New Book Celebrates Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne
- NEW YORK, New York
- /
- September 18, 2013
Accompanying a major traveling exhibition, TOULOUSE LAUTREC AND LA VIE MODERNE: PARIS 1880-1910 celebrates the avant-garde artists who were living and working at the center of the artistic and cultural scene in Paris at the turn of the last century, or “La Belle Époque” as it was known by its contemporaries.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Juan Gris, Mary Cassatt, and many others offered new visions for life and society during this era, popularly coined the fin de siècle, while battling the formality of the conservative Academic art standards of the time. Like the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists before them, the Nabis, Incohérents, Symbolists, and Naturalists sought to reinterpret their world in depictions of modern Parisian life and its café-concerts, cabarets, circuses, and brothels; street scenes and landscapes; and intimate domestic interiors. An idea brought to life in a small café amidst the Parisian Latin Quarter, these artists were passionate about the true meaning of “La Vie Moderne,” and reflected the spirit of this vivacious city.
This book is the first to investigate the variety of ways in which this broad spectrum of avant-garde artists defined their art as “modern.” Lavishly illustrated with imagery from paintings, prints, watercolors, and drawings, to rare zinc shadow puppet silhouettes, caricature, and programs for the famous Chat Noir cabaret, this book establishes a material history of a distinctive graphic style that still resonates today. TOULOUSE LAUTREC AND LA VIE MODERNE: PARIS 1880-1910 is complete with a timeline of historical events, and essays by an international group of curators and scholars discussing topics such as “Parisianism,” entertainment and performance, and the symbolism behind these much-admired works.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS: Phillip Dennis Cate is director emeritus of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University and an independent scholar and guest curator of this exhibition. Fred Leeman is former chief curator of painting at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Christopher Lloyd is former Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, London. Belinda Thomson is an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and a renowned scholar of Post-Impressionism.
Edited by Phillip Dennis Cate; with contributions by Fred Leeman, Christopher Lloyd, and Belinda Thomson
Skira Rizzoli, an imprint of Rizzoli New York, and Art Services International, Alexandria, VA
Hardcover / 320 pages / 348 color illustrations / 9 ½’’ x 11 ½’’
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4120-2
PRICE: $75.00 U.S. / $75.00 CANADIAN / £45.00 UK
PUBLICATION DATE: October 2013
Exhibition Schedule:
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno: November 2, 2013 – January 19, 2014
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: February 8 – May 18, 2014
Foothills Art Center, Golden, Colorado: June 7 – August 17, 2014
Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada: September 6 – November 16, 2014
Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, Florida: December 5, 2014 – January 11, 2015
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California: January 31 – April 12, 2015
