Scarlet Letters?
Keeping Company with Toulouse-Lautrec in the Red Light District

Molly Borowitz, Princeton Class of 2009

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s first color poster, Moulin Rouge – La Goulue (1891), has become an icon of Parisian nightlife in the late nineteenth century. It advertises a high-kicking cabaret dancer entertaining a crowd of people with her slender legs, rustling petticoats, and impressive maneuvers. The name Moulin Rouge is visible four times on the lithographed paper in brilliant scarlet letters that evoke the famous red windmill of Montmartre. The clear crimson text cuts through the hazy background, glowing incandescently above the silhouetted crowd that watches the dancer. She, too, is infused with red: the color is visible in her blouse and her stockings, and her petticoats seem to reflect the smoldering light emanating from the scarlet text surrounding her. The prominent presence of red is an effective advertisement for the Moulin Rouge, as it seems likely that Toulouse-Lautrec is manipulating the Parisian public’s associations of the color red with both the nightclub’s name and its iconic red windmill.

Yet the red lights glowing through Moulin Rouge – La Goulue illuminate a deeper, more highly-charged explanation for Toulouse-Lautrec’s advertising tactics. Underneath any superficial associations viewers might have between the color red and the Moulin Rouge’s familiar red windmill, the crimson color represents a darker truth: la ceinture rouge, or “the red belt,” of Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec’s Montmartre was not the cheerful, flourishing artistic community we envision today, but rather a poverty-stricken, prostitution-ridden neighborhood in which sex was a common trade (Frey 185). Moreover, his first poster hints provocatively at the nature of the inhabitants of la ceinture rouge by depicting a woman shamelessly exposing herself for money. Performances by the Moulin Rouge dancers often included the women kicking men’s top hats off their heads and flashing their underwear at the audience (Frey 191). To Toulouse-Lautrec, these evocative maneuvers performed for a fee perfectly represented the scarlet world of prostitution. Yet, significantly, the scarlet ink transforms in meaning from 1891, when Moulin Rouge – La Goulue was first released, to 1899, the date of his final poster. The color is always a signal of sexuality, used to highlight sexual entities or symbols, but as the decade progresses, Toulouse-Lautrec’s associations with red shift from an illumination of prostitution in general to a more specific emphasis on the sexual behaviors of other Montmartrois artists. The color choice ultimately reveals his feelings of frustration with his life in Montmartre. After being confronted in late 1892 with his family’s disapproving attitude toward his sexually active lifestyle, he uses red to draw attention to the sexual aspects of individual members of Montmartre’s artistic community in an attempt to justify the sexual content of his own life and art.

The Exhibit
redheads and the moulin rouge
prostitution in posters: reine de joie
a need for self-justification
incriminating montmartre: bruant and may milton
the implication continues: sescau and jane avril
the eternal moulin rouge?
works cited
about the author

The (Poster) Gallery
what about toulouse-lautrec's other posters?
who else made posters?
how were posters made?
how have posters changed?

IMAGE
Moulin Rouge – La Goulue. 1891. The Posters of Toulouse-Lautrec. Andre Sauret. Monte-Carlo, France: Andre Sauret, 1966. Plate I.