometimes he turned up at parties or clubs in outlandish clothes—wearing yellow pants and an orange shirt, or a Japanese kimono, or dressed as a woman. In her fine biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, Julia Frey points out that eccentricity was in keeping with the self-conception of fin de siècle French aristocrats, and particularly with that of the painter’s father, Alphonse, who was known for wearing his Scotch Highlander outfit when he went hunting, and who once came down to dinner in a tutu. It also emerges from Frey’s portrait that when the son went costumed he was often treated less as an aristocrat than as an outrageous child.
The painter was named for Henri V, whom the Toulouse-Lautrecs believed to be the rightful king of France. Had Toulouse-Lautrec outlived his father, he would have become the Comte de Toulouse-Lautrec; he seems never to have been sure that he was living up to his name. It was a great disappointment to Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec that his son couldn’t hunt. After the child’s birth, Alphonse almost never lived at home, preferring to stay away from his wife, Adele, and what he seems to have felt was their error of too-close breeding. Along with hunting, he sketched; it was a family of accomplished amateurs. On rare rainy days, when they couldn’t shoot game, Toulouse-Lautrec’s uncles would close off one of the large parlors, turn it into a studio, and sketch all day. Perhaps the recollection of this gave Toulouse-Lautrec pleasure when he signed his paintings with his monogram: a T conjoined with an L, a short line between them to create the H, the whole encircled in an oval. The stamp gave a slightly Japanese look to his ancient initials. Sometimes he eschewed the monogram altogether and signed with a quick drawing of his ungainly face; he drew lots of caricatures of himself.
Like many of the French painters of his day, and in particular like Degas, whose paintings from brothels had a notable impact on Toulouse-Lautrec, Lautrec was much influenced by Japanese erotic prints, both by their subject matter and by the way the images are cropped and seem to continue beyond the frame. People referred to him as the Utamaro of Montmartre. In the series of drawings he called Elles (“they” in the feminine form), Lautrec drew the mechanics and economics of brothels. Women sit on couches waiting for customers, or lie flat, slack with exhaustion, among rumpled sheets. One drawing shows a woman crawling up the stairs, naked from the waist down, followed by a customer. Lautrec sketched women waiting in line for the medical inspections required of the licensed houses. (More than a quarter of the women had venereal diseases, often contracted from the inspections themselves.) He did scenes of women playing cards, kissing, lying next to one another in bed. There was then, as there has always been, a market for images of women together, just as there were customers who paid to watch women having sex with each other. These images were owned by Toulouse-Lautrec’s friends and by private collectors.
In the late nineteenth century, the men and women who worked in the sex trade lived in the worst slums on the outskirts of Paris; they had been almost forcibly relocated when Baron Haussmann and Napoleon III redrew the streets of the city and separated the social classes. It was fashionable to go to Montmartre and mix with the lower orders: the upper classes were thrilled by vice, and the middle classes had been largely persuaded by reform movements that prostitutes weren’t criminals but rather—more patronizing, but less violent—victims of social forces. Toulouse-Lautrec loved the flagrance of Montmartre; for the people and places of that neighborhood he had what he called his furias, his obsessions. He was almost compulsive about redrawing the same model, the same nightclub, the same line, again and again. The women in the brothels must have trusted him and been able to forget that he was there, which would surely never have happened to a count a foot taller. Lautrec seemed to appreciate and resent that his models were so undisplaced by his attention. Sometimes he gave his subjects the harsh features of caricature, though the women on the sofa remain individual. His images have a slightly cold documentary quality, as if he found the world of Montmartre bracing. You wonder if he was a person who needed, in the course of his brief life, more and more brutal shocks to his system in order to maintain his faculty of perception.
It would be interesting to know how he made class distinctions between himself and his models, if he thought of them as working for him or with him. He could be quite cruel to women who served him. One of his close friends, the art patron Misia Natanson, recalled a dinner in a restaurant to which Tou-louse-Lautrec came stinking drunk. He immediately began to torture a new serving girl, pawing her and tearing at her clothes until he tore them off her. At which point the manager of the restaurant fired the young woman and Toulouse-Lautrec went into the next room and fell asleep.
This behavior seems in almost studied contrast to the way he worshipped his religious, class-obsessed mother, who supported him through years of dissipation and, when he was in the last stages of what scholars are pretty sure was syphilis, pleaded with him to come home. He arrived two weeks before he died; he was thirty-six. With his mother he had the most sustained relationship of his life. She watched over him during his many childhood illnesses, anxiously carting him to endless spas and to the various family mansions whose rooms were often the limits of his world. In the late 1890s, Toulouse-Lautrec had a serious delusional episode probably brought on by advanced alcoholism. His mother, who had been living near him in Paris, fled the scene and had their housekeeper send reports; she eventually returned and put her son into a mental institution, where he stayed some months. Lautrec often painted his mother in white, looking serene and distant and a little melancholy.
The paintings of his mother and those of the femmes seem easily separated: the Madonna and the whore, the upper-class woman in white, the working-class woman in no clothes at all. But in fact Toulouse-Lautrec found vitality in both the upper and lower classes; his real enemy was the stodginess he associated with the middle class. He explained why he painted the women in the brothels in a letter to a friend of his: “professional models always look so stuffed, the women there are alive.” Old allegiances remain between the nobility and certain members of the working class. The femmes were not as far from his family as it might seem.
If you imagine walking over there with him, helping him to stay upright on the slick cobblestones on a rainy night, both of you sliding as you walked, a little bit drunk in your soft dark suits, you start to have a recognizable feeling of anticipation. Close off the parlor; we’re all staying home to sketch today. A legal house would be fairly bright: you might even be able to see the women through the rain-streaked windows, the gas lanterns giving a greenish glow to their faces. You would look at him, at his crooked legs and his cane, his brown eyes sparkling under the derby hat he always wore, and catch yourself thinking that these women are alive, and not just in contrast to the people you know. They’re alive in some familiar way, and you suspect that if you could be there with them, you’d feel alive, too.
Several years after I had first seen The Sofa, I encountered it again, now displayed in the permanent collection at the Met. I read the new card next to the painting, which tactfully identifies the two women as “a lesbian couple.” The doorless green room seemed suddenly intimate. I thought the women might even be talking. I felt I had failed as a viewer. I went back, obsessively, trying to understand why I hadn’ t seen it.
When I looked at the painting, I had the feeling that something violent had happened or was about to happen. I found out that the woman in the front was called La Gabrielle; she was also in Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawings of medical inspection lines. It’s not clear from the record whether she was a prostitute or a model, but she wasn’t an ordinary studio model. In my mind she became a woman who had seen brutality, and who could talk about it, lying on the sofa next to her lover, the woman with the red hair. I took a friend to look at The Sofa, a friend with a very good eye and uniquely reliable judgment. I said that I thought the painting held brutality behind the conversation. He said he did not think it was brutal, nor did he think it was a conversation. “The woman in front,” he said, “is asleep.”
I’ve been back to look several times, and she might be asleep or she might just be resting, but though her head is inclined ever so slightly toward the woman with the red hair, it’s quite clear that they’re not talking. I can only say what’s probably been obvious to you for some time: this painting is extremely difficult for me to see.
Every time I go to look at it, it’s bigger than I remembered. Much bigger. I remember it as eight inches by twelve, but it’s two feet by nearly three. I remember it as intense and raw and explosive. It’s large and loose; the women on the green sofa are exhausted. I stand in front of it, and it becomes a Veronese: a wall, a ceiling, a church could not contain this painting.
At first I had trouble remembering, but I was eventually able to reconstruct what had been happening to me at the time when I first saw The Sofa. A woman, whom I had loved very much, had left me, very abruptly. My clearest memory of that period is of a sensation of weight in my legs that made it physically hard to stand up. I was lonely and humiliated, and I felt uncertain of myself. Since that time, my relationships have mostly been with men, and sometimes I worry about that. I have always gone back and forth between having lovers who were men and ones who were women, but now I worry that I may be somehow hiding from myself, and that what I am hiding from is revealed by my inability to see The Sofa.
Perhaps to prove to myself that I was up to this kind of looking, I went scavenging through the Met searching for paintings of women talking, of women together, of lovers in bed. There aren’t any. There are some paintings of women together: Vermeer’s women and their maids; Degas’s women in milliner’s shops; and depictions of a scene I’ve often thought had lesbian overtones, The Visitation, where Elizabeth comes to see Mary. But there are no women who do not care about anything except the woman next to them. The Sofa is, almost singularly in my experience, a portrait of two women together, in a sexually ambiguous way, that might be intended for me. It might be a portrait of me, it might be meant to arouse me. It might have been painted for my private collection, if I had one. There is probably no other painting in the Metropolitan Museum with as full an awareness of my existence. It seemed to me that the source of my discomfort was the shock of being known.
But the more I went back, the more confused I felt. I wasn’t physically attracted to these women—I didn’t want to sleep with them the way I want to sleep with a Matisse nude or a Rodin. And, in fact, it doesn’t bother me that I want to sleep with Matisse’s nudes. I started to think that I had allowed some of my anxieties to distract me from others. The problem isn’t, or isn’t only, that the painting knows of my existence; the problem is that the women don’t. They don’t want me.
Toulouse-Lautrec was no stranger to rejection. In the entire voluminous Toulouse-Lautrec record and correspondence, there is but one scrawled note that suggests that he might have spent a single night with a lover whom he did not pay. She wrote to him, in fairly ungrammatical French, apologizing for missing their rendezvous and suggesting they spend the night together, but there are no other notes. The Frey biography mentions that, if a woman friend would agree, Lautrec would spend an hour kissing and smelling her hand, tasting it, looking at it, rubbing it against his face. He was obsessed with women; his feeling that he could never really be with them was fundamental to his way of seeing. You can see his loneliness in The Sofa; it’s in the face of the woman with the red hair. She is looking at her lover with an expression distinguished by its complexity and its absolute privacy—it’s a look that you never see in a painting, because it is impossible, because it can only happen if no one is watching. Seeing this secret intimacy may give you pleasure, or it may make you feel unutterably lonely, but it is clear that, in the world of this painting, you have ceased to exist.
When I stand in front of The Sofa, I sometimes feel a great tenderness for these two women, but more often I feel like a child, panicking. In the 1880s, a new law had been passed allowing women to be customers in the brothels. Like men, women could pay to have sex or to watch. Desire for a painting or a statue of a naked woman is pleasurable, sometimes even easy to feel. But watching, watching lovers together, is forbidden and frightening and irresistible. I go to look at The Sofa. It’s bigger than I remembered.
On at least five occasions, Toulouse-Lautrec moved into a brothel. He had his business meetings at the maisons, and he gave out their addresses as his own. He used to eat breakfast with the women, play cards with them in the afternoons, and sometimes take them out to dinner. In one establishment, the madam had sixteen of the women sit for portraits with Lautrec. Some scholars speak of his residencies as sociological research, others think he did it to break away from his overbearing family. There are those who think it was a humorous incident, and those who see in it the key to his debauchery and decline.
I think it was something else, something much closer to the reason I go to the Met every Friday night. I think it was a way of going home. In a museum, especially one on the scale of the Met, you are like a child in a marvelous mansion. You are like a dwarf in a brothel, treated as a child, comforted by the presence of women, enveloped in a suggestive atmosphere. Your house is safe as long as you do not one day round a corner, open a door, and inadvertently stumble on your parents having sex, on the fact of your own exclusion, on a scene so violent you are sure someone is getting killed, on a rejection so painful that you will lose all memory of it. You will probably never see the actual scene in your mind again, but you may edge up near it, though not too near. If, one day, painting the women in a brothel, or looking at a painting of them in a museum, this forgotten scene is what you experience, well, then, perhaps it is not so surprising if you can’t see it very well at all.
If you should happen to go to the Met some Friday night, and have the time, go and look at The Sofa. Go up the main central staircase, turn left and walk past the drawings and the photographs, go into the European hall draped with paintings by Delacroix, Munch, and Puvis de Chavannes, but do not look at any of these: they will distract you from your purpose. Enter the galleries when you see the Manets. Turn right and walk, purposefully, past the Renoirs, past the Monet landscapes, keeping your head down so as not to get visually confused; nod at the guards, try to indicate that you are not crazy for passing so much beauty. You will know you are approaching it when you see through the door that there are Seurat paintings on the far wall. Enter, at last, into the room that you seek. Turn to your left, walk forward five or six paces, and look up.
Then, if you are lucky, you may be able to see it. It will be bigger than you expected, but a good size, not overwhelming. The green will be harsh, but it ought to be: it’s the landscape; what matters is the figure. This time, the twist in the mouth of the woman in the blue chemise with the red hair will seem wry with experience but not unpleasant, and her expression will be almost tender in its concentration, as she looks at the woman lying before her, her lover, who might be asleep.
You may find yourself tracing the long, slow line—emphasized here in purple, here in cobalt blue, here in brown—that edges the two women. Divided as it passes in and out around their hair and faces, it meets where their shoulders and breasts lean against each other, and ripples all the way down between their bodies to their black stockings, where it lingers for a moment, hesitating over the orange-red monogram, before it trails out of the painting and disappears. You will feel compelled by the line; your eye will travel again and again from the face of the woman with the orange-red hair all the way down to Toulouse-Lautrec’s monogram stamped in that same color in the bottom left corner.
It looks like his monogram, but you’ll wonder if it isn’t really his face, the little caricature with which he sometimes signed his work. What’s here for you in this painting is his self-portrait—the dwarf, the aristocrat, the child who could never grow up—low down, in the corner, disguised as five orange lines. He is standing there, looking up. It’s him, it’s any of us. We are all standing in an orange circle in the lower left corner of a cardboard painting looking up at the face of a woman who is looking at her lover, and doesn’t know we’re there.
Rachel Cohen, who appears frequently in The Threepenny Review, also writes for McSweeney’s and Parnassus. She lives in Brooklyn.
