Girl with Lovelock

Painted in 1889 and now at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, this work of a girl with a distinctive lovelock hairstyle belongs to Lautrec's habit of closely observing Parisian women's fashion, hair, and physical self-presentation. Hair as a subject held particular interest for him — from the elaborate coiffures of bourgeois women to the loose hair of women at their toilette in his brothel paintings. The Tehran museum, which holds a remarkable collection of European modernist works assembled before 1979, is an unlikely repository for this intimate Parisian observation.

The eponymous lovelock — a carefully arranged curl or ringlet — serves both as a fashionable accessory and a compositional focal point that Lautrec uses to anchor his observation of the girl's appearance. His thin paint technique renders hair with particular sensitivity, the individual strands dissolved into chromatic mass.