The Moulin Rouge, a dance hall in late 19th-century Paris, has been depicted in more than one film. I feel compelled to add "and sensationalised". But looking at the way the nightclub's famous habitué Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed the fin-de-siècle denizens of nocturnal Montmartre, it's clear that film-makers have been sanitising the story. Neither Baz Luhrmann nor John Huston came anywhere near the true wildness and strangeness of the real Moulin Rouge.
You can see the original, raw reality of Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge in an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, which closes on 18 September 2011. Summer visitors to London should put it on their itinerary, especially as the £6 admission also gets you into this gallery's small-but-exquisite collection of artistic masterpieces, which includes Manet's highly relevant A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.
The exhibition concentrates on the sickly southern-aristocrat painter's friendship with a thin, nervous dancer called Jane Avril. Hospitalised for mental illness as a teenager, Avril was mocked by some as a crazy dancer whose legs spun all over the stage while her face remained a mask of misery. But in Toulouse-Lautrec's portraits and posters, she is at once intensely lonely, mysterious and – blatantly – his object of desire. The bony beauty of Avril blazes eerily in his supercharged vision. The power of Toulouse-Lautrec is that the more seedy and unglamorous he makes places and people look (for he is a savage realist, and faces in his pictures are waxen with pain) … the sexier it all is.
