Around 170 works from the collection of the Herakleidon Museum, Athens, are at AMO Arena Museo Opera – Palazzo Forti in Verona, from 1 April to 3 September 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, which is under the patronage of the Comune di Verona, is organized by the Gruppo Arthemisia, with the support from the Gruppo AGSM – main sponsor of the initiative, 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.