Giant Dwarf

THE TRAGIC LIFE OF TOULOUSE-LAUTREC (277 pp.)--Lawrence & Elisabeth Hanson--Random House ($5).

In the 50 years while impressionist art was becoming a common place of the U.S. home, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has passed through all stages in opinion from monster to master.

The Counts of Toulouse ruled Southern France for centuries, but nothing in the life of his heroic forebears became the Toulouses so much as the gallantry with which the disfigured dwarf made of himself a gay, broken blade in Paris. He never developed the cripple's defense mechanism of a sweet nature; instead he swaggered through the world on toddler's legs. He drank big men under tables as high as his proud chin. When he closed his eyes, he experienced the horrors of alcoholic hallucination, but with his eyes open, Count Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec saw with a savage clarity that has forced his special vision of his age on succeeding generations.

Born with a malady that left his bones tragically brittle, Henri crippled himself in a childhood fall. His sporting father, the bewhiskered and kilted Count, was so annoyed that he all but disowned him. But Henri became a living legend in Paris of the '90s. He was a fan of the cycle tracks (making a midget velodrome of his garden paths, on which he pedaled madly with his toy legs), the horse tracks, brothels, Lesbian joints and cafes. Out of frustrated love for the world of theater and action denied him by his deformity, he created the art of the poster, celebrating popular idols in designs exquisitely executed on stone.

Not a great painter, he was a master draftsman. Even in the madhouse, he drew a set of circus pictures with a ringmaster's eye for a false move. His latest biographers (husband-and-wife team of Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson, who have also done Gauguin and Van Gogh) have sketched a watercolor rather than a lithograph. But they are at pains to correct the legend fixed in the moviegoing imagination by Actor Jose Ferrer in Moulin Rouge of pet and amateur pimp to the madams and sporting types of Montmartre. Dwarfed Henri was not a refugee from a name-proud sporting family; he was indeed a proud son of the house of Toulouse, determined to carry his family name into the only field his deformities of mind and body left open to him. To the end he used his stylus like a lance and his mahlstick like a mace.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.