The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec

Though he was deeply engaged with painting and drawing, Toulouse-Lautrec’s lasting contribution to artistic practice was as a graphic artist. Through his prints and posters, he brought the language of the late-nineteenth-century French avant-garde to a broad public, through editioned prints, advertisements and contributions in reviews and magazines. He ushered in the first print boom of the modern era; taking advantage of lithography’s new potential for color and scale, he made both posters for the streets of Paris and prints for the new bourgeois collector’s living room. During his short career, he created more than 350 prints and 30 posters, as well as lithographed theater programs and covers for books and sheet music. The Museum of Modern Art’s collection of this material is stellar, encompassing over 100 prints and posters, his most important book projects, and many magazines, journals and other examples of printed ephemera. A cultural nexus, Toulouse-Lautrec connected artists, pe