It opened in October 1889 and, according to Le Figaro, quickly attracted a fashionable crowd. The clientele was said to consist of ''les artistes peintres, sculpteurs, litterateurs, danseurs . . . enfin le Tout Paris, joyeux.'' One of those artistes peintres was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who recorded his impressions of Montmartre's newest nightspot in the famous painting Au Moulin Rouge. Exhibit 75 in ''Toulouse- Lautrec'' at the Hayward Gallery, it serves notice that Lautrec was much more than the gifted but essentially superficial celebrant of the late nineteenth-century demi-monde preserved in popular legend.

The painting presents a strangely disorientating vision of a night on the town. The famously nocturnal Lautrec, who included himself in the background, is in his element. But there is no hint that he is happy to be there. He is a pallid figure lurking in the scene's margins, while the interior is itself a weird and disconcerting place, a bad dream made fact. The painting's uneven light - ranging from gloom to abrupt, bright illumination - contributes powerfully to its effects. The faces of Lautrec's subjects are either sunk in a shadowy half-light that enhances the sense (strong here) of premature decrepitude; or they are irradiated by a harsh, artificial light, tinged with green, that gives them the appearance of sinister cosmetic masks.

None of the people here seem to be communicating with one another. Even the odd, truncated woman who stares out from the right edge of the painting - Lautrec often attempted to bridge the fictional world of the painting and the real world of the viewer - looks through or beyond, rather than at us. In a style tuned to the discontinuities of an evening spent in this world, forming and dissolving a multitude of temporary alliances, Lautrec painted an image of seeming...

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