On September 9, we
commemorate 120 years since the death of a prominent French painter and graphic
artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (November 24th 1864, Albi – September 9th 1901, Malromé) who is associated with the artistic leaven of Paris at the turn of the
19th and 20th centuries. His distinctive artistic style based on flat, linear
stylization and figural deformation stemmed from Art Nouveau and anticipated
the future development of modern art. In his drawings and graphics, and especially
in his lithographs, he depicted the human types he met on busy boulevards, in dance
halls, shantans and bars which the metropolis over the Seine used to be full of.
Lautrec's work is a chronicle of the "Belle Époque," as the French
call this period, a time in which the 19th century’s old world was nostalgically
languishing while the modern new world was being born in euphoria.
