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www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue5/thedrink.htm |
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Friday, 16 May 2008 |
Absinthe, ‘queen of poisons’
This site from London’s Tate Museum, entitled ‘The Drink that Fuelled a Nation’s Art’, is
dedicated to the famous French beverage, absinthe. It offers a fascinating essay on the
relationship between French 19th- and 20th-century art and the ‘queen of poisons’. The article
is by Jad Adams, author of ‘Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle’, and here he
documents the artists, including Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Van Gogh, who drank
absinthe or displayed it in their paintings.
While most of these artists remained relatively passive flâneurs and only occasional
absinthe drinkers, some immersed themselves in the experience. An official report remarked
that many late 19th-century
Parisian writers and painters, in
their quest for more original and
exquisite ideas, gave themselves up
to ‘the green’ with passion. Among
the most prominent of these was
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who
illustrated the life of the music
halls, the bars, the brothels and, in
particular, the Moulin Rouge. The
disabled aristocrat famously carried
a hollow walking stick which
contained a draught of absinthe,
and was occasionally accompanied
by a pet cormorant he had trained
to drink it!
Poster advertisements of the
period convey the initial product
boost for absinthe and the later
grim warnings before it was finally banned. Among the highlights of the essay are notes on
Degas’ ‘L’Absinthe’, the iconic painting of the period and its hostile reception at Christie’s
auction in 1892. The author’s conclusion about the recently legalised drink remains negative –
see Aleister Crowley’s quote from ‘The Green Goddess’ (1918): “What is there in absinthe
that makes it a separate cult? Even in ruin and in degradation it remains a thing apart: its
victims wear a ghastly aureole all their own, and in their peculiar hell yet gloat with a sinister
perversion of pride that they are not as other men.”
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