As we have seen, Toulouse-Lautrec was a great innovator in the world of art, in terms of both technique and subject matter.But we should not forget that Lautrec was fundamentally a child of the modern age.Perhaps that was even one of his greatest strengths: his ability, unlike so many of his contemporaries, to capture the changes happening all around him and grasp their revolutionary importance. Today, when we think of Lautrec's depictions of Montmartre cafes and cabarets, we run the risk of seeing them as trite stereotypes, forgetting that in their own time they were avant-garde. Let's consider the example of the Can-Can, today almost synonymous with "Frenchness". Although its exact origins are unclear, what is well documented is how scandalous it was: a dance that involved vigorously kicking one's legs skyward, making skirts and petticoats fly all over, and performing splits and cartwheels was considered highly immoral - especially because at the time, women's undergarments had no crotch, so lifting one's legs could show off quite a bit more than mere lingerie. The public reaction to the Can-Can was comparable to the mid-20th century outrage over rock and roll, embodied by the sensual pelvic thrusts of Elvis Presley. And if even that seems too distant a past, we might do well to reflect on the social value of these nightclubs and cabarets.They were much more than simple entertainment venues: they became genuine spaces for the co-mingling of social classes, of the sexes, and of high art with popular culture, in a way not unlike the nightclubs of New York in the 1970s and 1980s or Berlin in the 1990s and 2000s.What we know today as "club culture" had an older cousin a century ago, in Toulouse-Lautrec's Paris. These venues were also at the cutting edge of technology: many of them were illuminated by electric lights, invented just ten years earlier. Fascinated by their novelty, Lautrec eagerly depicted them in his works: yellow globes of various sizes often appear in his paintings. To make them even more luminous, Lautrec sprinkled them with gold dust, a technique he surely learned from his explorations of Japanese prints. Lautrec's Paris was at once the city of the wide boulevards recently redesigned by Haussmann, and the one still smoldering with anarchy in the wake of the violent suppression of the Paris Commune. A city where photography and film were entering people's daily lives. Most of all, the city of the two World's Fairs, in 1889 and 1900, which not only gifted the city a symbol like the Eiffel Tower but inundated it with the very latest developments in science and technology.