Toulouse-Lautrec at the Tate . vigour and decay . by David Sylvester . an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Toulouse-Lautrec , organised by the arts council , opened at the Tate Gallery on Friday . Lautrec &apos;s liking for whores and dancers and singers and acrobats as subjects was , of course , a perfectly commonplace taste among artists of his time . what is singular about his use of them is that no other artist , of his time or any other , has painted them so directly , intimately and pertinently . he does n&apos;t , on the one hand , use them as symbols , pegs for a moral or aesthetic attitude , as the young Picasso does ( to take one example among many ) ; and on the other hand , he does n&apos;t use them only for the way they look , like Degas , whose dancers are more or less interchangeable with his laundrywomen - the same breed with a different set of gestures . he is concerned with them as they are and also for what they are . the artist and his obsessions . this can n&apos;t be explained away by his extreme personal involvement with them . artists do n&apos;t necessarily bring the deepest obsessions of their life into their art - not in a direct way . a poet who is drunk does n&apos;t necessarily write odes to Bacchus . a painter who loves whores does n&apos;t have to paint whores in order to express in art what it is in himself that makes him love them . he may be able to express this better by painting duchesses or cats or velvet-curtained rooms . in painting whores and entertainers , Lautrec was choosing to paint those whose body is their fortune . his own body was his misfortune . he must have felt this all the more poignantly for not having been a cripple from birth , but from an age , fourteen , by which he had acquired some relish in using his body , in riding and shooting . he must have suffered not only from knowing what a monster he was to look at , but also from the uselessness to himself of his distorted body . this perhaps is what gave him a fascination with bodies that were agile , bodies that could do what was asked of them , and bodies that others wanted to use . at the same time , he needed to reassure himself about his own deformity with his consciousness that these bodies also would in time become , as his had , useless and hideous and unwanted , and that they would become so through the very exploitation of their desirability . Lautrec &apos;s vision of his women is , I think , the outcome of some such ambivalence as this : on the one hand , celebration of their easy animal vigour and grace ; on the other , celebration of the knowledge that they too would fall into decrepitude . for it is not a present state of decay that Lautrec presents as a rule , but only an intimation of decay . partaking of vitality . he is n&apos;t at all Swiftian about women : he does n&apos;t , getting close , rejoice in recoiling from their enlarged pores . he paints them as desirable - not glamourised , but desirable as women are in the flesh . his women are excitingly depraved , but they are n&apos;t sick , they are anything but sick ; they convey a terrific sense of well-being . and they are drawn with a longing to share in that well-being , as if the painter , by transmitting to canvas the tautness and flexibility and plasticity of their limbs , were by this somehow partaking of their vitality . he is no moralist , then ; he does n&apos;t use art as a means of revenge . he is no expressionist , inflicting ( like those central European artists who have borrowed from his style and iconography ) upon the appearance of his whores an idea of their inner corruption , making their bodies reflect the supposed state of their souls . he paints them in all their ambiguity . he paints the presence of their beautiful vitality , the promise of their decay , the process of transition between them . the artist he resembles most closely in spirit is , I think , Watteau . Watteau , dangerously delicate in health , paints a world of pleasure in which the threat of death is as surely present as in those medieval images in which skeletons dance among the ladies of the court . Lautrec , misshapen and useless , paints the agile and usable bodies of women who are well aware that they are on the way to being used-up . the transience of youth is the common theme , and Lautrec as much as Watteau is a truly tragic artist in that he communicates not only the certainty of loss but the sense of how much there is to lose . the arts council show of paintings and drawings at the Tate is not a major exhibition . it consists of a selection of works from the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum at Albi , France , plus a score of things from other collections in France and England . the Albi contribution , helped by Mr Jeffress &apos;s portrait of Emile Bernard , makes the representation of the early work as strong as could be wished : it shows how his art was based on a wonderfully sure grasp of form in the round . there are a number of notable drawings and sketches . but of his finest paintings there are no more than a handful . at the galleries . brave new age of bronze . by Nevile Wallis . Rodin &apos;s ghost will not be laid . it is that old master &apos;s energy and rugged form , rather than his aspirations , which have influenced two of the three conspicuous sculptors this week : Ralph Brown ( Leicester Galleries ) and the American Jack Zajac ( Roland , Browse &apos;s ) . Ralph Brown began as a social realist sculptor infusing tenderness into a gawky mother fondling a child , an infant bowling a hoop . his responsiveness to the earthy human being , often in turning or more lively movement , is well seen in the swing of an adolescent girl and in some fine figure drawings . but recently his sculptural conceptions , carried out in ciment fondu for bronze , have become more complex . his search now is for a metaphor for the human figure . preserving the human attributes in out-thrust scrawny limbs and references to the ribbed torso , his images also resemble the growth of trees . thus his forms have become bunched , with knobbly casing and clefts hard to read anatomically , and with lean stumpy extremities . this works well in the more fluid forms of his swimmers where the whole emphasis is on their gliding motion or contortions . it does n&apos;t work , I think , in the arbitrary protrusions of the trunks of his humanistic standing figures . Henry Moore &apos;s stylisation is entirely consistent when one recognises that the twist of a worn ridged pebble has suggested the bony structure of a figure as timeless . Brown &apos;s distortions , on the other hand , seem superimposed on the anatomical structure of his statue of a man with a child on his shoulders , whose first impression of brute strength yields to a sense of uncertain architecture and even pretentiousness . the search for a synthesis , a metaphor for tough masculinity , continues . Brown is happiest here in recent reliefs as sensitive as the shapes of his swimmers surfacing . whereas Brown gropes ambitiously and often clumsily , Jack Zajac seems perfectly assured . this young sculptor from Ohio has worked in Rome , and the exuberant baroque of his prancing hybrid figures is as clearly Italianate as his rugged porters are Rodinesque . Italy has moulded the elegance of his bronze forms , elegantly mannered even when the theme is as violent as a sacrificial goat trapped by a stake . the volumes and agitated silhouettes in this Easter goat series are always expressive . the drama of imminent death reaches its climax in the cruciform design of the beast with rearing neck and spreadeagled legs against the long goad . one admires the inventive interplay of hard , tusky forms and vulnerable belly without being in the least moved by the torture . aplomb is a cooling quality . more mature than either , with a certainty of architectonic design still denied to Brown , F E McWilliam held me longest with his recent bronzes sparely arranged at Waddington &apos;s galleries . I was quite unsympathetic to his earlier surrealist figures , dismembered and reassembled , their capriciousness masking for me the reflectiveness of his mind . from these carvings he moved on to metal totem figures , two of these aloof , highly wrought effigies standing here as a reminder of them . his more recent shield-like emblems or icons yield their dark spell without the demonstrativeness of Paolozzi &apos;s encrusted objects . they are deliberately frontal in aspect . their intricately textured and symbolic relief sometimes appears positive on the front , negative on the back surface . the mood is equivocal , more capricious in small variations of cult objects , contemplative in his large bronzes . McWilliam may be unconscious of the distinction , for his appeal is to different levels of consciousness . a trinity of figures communes in the hollow of a great saucer . a beacon seen on the shore becomes transfigured into an ominous signal-cum-lookout post . a Corinthian helmet inspires an exploration of hollow form , with the inscrutable menace of the visor still preserved . his personality is impressed on every delphic image . how it is that Celtic mystery and individual beauty can coalesce in a flaky , metal shield on prongs is hard to say in simple terms . it is simplest to say that McWilliam &apos;s restless fancy has found fulfilment in his most satisfying sculptures to date . the supremacy of personality . the characters of love . by John Bayley . ( Constable . 21 s ) . by Philip Toynbee . the ambiguous title reveals , by the end of this book , a depth of meaning . love , writes Mr Bayley , is the potentiality of men and women which keeps them most interested in each other . and later , writing of his reasons for choosing Troilus and Criseyde , Othello and the golden bowl to illustrate his thesis , he has this to say : - their achievement becomes more impressive and their status more clear if we realise how decisive in all of them is the idea of a conflict of sympathies , the kind of conflict which can only be set up by an opposition of characters of the old kind . in a sense the theme of love is secondary to Mr Bayley &apos;s main purpose , which is to vindicate his faith in the supremacy of personality in the greatest literature . it is a theme , of course , which is extremely familiar . countless old Dickensian hacks have been bemoaning Pickwick and Micawber ever since novelists and critics first began their resolute march in a different direction . but the point about Mr Bayley &apos;s book , which makes it , I believe , a critical work of the first importance , is that he is a man of great intelligence and deep reading who is very well aware of all the arguments which have been used against his position . he is , in the literal sense , a reactionary ; and he is reacting with passion and intellect against some of the principal assumptions of modern criticism and modern fictional practice . it is impossible to summarise the long chapters in which Mr Bayley has investigated the chosen illustrations of his theme . I shall allow him , where possible , to speak for himself . of Chaucer &apos;s poem and its origins he has this to say : - all these ( qualities in Boccaccio ) Chaucer modifies in some way , throwing round them a haze of the atypical and the individual . whereas everything in Boccaccio is hard , elegant and general , in Chaucer it is muted , peculiar , full of objects that are unexpected and yet oddly characteristic . Othello , for Mr Bayley , has a subtle and singular function , unique among Shakespeare &apos;s plays , and in its peculiar blend of effect reminds us &amp;hellip; of the novel . and against the many hostile critics of the play he suggests that they have adopted the false premise of supposing that the great play should be impersonal , that the quirks and undercurrents of individual psychology should be swallowed up in a grand tragic generality . as for the golden bowl , among many other personalising qualities which he finds in it , Mr Bayley praises the novel because : - not only are the details of personal appearance and of town and country landscape selected with a vividness and subtlety unmatched in the James canon , but the physical nature of life is recorded with unique emphasis . 