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The current vision of Toulouse Lautrec (1864-1901) often comes down to his contempt for the values of his class and his vision of Parisian nights and prostitutes.
This exhibition, which brings together about 200 works, aims to show the artist in his intense freedom as a modern poet in his unique outlook and his satirical verve.
Toulouse Lautrec was both an heir and a rebel who knew how to render in all its intensity life in the present without judging it.
Accomplice and observer, he rallies to a very French line of expressive realism in his abrupt and direct humor which differs from the crude and humiliating caricature. He translates his world with force and ferocity in the mists of his leniency and tenderness.
Lautrec has never been an accuser of impure haves. By his birth, his training and his life choices, he poses as a pugnacious and funny interpreter, terribly human. In this sense, he joins Daumier and Baudelaire, and the exhibition reveals to the public today this aspect of his work that is too often neglected.
Singular, modern, he associated himself more than any artist of the nineteenth century with photography of which
he appropriated the effects in the search for movement.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Rousse (The Toilet)
1889
oil on cardboard
67 x 54 cm
Paris, Orsay Museum
© Rmn-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum) / HervéLewandowski