but lautrec's great early influence was the work of edgar degas. s a wonderful anecdote about how, after dinner one evening, he took some friends for what he called a dessert and took them to a friend's apartment where he showed them a painting by degas. what degas stood for was a kind of sophisticated naturalism in painting. degas, in the 1870s, had used cut-off figures, steep angled perspectives, and other devices to give a dramatic sense of immediacy in a way of representing the modern world. lautrec borrowed those kinds of devices for his work. (narrator) the lessons degas offered in a work like in a café-- off-center compositions and cropped figures observed in the real world-- would emerge in lautrec's art. but he reached beyond the frontiers of naturalism and moved into more expressive territory. as he grew into his own style, you see a greater difference between lautrec and degas. and one way you see that especially is that toulouse-lautrec always seems to have a greater emotional intimacy, i'd say, with his models. there's always more of an

edgar degas, in particular, explored places like these with an extraordinary variety of techniques, increasingly pastel as a means of combining color with drawing. [woman singing in french] in the way he arranged his compositions, degas looked to the example of the japanese color print, whose customary viewpoints and cutoff compositions suggested ways of presenting his vision of the modern world. pierre auguste renoir painted a far more involved and festive vision of the era. the forms of the figures dissolved into a play of patches of warm and cool color, which suggest the fall of sunlight through the trees. by this focus on the surface of appearances, renoir treats the modern world as a spectacle, rather than creating the sort of moral narrative favored by academic artists. of this study, nude in sunlight, a newspaper critic said, "someone kindly explain to monsieur renoir "that a woman's torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh "with the green and purplish b blotches that indicate a state of putrefaction in a corpse." his la loge was shown at the first impressionist exhibition in 1874. this e