Toulouse-Lautrec

This catalogue is the first great Roman retrospective dedicated to Toulouse-Lautrec. The characters in the coffee houses and cabarets of Montmartre, in dance halls and bordellos, at the famous Moulin Rouge, and in circuses and theatres, come to life in rapid brushstrokes and with bitter sadness tell the story of a cross-section of Parisian life between 1880 and 1900.
More than 180 works comprising paintings, watercolours, drawings, etchings, lithographs and posters convey Lautrec's deep and complex human and artistic journey. His work, which was accused of being superficial and a simplistic appeal to the masses, instead reveals great sophistication.
As explained by the editor Julia Frey in her essay, "Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, like his friend Vincent van Gogh, attracted the attention of many people, not only because of his artistic work, but also because of his personal life. Not only was he an aristocrat who was strongly tied to an eccentric and ultra-conservative family, but he was also affected by a physical handicap - a form of dwarfism due to his parent's blood relationship. He chose to live among other artists, prostitutes and freaks that were his models for equally controversial works of art. Lautrec has become a paradigm for an entire era in French history, the Belle Époque, expressing the essence and effervescence of Paris in the 1890s. Admiring the works of Lautrec is like visiting his private world, a world of contradictory images and characters, made up of aristocrats and clowns, sportsmen and cancan ballerinas, bordellos and cafés... In the portraits of people and places that interested him and in recording his daily activities, Lautrec tells two stories: his own and that of his generation."
In Lautrec's company we peep at sordid nightclubs, lazy early mornings, the mechanical nature of every-day actions, clowns with pale skin and crumpled ostrich boas, grotesque male characters and worn-out ballerinas. With a sharp and sympathetic eye, Toulouse-Lautrec expresses the tale of beauty's evanescence, the hardships and boredoms of washerwomen and prostitutes, of difficult lives, of dark loneliness hidden behind bitter smiles, of deep gloom behind the sparkle of the stage, and of the decay of once inviting and voluptuous bodies.