Toulouse-Lautrec from every angle… From October 9, 2019 to January 27, 2020 Paris Grand Palais dedicates a large retrospective to the artist known for his painting depicting Parisian night’s world. An exhibition aims at returning to three rejections influencing the current vision of Toulouse-Lautrec and clearing them: a certain despise of the values of his class, a market of disregarded art as well as a world of chargeable and overused night and sex.

All in all, 200 works of art try to replace this “conflictual vision of his modernity” with a more positive one. A peculiar artist who managed like no other to translate the world “with a unique force making ‘present life’ more intense and meaningful”. A painter that also got close to photography, aware of the power of amateur and professional photographers.

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And as a preferred subject, an obvious picture of the “present life”: the “Paris of shady pleasures and modern alienations, from the cancan to the brothel” of which he is the accomplice as much as the judge. Toulouse-Lautrec portrays himself as a “combative and comical and terribly human interpreter as meant by Daumier or Baudelaire”, without ever setting himself up “as an accuser of urban deflects and the impure affluent classes”.

And in the heart of the exhibition, a highlight of his letters with Manet, Degas, Forain and even Ingres allowing him to “transform his powerful naturalism into a more biting and caustic style”. The exhibition also tries to show the strategy developed by the painter to reconcile the public face of his work and his more secret and committed aspect. Shall we dive into Toulouse-Lautrec’s universe, friends?