One of my favorite paintings of all time is a small study by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec titled Seule, created in 1896. I first discovered the painting on a postcard when I was 14. Back then, my postcard collection was a carefully curated mini gallery of my own—3x5s of all my favorite artworks blue-taped to the wall. But, when I took this particular postcard home I tucked it into the drawer of my bedside table. She just didn’t fit with the Hokusais or the Rodins. Even John Singer Sargent’s Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, raising a single perfectly arched eyebrow, seemed to scoff at the thought of sharing her wallspace with this picture.
Housed at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, I have never seen the real thing in person. It is a small painting, only about fifteen inches wide and twelve inches tall. The creased sheets of the unmade bed pictured occupy the entire frame, the lines of the bed slashing across the piece diagonally. A figure lies perpendicular with her lower legs hanging off its side. Behind her, the outlines of two pillows are hinted at. The paint was applied to bare cardboard without any grounding—the surface preparation that helps paint adhere to the board—so it wasn’t made with the intent of being preserved. The piece, like the moment depicted within, is ephemeral. Thus, the fibrous texture of the cardboard is visible in the spaces between the sparse brushstrokes, spontaneous and gestural. It captures the air of a moment, rather than carving out its precise details. The image as well as the artifact itself is a suggestion and a provocation.
Broad strokes of white highlight the folds of the bedsheets and of the figure’s dress. Her body is slumped into the bed, almost indiscernible from the creases of the sheets. To the viewer’s left, her legs extend, painted in stark black. The figure’s head is thrown back, her jaw highlighted by a single stroke of white. Her eyes appear to be closed and her lips are pursed in a short line. Her red hair curls up over her forehead and fans out behind her head, stray locks looping over her shoulders. Her right hand rests on her right thigh, just below where the leg and the hip meet, her fingers splayed out, almost dipping between her legs, a tight detail contrasting against the vague folds of her dress.
Seule was done as a preparatory sketch for a lithograph in Toulouse-Lautrec’s series Elles, completed in 1896. In Elles, Toulouse-Lautrec captured intimate moments in the daily lives of women working in a brothel. The word “elles” literally means “them” but is often translated to English as “those women.” I feel there is a bit of nuance lost in that translation. The subjects are set farther away from the viewer by this phrase—Elles feels closer, more appropriately intimate.
The series of twelve lithographs in Elles are indeed intimate, but not erotic. They focus on the mundane aspects of the lives of women: waking up in the morning, brushing their hair, filling a bathtub, etc. Many feature an openly lesbian couple believed to be the French dancer, Cha-U-Kao (her stage name as a Moulin Rouge clown) and her partner, Gabrielle. Many theorize that Toulouse-Lautrec found kinship amongst these women, that he and they connected as outcasts of French society. He was allowed—perhaps even invited—to observe them at length for his artwork.
The very first time I ever masturbated, I laid a towel down on the floor next to my bed. I was worried about making a mess. I was worried about getting caught. I didn’t even know what I was doing or what I was looking for, but I knew I didn’t want anyone to know. But, most importantly, it absolutely couldn’t happen in the sanctity of my bed. I laid a towel on the floor every time I masturbated for years.
I attended an all-girls Catholic school from the time I was 11 until I was 18. Sex ed at our school was always taught by whoever was our religion teacher. If I had to estimate the average age of the religion teachers at that school, I’d say it was somewhere between 80 and 150 years old.
In ninth grade, our sex ed teacher was Ms. Zeller. She wore sandals every day, even in winter, and she carried a huge cylindrical basket on her back instead of a backpack. When she taught sex ed, she put a shoebox at the front of the room that she had covered in purple construction paper and cut a slit at the top of. She told us that if we had any questions we felt too embarrassed to ask out loud then we could write them down and put them in the purple box. At the end of class every week, she would open the box and answer the questions. One week, after spending our entire class period explaining 12 different types of menstrual pads, she pulled a slip of paper out of the box that read, in tiny blue ball-point pen:
“What does an orgasm feel like?”
She read the question out loud and thought for a moment. Less than a minute. I tried to will away the heat that I felt rushing to my face. Classmates scanned the room, looking to see if they could figure out who asked the question and who was paying attention to the answer. Ms. Zeller told us, “if you scrunch all your fingers and toes and hold it for about 10 seconds and then release, that’s kind of what an orgasm feels like.” Glancing down I saw 20 pairs of feet, all wearing the same green knee high socks and black shoes, lift slightly off the floor as we all clenched our toes.
Recently, I looked online at images from Toulouse-Lautrec’s series Elles and found that Seule was actually a study for a lithograph titled Femme sur le dos, Lassitude (Reclining woman, Lassitude), also completed in 1896. When I saw the lithograph, I could hardly believe what had become of the woman in the study. The original work’s spontaneity was absent in this lithograph; the drawing was devoid of the careful and quiet intimacy that had drawn me to Seule in the first place.
Femme sur le dos, Lassitude consists of faint, rough red-brown lines on toned paper. The woman is still lying back on the bed with her legs hanging off the side, but her posture and expression are completely different. Her mouth is upturned and her face is flushed as her hair hangs around her shoulders. Her slip seems to tent up over her and she wears only one black stocking. In the background we can see her discarded dress and feather hat. The entire angle is changed—the viewer is looking in on her from slightly above eye level. But the most grievous difference is in her posture. Her bedsheets are even more rumpled than in the study, and she lays stiffly over top of them. Both of her hands are tucked behind her head. I’m not sure exactly how it happened—if the initial liveliness of the picture was sacrificed through the complex lithography process, or if it was an intentional shift—but I am sure that the final edition scarcely lives up to the study.
In my postcard gallery, I had lots of postcards of the sculptures of Rodin. I loved the drama of the posed figures with bulging muscles and massive hands. I had previously encountered Rodin’s images of women masturbating, which usually read to me as sculptures. The body is used as a material. It’s about angling the legs and carving out the chest and arching the head. The body’s folds and curves are a landscape. The genitals—though almost always centrally located on the page—are lost in smudges of gray charcoal approximately where the pubic area would be.
Klimt and Schiele also come to mind. I taped their postcards near the Rodins. Their masturbating women pose in very similar ways; legs spread, heads thrown back, eyes closed, and fingers buried in blurry scribbles. Looking at Seule alongside these images of people explicitly masturbating, I feel a sense of guilt for assuming that the woman in Toulouse-Lautrec’s Seule is masturbating too. But, I also wish for this to be true. Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Klimt, and Schiele were all experts in looking. Their male gaze— and, to a certain degree, their erotic gaze—is reflected in their work. In contrast, I feel that the framing and the tone of Seule is delicate and careful in a way that distinguishes it from other, more explicit works.
The series Elles was largely considered a “commercial failure” by the publisher, who specialized in erotic art. According to the Museum of Modern Art, this may have been because Toulouse-Lautrec created “not an exotic fantasy, but rather an intimate portrayal of women [he] knew firsthand” Other museum image descriptions of both Seule and Femme sur le dos, Lassitude emphasize the figure’s apparent state of exhaustion or deep relaxation. Although her fatigue is palpable, I am unsatisfied by this characterization. When I look at the painting, I see a woman at peace with a blissful weight to her relaxed muscles. Even her lithographic counterpart depicts a certain dreaminess about her features. To me the tilt of her head and the heaviness of her limbs suggests a profound pleasure. It’s as if she’s clenched her fingers and toes for about ten seconds and is just releasing them.