TOULOUSE-LAUTREC AT THE TATE .sx Vigour and Decay .sx By David Sylvester .sx An exhibition of paintings and drawings by Toulouse-Lautrec , organised by the Arts Council , opened at the Tate Gallery on Friday .sx LAUTREC'S liking for whores and dancers and singers and acrobats as subjects was , of course , a perfectly commonplace taste among artists of his time .sx What is singular about his use of them is that no other artist , of his time or any other , has painted them so directly , intimately and pertinently .sx He doesn't , on the one hand , use them as symbols , pegs for a moral or aesthetic attitude , as the young Picasso does ( to take one example among many ) ; and on the other hand , he doesn't use them only for the way they look , like Degas , whose dancers are more or less interchangeable with his laundrywomen- the same breed with a different set of gestures .sx He is concerned with them as they are and also for what they are .sx The artist and his obsessions .sx This can't be explained away by his extreme personal involvement with them .sx Artists don't necessarily bring the deepest obsessions of their life into their art- not in a direct way .sx A poet who is drunk doesn't necessarily write Odes to Bacchus .sx A painter who loves whores doesn't have to paint whores in order to express in art what it is in himself that makes him love them .sx He may be able to express this better by painting duchesses or cats or velvet-curtained rooms .sx In painting whores and entertainers , Lautrec was choosing to paint those whose body is their fortune .sx His own body was his misfortune .sx He must have felt this all the more poignantly for not having been a cripple from birth , but from an age , fourteen , by which he had acquired some relish in using his body , in riding and shooting .sx He must have suffered not only from knowing what a monster he was to look at , but also from the uselessness to himself of his distorted body .sx This perhaps is what gave him a fascination with bodies that were agile , bodies that could do what was asked of them , and bodies that others wanted to use .sx At the same time , he needed to reassure himself about his own deformity with his consciousness that these bodies also would in time become , as his had , useless and hideous and unwanted , and that they would become so through the very exploitation of their desirability .sx Lautrec's vision of his women is , I think , the outcome of some such ambivalence as this :sx on the one hand , celebration of their easy animal vigour and grace ; on the other , celebration of the knowledge that they too would fall into decrepitude .sx For it is not a present state of decay that Lautrec presents as a rule , but only an intimation of decay .sx Partaking of vitality .sx He isn't at all Swiftian about women :sx he doesn't , getting close , rejoice in recoiling from their enlarged pores .sx He paints them as desirable- not glamourised , but desirable as women are in the flesh .sx His women are excitingly depraved , but they aren't sick , they are anything but sick ; they convey a terrific sense of well-being .sx And they are drawn with a longing to share in that well-being , as if the painter , by transmitting to canvas the tautness and flexibility and plasticity of their limbs , were by this somehow partaking of their vitality .sx He is no moralist , then ; he doesn't use art as a means of revenge .sx He is no Expressionist , inflicting ( like those Central European artists who have borrowed from his style and iconography ) upon the appearance of his whores an idea of their inner corruption , making their bodies reflect the supposed state of their souls .sx He paints them in all their ambiguity .sx He paints the presence of their beautiful vitality , the promise of their decay , the process of transition between them .sx The artist he resembles most closely in spirit is , I think , Watteau .sx Watteau , dangerously delicate in health , paints a world of pleasure in which the threat of death is as surely present as in those medieval images in which skeletons dance among the ladies of the court .sx Lautrec , misshapen and useless , paints the agile and usable bodies of women who are well aware that they are on the way to being used-up .sx The transience of youth is the common theme , and Lautrec as much as Watteau is a truly tragic artist in that he communicates not only the certainty of loss but the sense of how much there is to lose .sx The Arts Council show of paintings and drawings at the Tate is not a major exhibition .sx It consists of a selection of works from the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum at Albi , France , plus a score of things from other collections in France and England .sx The Albi contribution , helped by Mr. Jeffress's portrait of Emile Bernard , makes the representation of the early work as strong as could be wished :sx it shows how his art was based on a wonderfully sure grasp of form in the round .sx There are a number of notable drawings and sketches .sx But of his finest paintings there are no more than a handful .sx AT THE GALLERIES .sx Brave New Age of Bronze .sx By NEVILE WALLIS .sx RODIN'S ghost will not be laid .sx It is that old master's energy and rugged form , rather than his aspirations , which have influenced two of the three conspicuous sculptors this week :sx Ralph Brown ( Leicester Galleries ) and the American Jack Zajac ( Roland , Browse's) .sx Ralph Brown began as a social realist sculptor infusing tenderness into a gawky mother fondling a child , an infant bowling a hoop .sx His responsiveness to the earthy human being , often in turning or more lively movement , is well seen in the swing of an adolescent girl and in some fine figure drawings .sx But recently his sculptural conceptions , carried out in ciment fondu for bronze , have become more complex .sx His search now is for a metaphor for the human figure .sx Preserving the human attributes in out-thrust scrawny limbs and references to the ribbed torso , his images also resemble the growth of trees .sx Thus his forms have become bunched , with knobbly casing and clefts hard to read anatomically , and with lean stumpy extremities .sx THIS WORKS well in the more fluid forms of his swimmers where the whole emphasis is on their gliding motion or contortions .sx It doesn't work , I think , in the arbitrary protrusions of the trunks of his humanistic standing figures .sx Henry Moore's stylisation is entirely consistent when one recognises that the twist of a worn ridged pebble has suggested the bony structure of a figure as timeless .sx Brown's distortions , on the other hand , seem superimposed on the anatomical structure of his statue of a man with a child on his shoulders , whose first impression of brute strength yields to a sense of uncertain architecture and even pretentiousness .sx The search for a synthesis , a metaphor for tough masculinity , continues .sx Brown is happiest here in recent reliefs as sensitive as the shapes of his swimmers surfacing .sx Whereas Brown gropes ambitiously and often clumsily , Jack Zajac seems perfectly assured .sx This young sculptor from Ohio has worked in Rome , and the exuberant baroque of his prancing hybrid figures is as clearly Italianate as his rugged porters are Rodinesque .sx Italy has moulded the elegance of his bronze forms , elegantly mannered even when the theme is as violent as a sacrificial goat trapped by a stake .sx The volumes and agitated silhouettes in this Easter Goat series are always expressive .sx The drama of imminent death reaches its climax in the cruciform design of the beast with rearing neck and spreadeagled legs against the long goad .sx One admires the inventive interplay of hard , tusky forms and vulnerable belly without being in the least moved by the torture .sx Aplomb is a cooling quality .sx MORE mature than either , with a certainty of architectonic design still denied to Brown , F. E. McWilliam held me longest with his recent bronzes sparely arranged at Waddington's galleries .sx I was quite unsympathetic to his earlier surrealist figures , dismembered and reassembled , their capriciousness masking for me the reflectiveness of his mind .sx From these carvings he moved on to metal totem figures , two of these aloof , highly wrought effigies standing here as a reminder of them .sx His more recent shield-like emblems or icons yield their dark spell without the demonstrativeness of Paolozzi's encrusted objects .sx They are deliberately frontal in aspect .sx Their intricately textured and symbolic relief sometimes appears positive on the front , negative on the back surface .sx The mood is equivocal , more capricious in small variations of cult objects , contemplative in his large bronzes .sx McWilliam may be unconscious of the distinction , for his appeal is to different levels of consciousness .sx A trinity of figures communes in the hollow of a great saucer .sx A beacon seen on the shore becomes transfigured into an ominous signal-cum-lookout post .sx A Corinthian helmet inspires an exploration of hollow form , with the inscrutable menace of the visor still preserved .sx His personality is impressed on every delphic image .sx How it is that Celtic mystery and individual beauty can coalesce in a flaky , metal shield on prongs is hard to say in simple terms .sx It is simplest to say that McWilliam's restless fancy has found fulfilment in his most satisfying sculptures to date .sx The Supremacy of Personality .sx THE CHARACTERS OF LOVE .sx By John Bayley .sx ( Constable .sx 21s .sx ) .sx By PHILIP TOYNBEE .sx THE ambiguous title reveals , by the end of this book , a depth of meaning .sx " Love , " writes Mr. Bayley , " is the potentiality of men and women which keeps them most interested in each other .sx " And later , writing of his reasons for choosing " Troilus and Criseyde , " " Othello " and " The Golden Bowl " to illustrate his thesis , he has this to say :sx - Their achievement becomes more impressive and their status more clear if we realise how decisive in all of them is the idea of a conflict of sympathies , the kind of conflict which can only be set up by an opposition of characters of the old kind .sx In a sense the theme of love is secondary to Mr. Bayley's main purpose , which is to vindicate his faith in " the supremacy of personality in the greatest literature .sx " It is a theme , of course , which is extremely familiar .sx Countless old Dickensian hacks have been bemoaning Pickwick and Micawber ever since novelists and critics first began their resolute march in a different direction .sx But the point about Mr. Bayley's book , which makes it , I believe , a critical work of the first importance , is that he is a man of great intelligence and deep reading who is very well aware of all the arguments which have been used against his position .sx He is , in the literal sense , a reactionary ; and he is reacting with passion and intellect against some of the principal assumptions of modern criticism and modern fictional practice .sx IT IS impossible to summarise the long chapters in which Mr. Bayley has investigated the chosen illustrations of his theme .sx I shall allow him , where possible , to speak for himself .sx Of Chaucer's poem and its origins he has this to say :sx - All these [qualities in Boccaccio] Chaucer modifies in some way , throwing round them a haze of the atypical and the individual .sx Whereas everything in Boccaccio is hard , elegant and general , in Chaucer it is muted , peculiar , full of objects that are unexpected and yet oddly characteristic .sx " Othello , " for Mr. Bayley , " has a subtle and singular function , unique among Shakespeare's plays , and in its peculiar blend of effect reminds us .sx . of the novel .sx " And against the many hostile critics of the play he suggests that they have adopted the false premise of supposing " that the great play should be impersonal , that the quirks and undercurrents of individual psychology should be swallowed up in a grand tragic generality .sx " As for " The Golden Bowl , " among many other personalising qualities which he finds in it , Mr. Bayley praises the novel because :sx - Not only are the details of personal appearance and of town and country landscape selected with a vividness and subtlety unmatched in the James canon , but the physical nature of life is recorded with unique emphasis .sx