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Toulouse-Lautrec art exhibition in Canberra: large, impressive, and popular


The “Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris & the Moulin Rouge” art exhibition is on display at Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia (NGA) until April 2, 2013, attracting a large contingent of local, interstate, and international visitors.
With 111 exhibitions, it is a large and impressive collection ranging from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s oils on cardboard, brush and spatter lithographs, chalk drawings, and crayon lithographs. Chronologically housed in six rooms in the NGA, the collection is separated into sections: Room 1 – his early works; Room 2 – portraits and boulevardiers (young men about town); Room 3 – the private lives of brothel workers (the houses of tolerance); Room 4 – the cabaret; Room 5 - posters as art; and Room 6 – cabaret and the final years.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born in Albi, France, in 1864, although lived most of his life in Paris. Born with a rare congenital disease and having broken his legs in childhood he spent his bedridden childhood painting and drawing. In Paris, Toulouse-Lautrec attended art classes. While studying art he met many artists including Rene Princeteau, Vincent van Gogh, Leon Bonnat, Fernand Cormon, and Emile Bernard. He experimented with impressionism and post-impressionism, but was more and more obsessed with café life, brasseries, circuses, horse racing, cycling, dance halls, masked balls, theatres, and cabarets. Hence the collection shows his development as an artist, especially in the portrayal of human character, movement, and body language.
Some of his collection includes line drawings, such as Pessima (Pessimist) of 1898. He also used friends to pose for him, such as Jeanne Wenz for the famous brooding pose as a solitary drinker at a table in a bar, painted in black, white, and grey. Other portrayals are more gay and colourful, especially of can-can dancers and poster art, such as La Goulue entrant au Moulin Rouge (La Goulue – Louise Weber known as the glutton – entering Moulin Rouge) 1982; Caudieux (1893), Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret (Aristide Bruant in his cabaret) 1893; Confetti (1894), and the speed of Le Jockey (1899) at the horse races.
He returned to his home town when his health declined and died two months before his thirty-seventh birthday.





MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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