A collaboration between the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has brought over 120 lithographs by the French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) to the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
“El París de Toulouse-Lautrec. Impresos y carteles de MoMA” (The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters from MoMA), which opens on Aug. 11 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, brings viewers into the world of Paris during the Belle Époque and demonstrates Toulouse-Lautrec’s skill and versatility as a fine artist, printmaker and illustrator.
Toulouse-Lautrec was born into an aristocratic family in southern France, and moved to Paris as a young adult during the rise of the Belle Époque. The Belle Époque period in Paris, which began with the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and ended with the start of World War I in 1914, was characterized by the proliferation of nightlife and popular culture and the production of art and architecture in the Art Nouveau and post-impressionist styles.
“There are few times that are quite as iconic as the moment of the Belle Époque in Paris,” said Christian Rattemeyer, Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings at MoMA, in an interview with The News. “And there’s no better chronicler of that moment than Toulouse-Lautrec. So I hope that those who see the exhibition feel immersed in that moment and have that moment described vividly by Lautrec’s work.”
The exhibit opens with Toulouse-Lautrec’s first professional foray into lithography, the 1891 poster “Moulin Rouge, La Goulue.” An advertisement for the dancer La Goulue’s performances at the Moulin Rouge nightclub, the monumental poster demonstrates Toulouse-Lautrec’s disregard for the boundaries of popular and fine art.
“For Toulouse-Lautrec, there was no difference between a poster for the streets and a fine-art print for a collectors’ home,” said Rattemeyer. “‘Moulin Rouge, La Goulue’ was in fact the first time that Lautrec used the medium of lithography, and we can see that he immediately took to it in monumental scale and radical technical innovation.”
“Moulin Rouge, La Goulue” remains one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s most famous works, and was only recently acquired by MoMA, while their exhibition of “The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec” was already on view. The Bellas Artes exhibition of “The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec” will be the first time that the poster will be included from the exhibit’s opening.
Between producing “Moulin Rouge, La Goulue” in 1891 and his death in 1901, Toulouse-Lautrec worked diligently as a lithographer and established himself as a master of the medium. “The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec” focuses on this ten-year period of his work.
Lithography, which was developed in late-18th-century Germany, initially revolutionized bookmaking but was not immediately applied to fine art. Using drawings on limestone plates with hydrophobic media such as wax, lithography allowed the printing of diverse hues, which had been impossible with previously available printing techniques. Lithographic prints can be reproduced between 80 and 100 times, making lithography a semi-commercial medium, more reproducible than more fine-art printing media like woodblocks, but less so than commercial printing techniques such as offset printing.
“In Toulouse-Lautrec’s hands, lithography became an infinitely malleable and quick medium to the range of things that he was doing,” said Rattemeyer. “Lithography as a medium allowed him to have a much more painterly or drawing touch. It embodied the speed and the modernity, the kind of popularity of the images he was presenting.”
Although many of the pieces on display in “The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec” are prints that have copies elsewhere, that doesn’t make them any less precious.
“Some of the posters were intended for the streets, they were intended as advertisements,” said Rattemeyer. “So if you print 100 copies and you used 40 to put out on the street, they are gone afterwards. They’re destroyed. The fact that some of these survived for 120 years in that good of condition, as what effectively was a poster for advertising, is a small miracle.”
This exhibition is the first time that such a large volume of Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs have been displayed in Mexico since a 1942 exhibit in Bellas Artes, when Carlos Pellicer brought lithographs from the Art Institute of Chicago.
MoMA’s collection of Toulouse-Lautrec’s art began with the personal collection of MoMA founder Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr. Many of the works in “The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec” were part of Aldrich Rockefeller’s first donation to MoMA in 1940.
“When we try to show the great artists of modernism, Toulouse-Lautrec has been included in that narrative from the very beginning,” said Rattemeyer. “So we’re very happy that we can take another look, a fresh look, a contemporary look at the work of Toulouse-Lautrec.”
For Rattemeyer, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City’s gem of Art Nouveau architecture, is a felicitous venue for the displaying the work of the contradictory French printmaker.
“Toulouse-Lautrec, who came from an aristocratic family, but spent most of his artistic career in the bars and cafes and restaurants and theaters of Montmartre, was a paradox,” he said. “He had a proper, Belle Époque exterior, but a fiercely modern interior. In many ways, Palacio de Bellas Artes is the same; it has a very proper, Belle Époque exterior and a fiercely modern interior.”
“The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters from MoMA” will be on display in the Justino Fernández and Paul Westheim rooms in the Palacio de Bellas Artes from Aug. 11 to Nov. 27
The Palacio is open from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. More information can be found here
