November Issue 2001
The North Carolina Museum Of Art Presents Posters & Prints of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
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Cabarets, bars and bordellos will set the scene for the exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec: Master Of The Moulin Rouge, from the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, from Nov. 11 through Feb. 17, 2002. The show enters the artistic world of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, one of the most fascinating and most distinctive figures of 19th-century French art, and features nearly 50 of his famous images of Parisian nightlife during the 1890s, as well as a complementary selection of 30 posters and prints by his contemporaries.
"Toulouse-Lautrec became a sensation overnight when his first poster hit the streets of Paris," said exhibition curator Joseph Covington, the Museum's director of education. "The subject of Moulin Rouge (La Goulue) , a risque music hall dancer performing a cancan, was provocative for 1891; one critic said he was so struck by the revolutionary image that he ran alongside the cart it was attached to as it raced along the boulevard. While his subject matter may seem less provocative today, the artist's bold use of color and angle of vision even now distinguish these posters as masterpieces."
The appeal of artwork from this period, called the belle époque, continues a century later. The Museum's 1999 Alphonse Mucha exhibition, for example, was a critical and popular success. And the recent film Moulin Rouge captured the public's attention earlier this year.
"Toulouse-Lautrec emerged from a dynamic period of Parisian history and made renowned contributions to art and design," said Museum Director Lawrence J. Wheeler. "We're excited that our visitors will be able to visit turn-of-the-century Paris again this season and experience firsthand the genius of Toulouse-Lautrec. Virtually all of his celebrated posters are represented, thanks to generous loans from the magnificent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art."
Born of an aristocratic family, Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was never in robust health, and as a boy he suffered accidents that impacted his growth. But his frail constitution did not prevent him from venturing to Paris, where he quickly absorbed the examples of the Impressionists before creating his own, unmistakable style. Embracing popular entertainments with abandon in his private life, the young artist pursued the pleasures and performers of cabarets and dance halls into the night. By day, he painted in his Montmartre studio, and by the time of his death at age 36, he had finished over 1,000 paintings, drawings and lithographs - a panoramic view of popular culture in the Paris of the 1890s.
"The two big scandals in Paris in 1889 were the new Eiffel Tower and the cancan dancing at the Moulin Rouge," said Covington. "The Moulin Rouge was the newest, most sensational music hall in the Montmartre section of Paris, which had long been avoided by the proper bourgeois of Paris as a poor and dangerous suburb. Montmartre evolved just at the time of Toulouse-Lautrec's student days into an area that attracted struggling young artists and students because of its cheap rents and less restrictive morals. These bohemians and the nightspots that opened to cater to them attracted not only working class patrons but soon bourgeois and even royalty seeking pleasures forbidden in their own neighborhoods. Shop girls, counter clerks, artists and prostitutes mingled at the Moulin Rouge with counts, dukes and even the Prince of Wales, and in the afternoons and evenings patrons might be entertained by fortune tellers, bellydancers, trained monkeys or even an orchestra hidden inside an enormous elephant left over from the 1889 World's Fair."
Toulouse-Lautrec was the first poster artist to advertise entertainment venues by featuring individual personalities among the performers, including La Goulue ("The Glutton") at Moulin Rouge, Jane Avril (The Bomb) at the Jardin de Paris and Aristide Bruant at the Ambassadeurs. Mademoiselle Cha-U-Kao (Miss Can-Can Chaos) and Valentin the Boneless were also depicted. Unlike other great artists of his day, Toulouse-Lautrec also embraced the production of commercial imagery, and he perfected the use of lithographic printing to raise the art poster to its highest level of achievement - ultimately the finest example of the most modern art form between the Impressionists and Picasso.
"Designing images to be seen from a distance by busy passersby, Toulouse-Lautrec used broad areas of bright color, lively outlines and unexpected points of view," said Covington. "Bruant's bohemian artist uniform is unmistakable in these posters, with his wide-brimmed black hat and black cape, his red muffler and the boots of a sewer workman. Toulouse-Lautrec also created several posters featuring Jane Avril, and a certain stylistic evolution can be seen in these works, from a Degas-inspired cancan scene in an early one to a more Art Nouveau approach in a later design in which she wears a black dress covered by an entwining serpent."
While advertisements for Parisian cabarets and music halls predominate, the exhibition also includes various other images, ranging from ads for bicycle chains to theater programs, and from family scenes to six lithographs from the Elles series that provided glimpses into the private lives of ladies of the evening. Several posters will also be exhibited in different states - with and without lettering, for example - so that visitors can better understand the elaborate print-making process.
In addition to posters, original prints and studies by Toulouse-Lautrec, the exhibition features several works by his contemporaries. Included are posters and lithographs by Edmond Aman-Jean, George Auriol, Pierre Bonnard, Jules Chéret, Maurice Denis, Fernand-Louis Gottlob, Eugène Grasset, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, Gustave-Henri Jussot, Alexandre Lunois, Alphonse Mucha, Alfredo Muller, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Paul Sérusier, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Louis Valtat and Edouard Vuillard.
This exhibition is organized and circulated by The Baltimore Museum of Art. Presenting sponsor for the exhibition is The Liggett Group. Media sponsors are Capitol Broadcasting Company, Inc., "Our State" magazine and Time Warner Cable. Additional support from state funds and private donations is administered by the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation.
For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the museum at 919/839-6262.
The Art Of Lithography And The Genius Of Toulouse-Lautrec
Toulouse-Lautrec secured a significant place in art history because of his distinctive artistic style and through his development of the lithograph as a form of fine art. In addition to presenting well-loved images of French nightlife, the NC Museum of Art's exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec: Master of the Moulin Rouge explores the importance of lithography to the artist's successful career.
"Though lithography, literally stone printing, was invented a century earlier, ToulouseLautrec created the finest works in the medium," said exhibition curator Joseph Covington, the Museum's director of education. "Lithographs allowed images to be reproduced inexpensively, resulting in an explosion of the popular press in Toulouse-Lautrec's time. He and the other artists in the exhibition became famous for their lithographs in journals and art magazines, and collectors could have prints for nominal sums."
In lithographic printing, a drawing is made on a smooth slab of limestone with a grease crayon. Ink is rolled onto the slab, adhering to the oily material that forms the drawing but not to the bare stone. A sheet of paper is pressed onto the inked stone, and when it is lifted, the ink has been transferred onto the paper. The inking and printing process can be repeated many times, allowing the original drawing to be reproduced in multiple copies.
"As long as the original stone and drawing are used, each copy is considered an original work of art," said Covington. "Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs were printed in editions ranging from a handful of copies to, typically, 100 for collector prints or 2,000 for the great posters."
Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs are distinctive for both the quality of the drawing and his uses of color. He exploited the medium's ability to produce large, flat areas of bright colors. Each different color in the composition required that the portion of the design to be printed in that color be drawn onto a separate stone. His color prints often required four stones, one for each primary color plus the dark color of the outline.
"Occasionally, as in the portrait of actress Marcelle Lender, he experimented with as many as eight colors in a print," said Covington. "Even a master of the medium such as Toulouse-Lautrec required close cooperation of a skilled printer to overcome the technical difficulties of the printing process. Toulouse-Lautrec's largest posters, such as his famous Moulin Rouge (La Goulue), had to be printed on two sheets of paper and pasted together, necessitating double the number of stones of smaller prints."
Original lithographs, Covington stressed, should not be confused with later methods of reproduction that are often called lithography but are essentially photographic processes.
Visitors to the exhibition can compare different editions of several of Toulouse-Lautrec's posters printed for collectors before the lettering was added and others that consist of only the first state - the drawing without color. There is also one example of a "remarque," a small drawing added in the final edition that is absent in earlier ones. The artist occasionally added personal "remarques"as a manifestation of his famous sense of humor.
"Toulouse-Lautrec's poster for a friend, the photographer Paul Sescau, contains several allusions to his reputation of pursuing his models for amorous purposes once he got them into the studio," said Covington. "This "remarque" shows a tiny nude woman training a piglet."
For more information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the museum at 919/839-6262 or on the web
at (http://www.ncartmuseum.org).
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