Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Transports Visitors At Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston To Turn Of 20th Century Paris

Montmartre, Moulin Rouge, Folies Bergère, absinthe, the can-can, Chat Noir, the fin-de-siècle (end of the century) devil may care, bohemian, sexy, sleep all day, party all night Paris of our imagination exists largely thanks to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901). He captured and promoted the image in countless posters which have circled the globe, shaping our perception of the era ever since their creation.

No one before or since has elevated poster art to higher levels.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s art and the vision of Paris he illustrated can be experienced through August 4 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with its exhibit Toulouse-Lautrec and the Stars of Paris.

“The popularity of reproductions of Toulouse-Lautrec posters, and of tourist attractions based on café and cabaret themes, speaks to the endurance of an image of Paris as a city of Montmartre-style, turn-of-the-last-century nightlife,” Helen Burnham, Pamela and Peter Voss Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, said. “We certainly played with that idea in the title of the show.”

More than simply influencing how people perceive Paris around 1900, Toulouse-Lautrec’s work foreshadows our contemporary popular culture to an eerie degree.

“I see roots of the obsession with celebrity image that defines so much of contemporary culture, especially in social media,” Burnham says of the work on display. “A number of Toulouse-Lautrec’s artistic strategies remind me of publicity today, whether advertising or influencing. For example, he captures and defines a particular “look,” he uses bold imagery combined with subtle detail, and he employs a modern technique for reproducing images (in his case lithography) to amplify the impact of his work through repetition and variation.”

Celebrity culture, FOMO (fear of missing out), spectacle, living life to excess, prioritizing pleasure over responsibility, broadcasting your sexuality, all of these behaviors and interests from our modern world Toulouse-Lautrec puts on display.

Toulouse-Lautrec was more than merely an observer of this lifestyle. He was an active participant. His immersion in the ribald Parisian nightlife culture, and his ability to so authentically and sensitively capture it, are the result of his unique life story.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s aristocratic parents were first cousins. This gave him a weak genetic makeup. As a result, his legs stopped growing after breaking both femurs in childhood accidents. He stood barely five feet tall as an adult, walked only through the use of canes, and lived his life in considerable physical pain.

Which led him to drinking. A lot.

At only 36-years-old he died from a combination of alcoholism and syphilis.

Live fast, die young. That wasn’t a 20^th century invention.

Artwork not by Toulouse-Lautrec including Mary Cassatt’s iconic In the Loge, a most unusual, small Picasso, a nocturne by Pierre Bonnard, a wild, whirling, black-and-white painting from John Singer-Sargent and a pink riot from Paul Signac partially inspired by one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s subjects, dancer Loïe Fuller, take the exhibit from strong to sensational.

Approximately 200 works are on view in the collaboration between the MFA and the Boston Public Library, drawing on both institutions’ extensive holdings of rarely displayed graphic works by Toulouse-Lautrec. It also includes a selection of loans from the Harvard Art Museums, the Houghton Library of Harvard University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as local private collectors.

Posters are hot this summer.

Toulouse-Lautrec would surely smile at the opening in June of America’s first museum devoted to posters, New York’s Poster House. Through exhibitions, events and publications, Poster House presents a global view of posters from their earliest appearance in the late 1800s to the present day.

Current exhibits there focus on posters from the Art Nouveau period as well as a look at a German graphic design agency which broke ground using early desktop computer publishing tools in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. is wrapping up a project in which it will digitize 18,000 old political and military posters in order for them to be easily accessed online.  

Chances are, the first picture you hung on your wall in the attempt to say something about yourself wasn’t a 36 x 48 inch oil on canvas painting from a name brand artist you spent two month’s salary on. Chances are, it was a poster.

Maybe it was a kitten hanging from a tree limb, maybe it was Brett Favre, maybe it was a reproduction of a 36 x 48 oil on canvas painting from a name brand artist that hangs in a museum.

Maybe it was an image of Paris inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec.