Product Description
This book contains a detailed biography and 350 paintings on 334 full colour plates.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was and remains a remarkable paradox,” writes Florence Coman, Curator of French Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Scion of an ancient aristocratic family, he spent his adult life among the common people of Paris and Montmartre, even taking rooms in a brothel, and he made the city's seamy night life, cafés, cabarets, dance halls, and theater the principal subject of his art. In the 1860s during the renovation of Paris, Baron Haussmann's razing of the slums had marginalized Montmartre, which became established by the 1890s as an enclave famous for its naughty nightly revelry; the community flourished with the tourist trade attracted by advertisements in the popular press and by eye-catching posters. Lautrec's painting Marcelle Lender Dancing the Bolero in Chilpéric chronicles the spirit, style, and spectacle of the nineties, and underscores Lautrec's fascination with the ambiguous boundaries between art and artifice and between 'high' and 'low' art.
This work, along with his related paintings, drawings, and lithographs, embodies the artist's ultimately egalitarian vision of life and art.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was and remains a remarkable paradox,” writes Florence Coman, Curator of French Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Scion of an ancient aristocratic family, he spent his adult life among the common people of Paris and Montmartre, even taking rooms in a brothel, and he made the city's seamy night life, cafés, cabarets, dance halls, and theater the principal subject of his art. In the 1860s during the renovation of Paris, Baron Haussmann's razing of the slums had marginalized Montmartre, which became established by the 1890s as an enclave famous for its naughty nightly revelry; the community flourished with the tourist trade attracted by advertisements in the popular press and by eye-catching posters. Lautrec's painting Marcelle Lender Dancing the Bolero in Chilpéric chronicles the spirit, style, and spectacle of the nineties, and underscores Lautrec's fascination with the ambiguous boundaries between art and artifice and between 'high' and 'low' art.
This work, along with his related paintings, drawings, and lithographs, embodies the artist's ultimately egalitarian vision of life and art.
