HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC (1864-1901) BABYLONE D'ALLEMAGNE. 1894. 481/4x331/4 inches. Chaix, Paris. Condition A: minor restoration in margins; creases in image. The design and printing of the poster for Babylone d'Allemagne was partly an inside joke and partly an international scandal. The poster is advertising a book written by Lautrec's friend Victor Joze. The two had worked together before, in 1892, when Lautrec designed Reine de Joie, another book written by Joze. That earlier poster resulted in a huge scandal when Baron Rothschild tried to have the poster and the book suppressed, believing (incorrectly) that the caricature in the poster was supposed to be him. Two years later Joze approached Lautrec again to help promote his latest work, The German Babylon, exposing the decadence of the Berlin aristocracy. The poster is one of Lautrec's most elaborate compositions composed of two opposing diagonals. The first is the line formed by the ascending cavalry parade, with handsome young officer astride his mount. The second diagonal is formed between the hirsute sentinel and a passing bourgeois couple, the woman is casting her glance at the blonde rider. The white haunches of the horse (the paper itself en reserve) are outlined in Lautrec's favored, olive green color, and the space attract the viewer's eye. He also uses the green color, in crachis, in the background. The typography is carefully organized not to impose upon the image itself. When Joze saw the finished poster, with the prominently displayed horse's backside and the unattractive German guard (allegedly a caricature of the Kaiser), he felt that it was too dangerous to post all over town, and that there might be some political backlash against it. Lautrec had obviously anticipated his friend's concern, and to thwart any plans to squelch the image, had paid for the printing and the distribution of the poster by himself. Adriani p. 96, Delteil 351 II, DFP II 832.
