During his brief but intensely prolific career, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec revolutionized the burgeoning field of lithography, much as Honore Daumier had fifty years before him and as Pablo Picasso would fifty years later, and claimed for the largely commercial medium a new status as an art form.  Primarily though his posters and prints, he handed down a view of a boisterous Paris demimonde that has shaped the popular conception of the fin de siecle.

This splendidly illustrated book examines Lautrec’s graphic work – the major and probably best-known part of his oeuvre – exploring the artist’s working methods and stylistic and technical innovations.  The numerous works reproduced include prints, drawings, working sketches, and related paintings, among them rare unique examples from major private and public collections in Europe and the United States.

The very vitality and popularity of Lautrec’s vision has perhaps inhibited serious criticism of his position as an artist.  This authoritative study contains an introduction by Riva Castleman, a biographical summary by Julia Frey, an assessment of Lautrec in relationship to other artists of his time by Matthias Arnold, a study of printing and publishing in France in the 1890’s by Phillip Dennis Cate, and an illustrated chronology of the final decade of the nineteenth century.  No other book on the artist combines such wealth of visual material with a thorough analysis of Lautrec as imaginative organizer of form, color, and space, graphic innovator, astute observer of character, and mirror of an era.

BOOK – HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC IMAGES OF THE 1890’S edited by Riva Castleman and Wolfgang Wittrock for the Museum of modern Art, New York.  Published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston.  Hard cover, Copyright 1985.  This book contains 264 pages, and contains 84 color illustrations and 207 black and white illustrations. The book is in excellent condition, complete with dust cover.  Cover price $60.00.

ILLUSTRATIONS:

Cover: The Clowness at the Moulin Rouge, 1897 – Lithograph

La Goulue entering the Moulin Rouge, 1891 – Oil on cardboard

The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge, 1892 – Oil and gouache on cardboard

Program for L’Argent, 1895 – Lithograph

Le Divan Japonais, 1893 – Lithograph poster in color

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