Toulouse Lautrec

A trip to the museum is never complete without nudes and who better to be our guide into "sans vêtements" then a diminutive man with a gigantic imagination and a penchant for "being in the right place at the right time" even to risk some nasty viruses. We of course must ease into this journey with the seemingly mundane visions of his poster work which I believe most of you have seen somewhere in your life even if it was just on a dorm wall in a the room of some hip art student burning incense and listening to the Grateful Dead. (not that I was ever that person...) Immortalized in some degree to a more modern audience in the film Moulin Rouge the musical with Nicole Kidman in which he was depicted as a cripple scooting around on the floor. Point is he spent many hours in and around brothels and burlesque establishments they offered a few explanations of this, one was that when using a live subject in a particular state it is best that they be most comfortable in the setting you wish to sketch them so for Lautrec women in repose and sans vêtements why not use prostitutes. Also they believe that he felt a connection with the women on the night based on his own feelings of being an outsider due to his physical limitations and size. All in all it was wonderful to get a full scope of his work and the time and place in history that Paris' social scene was doing at that time. I don't have a favorite work of his but rather a great appreciation for how he has shaped the art-advertising world that we now are immersed and sometimes drowning in, at the least making an art form of the everyday whether it's strippers of a glass of Pernod.