Around 170 works from the collection of the Herakleidon Museum, Athens, are at Palazzo Chiablese, Turin, from 22 October 2016 to 5 March 2017 in a major retrospective devoted to Toulouse-Lautrec, the aristocratic bohemian considered the greatest creator of posters and prints between the 19th and 20th century.

This exhibition organized by the Ministry of the Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, the Musei Reali in Turin and Arthemisia Group, is under the patronage of the City of Turin and is curated by Stefano Zuffi.

The works from the Herakleidon Museum in Athens illustrate the eccentric art and sophisticated yet anti-conformist and provocative poetic research – among the most innovative between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century – of one of the most popular and admired artists today. He was a “tormented artist” from his childhood who did not receive the recognition he deserved, though he was extremely optimistic and very aware of the beauty of life. A simple beauty, whose outlines were deliberately blurred, to be enjoyed in dissolute, vivid, wild moments, without embellishments, which he depicted both in his drawings and coloured works. No one since has been able to render so “perfectly” the face of imperfection. That is his style.

The exhibition includes coloured lithographs like Jane Avril, 1893, advertising posters like The Passenger in Cabin 54, 1895, and Aristide Bruant, in his Cabaret, 1893, pencil and pen and ink drawings, promotional graphics and magazine illustrations as in La Revue blanche, 1895, that have become the emblems of an era inextricably connected with the images of Count Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.