In 1996, I made my way to New York City for the first time. I was there for just about three weeks, and spent just about every other day, wondering through the rooms and the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was one of the first major art museums I had been in, and after years of looking at the photos of the famous paintings, to see them on the walls, just a few inches in front of my face was overwhelming and breathtaking. I was lucky at the time, as one of my favorite painters and draftsman was being presented in one of the halls.
A retrospective on the works of Toulouse-Lautrec presented rows of this man’s work, his carnival dancers and nightclub clowns. I did not know at the time, that Lautrec was not one of the starving artists of Montmarte, he was born and lived his life as an aristocrat, but found the backstage arenas of the Paris cabarets a much more interesting, and inspiring place to hang out. Lautrec died before the age of forty, but he produced an enormous body of work, which is now currently on exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Lautrec had a wicked eye, in the most respectful sense of the word, capturing caricature like images of the performers, images that with minimal detail conveyed a bit of a sadness in the madness of life in that arena. He, along with some of his contemporaries such as Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, transformed the world of the poster, and many of their techniques are being mimicked and copied to this day. Check yourself into a Boston hotel in the coming months, and stop by the Museum, not only for the Lautrec show, but for the other wonderful exhibits that will be running through the rest of the winter, spring and summer seasons.
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