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Sept. 14, 2000
Toulouse-Lautrec Lithographs Featured at Princeton University Art Museum
Exhibition Dates: September 26 through October 29, 2000
PRINCETON -- "Life at the Fin de Siècle: Lithographs of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec" will be on view at The Art Museum, Princeton University, from September 26 through October 29.
The exhibition includes both posters and prints from the Museum's rich holdings, the majority of them gifts of Sally Sample Aall and Professor Clifton R. Hall. The works survey Toulouse-Lautrec's contributions to two art forms, the poster, designed for public viewing, and the print, intended for a more private audience. Many of the works on view were conserved in 1988 through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a matching gift from the Friends of The Art Museum.
Posters began to appear on the streets of Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the Second Empire (1852-1871), colorful advertisements combining words and images were characteristic features of modern city life. It was Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), working in the 1890s, who brought this form of large-scale street art to its apogee, with the introduction of new colors into the lithographic process and a bold, sure sense of design.
Dating only a century after the invention of lithography and a half century after the beginning of the illustrated poster, Toulouse-Lautrec's images advertising Montmartre's popular entertainers -- the singers, dancers, and musicians who animated establishments like the Moulin Rouge or Le Divan Japonais -- are among the most beloved and evocative images in the history of art. Like the greatest works of art and the best advertisements, they retain their freshness of impact. The prints, on a more intimate scale, show the reflective side of his subjects, capturing momentary postures and examining the psychologies of entertainers and patrons of cafés and cabarets.
Through his formal innovations and frank explorations of modern life, Toulouse-Lautrec influenced the generation of artists coming of age in fin-de-siècle Paris, who would become the founders of the classic modern era in art.
The Art Museum is open to the public without charge. Free highlights tours of the collection are given every Saturday at 2:00 p.m. The Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and on Sunday from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. It is closed on Monday and major holidays. The Museum Shop closes at 5:00 p.m. The Museum is located in the middle of the Princeton University campus. Picasso's large sculpture Head of a Woman stands in front. For further information, please call (609) 258-3788.