Toulouse-Lautrec and the Stars of Paris

good afternoon and welcome to the second to last lecture in our course series the Stars of Paris I know I'm a little sad as well before we start today huge huge thanks to Wilmington Trust who is generously sponsoring this course in all of our spring courses thank you so much for joining us here today and please join me in welcoming our speaker on Burnham Thank You Kristen and thank you to all of you for coming today my lecture today is about Toulouse Lautrec and prints and postermania oh really about Toulouse Lautrec and lithography which is the technique that you see him using and almost I'd say 75% of the works on view in the exhibition but first I wanted to add a little bit to the wonderful lecture that we had last week on food and wine by tying it in with the show did you know there was a cookbook of Toulouse Lautrec recipes put together by his friend and biographer maurice Joyal from recipes found in Toulouse Lautrec estate he was a passionate and innovative cook he loved to cook for his friends he loved to socialize and he also designed two menus and invitations for parties and the one on your right is for a party at which he played bartender mixing american-style cocktails in 1891 which was a very important year for Toulouse Lautrec and for posters Toulouse Lautrec contemporary Pierre Bonnard made this beautiful poster to advertise Debray Champaign and Toulouse Lautrec shortly after made this important poster which is in the first room of the exhibition about the Moulin Rouge advertising the Moulin Rouge Pierre Bonnard reportedly introduced Toulouse Lautrec to the printmaking workshop of Eduard encore so this is a figure on your handout and this is his printmaking studio this is the master printer hotel in the background and this is Toulouse Lautrec for Jaina Vril and this is a work that you see early on in the exhibition as well you'll notice when you look at your handbook or your handout that we don't know how long encore lived he may be an important figure in Tolosa tracks life and also in the poster and print boom but like many figures essential to the rise of printmaking in this period he was little known to a broader public and perhaps it's because I think so highly of printmaking and it's so important to the exhibition that I wanted to highlight these figures for you and perhaps the one and only time you will see them on a handout this year maybe ever but it was here in on course to do that Toulouse Lautrec spent some of the happiest moments of his career creating many of the prints and posters in the medium of lithography many of which we see in the exhibition Toulouse Lautrec and the stars of Paris so I want to walk you through lithography as a technique because this is what I get I'd say about thirty percent of the questions I get about the exhibition are about lithography what is it how does it work why was Toulouse Lautrec attracted to it why did it work for him as an artist and you see in this display in the second gallery that we have a case with a stone a lithographic stone in it and two prints from that stone but the prints are different from each other one has text one doesn't but both are in Reverse this is the stone this is an image in Reverse printed from this stone you see there's text here but the text doesn't appear on this work but it does appear here on this work so how does that how does that happen how did to loose a truck produce this or how did a master printer working with Toulouse Lautrec produced this I'm going to show you a series of images that you can find on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website I've put the link in your handout there are a number of other places where you can find explanations of lithography I think this is one of the best so is the Khan Academy explanation lithography is a plan of graphic meaning it's a flat printmaking process based on the principle that grease attracts ink and water repels it what you're seeing now is a design being drawn onto the stone with a greasy crayon and then it needs to be fixed onto the stone with a chemical process first a layer of rosin is rubbed into the stone followed by a layer of powdered talc and that's on the left and then gum arabic or arabic or a combination of gum arabic with a mild acid solution is brushed onto the stone and that's what's happening on the right so this is a chemical process that toulouse-lautrec probably never did himself he would have worked with the master printer the older man that you saw in the studio of encore somebody who was really specialized in this technique and who would have actually helped toulouse-lautrec understand the possibilities of lithography another step the initial image is wiped clean almost it becomes a kind of shadow image with a solvent and then a layer of asphaltum is buffed onto the entire surface of the stone and allowed to dry so the master printers until oosa trucks they probably didn't have beautiful tattoos like this this is made in the last two or three years with one of the one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art employees demonstrating okay so here is the actual printing before this stone is ready for inking it is dampened with water which is absorbed only in the blank areas ink is applied to the stone with a roller the oil-based ink adheres to the greasy area of the image and is repelled by the damp parts of the stone so it's the principle that the greasy crayon is still what's attracting the ink and the wet parts of the stone are detracting it the dampening and inking of the stone is repeated until the entire image is thoroughly ate the stone is placed with the image face up on the lithographic press and a damp sheet of paper laid on top the stone and paper are covered with a board called a temple and several sheets of newsprint or some other kind of felt material as used as padding for the press a bar moves across to provide evens pressure and you get an image in Reverse of the image you drew so there you go that's the basic method of lithography and what's happened with the earlier image that I showed you where you have an image and then other things are added to it say there was text here that said this is half of a potato that would be added later using the same method but after something is added to this image to protect it from all of those acids and Arabic sand tallix and things that you saw applied so that's my explanation of how lithography works now I am the person who would work with a master printer I would never be able to do this myself but we have professional lithographer x' there may be some in the room who are critiquing me as I speak who work at the s MFA and who've been extremely helpful to understanding how this works looking at works from our own collection in the study room let me give you a little history of lithography because there's actually a very recently invented technique in Toulouse Lautrec stay it was invented at the turn of the 18th century by this man alloy Senna Felder in Germany or what's now Germany because he wanted to reproduce his plays he was a playwright but if he quickly caught on as a wonderful printmaking technique and that became his real fame as being the father of lithography lithos stone graphi writing but at the very beginning was actually called Polly autograph II multiple handwriting from or direct from the hand because it reproduced a drawing or handwriting so effectively it seemed very direct and immediate the time to lose the truck was working with lithography most artists used a hand to press like this called a bruise a press this is used to test your first impressions or to produce small additions of prints and you see that's exactly the same kind of press that we have in the background of this work that's in the exhibition but commercial lithography took soon took off and you had the appearance of big factories like this this is a la Mercier Factory from 1845 with big steam machine powered presses that could handle huge stones and this is why you could have eventually huge posters and this was big business by the end of the 19th century in Boston actually the Louis prang Factory this building still stands it's apartments in Roxbury now was a big Factory in Boston this is a view of the LA Mercier factory as it had ballooned into a factory that employed thousands of employees by the turn of the 19th century in Paris and this is an example of how people were housing stones that had been used already and might be reused again in the future these are actually Matisse and Picasso stones from the 20th century but the principle remained the same so in the 19th century when Toulouse Lautrec was making lithographs you could print on zinc plates which much thinner metal plates but most artists and most commercial lithographer --zz were still using stone that was quarried in Germany so you can imagine that lithography was sometimes affected by the politics of the period so when there was a war with Prussia the availability of lithographic stones would go down severely Tolosa truck used sink plates for a few of his works we know that he used it for this one which was printed in the United State because it makes sense sent across you wouldn't want to send over a big lithographic stone sent over a zinc plate and also because it's been recreated using zinc plates at the Art Institute and these are the zinc plates they used now notice this is a thin piece of metal can you see this is the edge of the metal so it's almost like a copper plate and that you need to use multiple plates to produce actually four or five to produce an image like this and this is true of stone lithography as well and in the exhibition you will see that we have an example of proofs meaning printings coming straight off the press of different colors that led to this poster for the Duvall japonais so this one we have a printing of the green ink so it would go through once with a stone for the green ink then it would go through again for the stone for the black ink this is the stone for the yellow ink and the stone for the orange ink and if you put them through all of those you would get this you notice that the name of the printmaking studio appears here UMP means impression or printed by Edward encore in Paris here is Toulouse Lautrec signature part of the lithograph and these which you find right down here at the bottom of the poster are the registration marks so that's what the master printer would use to line up the paper with the each stone so that everything would work properly in your final image I want to define what a master printer is I've told you a little bit about it this is kotel who died shortly after this print was made and replaced in Toulouse Lautrec life by another master printer named Stern who became his drinking partner as well as his master printer and they would spend nearly every weekday together in the mornings and then Toulouse Lautrec would go to his own studio to paint or draw and then he would go and have dinner with his mother usually and then he would go out on the town he's a very social person and I think that this is part of the reason why he was drawn to lithography that's very much a collaborative process and the master printer is a highly skilled craftsman or now woman who prints an artist's work and this relationship between the master printer and the artist can be very close and even collaborative as the master printer can suggest technical possibilities to the artist now this work is actually a cover for a journal called lace stomp original published by the Journal of artists they stomp ovg now means original print well what does that mean is it a contradiction in terms it suggests that although most prints are multiples some are perhaps more multiple than others and it is true that while some prints are published in massive numbers and small some are published in small or limited editions but the term original print was used in the period to mean an artistic print one in which the artist played a direct role in the design and decision making process and produced something closer to an autograph than to a reproduction so this is the same woman actually appears in this work looking at a print that's come off of the press acting as a kind of connoisseur or critic and this woman here person Jane have real here is actually a sketch for this work and this highlights an important part of toulouse-lautrec process as he created his posters and prints particularly toward the beginning of his career as a print maker he tended to make these wonderful highly finished preparatory drawings which he would then copy onto the stone mm-hmm toward the end of his life the drawings were much sketchier often didn't bear as much relationship to the eventual design on the stone because I think he felt much more free at that point to just draw directly onto this stone in the second gallery of the exhibition you'll notice that we've dedicated a space to to lose the tracks work as a draftsman and to how important draftsmanship was to him to the extent that he actually created this as a little cartoon about himself as a consummate draftsman this became his calling card even from an early age he loved to draw he was very witty he loved caricature he could capture with with wit an incredible level of perception the things that he saw around him and especially the performances of people on stage he drew horses from a very early age and this is likely one of his earlier drawings from around the age of 12 or 13 when he was studying with a friend of his family who was a specialist in equine portraiture Toulouse Lautrec as you know came from a long line of counts of Toulouse in the South of France and he was in line to become the count of Toulouse his family was full of aristocratic sportsmen who loved riding but after he fell and badly injured his leg around this time when he made this drawing he no longer participated in these kinds of dangerous sports and his parents then supported his choice of becoming an artist and allowed him to go to Paris to study in artistic studios now you know a little bit about this already and that he looked at the work of de God this is by Toulouse Lautrec but it's very much inspired by looking at de gah that he was a consummate draftsman and that he studied in these studios in Paris learning traditional techniques for portraiture but then and other other genre scenes and subject matter but then mixing them with influences from caricature Japanese woodblock prints and all sorts of other influences that were alive to him in Paris of the time he also learned his art history and when he portrayed his friend Adolph Albert at work in his studio he clearly referenced a work from the 17th century that was very well known in the period and maybe known to many of you as well which is this self-portrait atching by Rembrandt of himself drawing at a window Rembrandt was a hero to artists in the period as much as a printmaker as a painter he was known as the consummate original print maker the consummate artistic print maker who used printmaking as an experimental extension of his practice and this contributed a great deal to something called the acting revival where artists took up action this other form of printmaking an earlier form the kind that Rembrandt had used much earlier then then lithography but that eventually led to exploration of all other kinds of printmaking techniques including woodcut and engraving and lithography artists printmaker saw themselves as following in this distinguished tradition and here is an engraved portrait of toulouse-lautrec contemporary Steinman a Swiss artist living in Paris by his Dutch friend this is on the left Peter DuPont and if you go to the sharp visitor center you'll see Peter du Pont's drawing of notre-dame Cathedral on view there it's quite a lovely drawing Stein land is the artist who designed this amazing poster that's in the exhibition for the Jean or the black cat cabaret in Moe mount now here's Stein Lynne in his well-appointed studio with his tools behind him and books on the wall this view reminds a lot of people of this view of st. jerome in his study by Albrecht Durer who was another hero printmaker two artists of this period but this interest in the interior spaces in spaces that were dedicated to printmaking to artistic pursuits and to appreciation of art was something that affected home life as well a large number of middle and upper-middle class mostly men dedicated parts of their houses to print cabinets in the period and this is a view of the print collector Lots Briseno appreciating a print and you can see these portfolios this one says in French drawings what cuts touchings and on the wall he has pictures probably some paintings some sculpture these are the signs of a cultivated person here's Roger marks who was a huge fan of Toulouse Lautrec on the wall you actually see a toulouse-lautrec painting that's now in the collection of the musee d'orsay as are many of these works of art because he gave them upon his death and in these cabinets he would have housed his print collection as well as in this portfolio now Roger marks who wrote about Toulouse Lautrec also wrote about the pleasure of collecting prints saying after one of those long days of disappointing Paris life now that's not a sentence that many of us would repeat but poor guy he had to live there all the time after one of those long days of disappointing Paris life I throw myself into an armchair close to the stand or my favorite engravings lie sleeping in their large portfolio and as I examine them one by one my troubles evaporate I forget the cares of the world now this passion for prints and for collecting prints is one of the reasons why we have this exhibition because printmaking was and print collecting was something that the trustees of the MFA and one of the great donors to the BPL valued very highly and that's why we have such rich collections here that we can put together in this exhibition this is a view actually of the print study room of the MFA in 1920 it was actually one of the first departments founded at the Museum and it continues to this day to be an integral part of our collecting strategy as an institution but back to the period at hand toulouse-lautrec two of his heroes were the artists honoré daumier and this is a painting by domi a of men looking at a drawing or a print it's called the print collectors so I'm going to assume it's a print and on the right draw a painting by de gah another hero of Toulouse attracts of a print collector now we think that this print collector who looks a lot less excited about what he's doing then these guys over here was probably an old fuddy-duddy collector very out of fashion he has a ready a floral print from the 18th century here some here and other things that are considered sort of out of out of fashion and we think that probably this is a portrait by de God the kind of print collector who wouldn't have appreciated the gods experimental approach and it truly was extremely experimental this is a lithograph by to God this is one by two the track and we see the the influence very directly here but we also see in the de Gouw one how Frida gaw was to use this as a medium with a whole range of possibilities so you see that in this area which is where the detail is from he first has put down the dark area using his black greasy crayon and then scraped away the light areas the columns the chandelier and this is something that's obviously easier to do when you're working with a stone surface instead of a paper if you scrape away on paper it's there's the possibility that it's going to rip but with stone scraping is something that is not only easy to do but it's a very welcome and wonderful experimental possibility and this is something that artists of this period we're learning from looking back at earlier lithographer is like Goya and Agha of course was also wonderful at capturing the idiosyncratic qualities of the dancers and performers on stage including this woman whose performance was based on barking like a dog and here we have a doe me a from even earlier in the century from 1834 domi I also used a lot of scratching on the stone he was a master of the light and dark effects and see how interested he is in the effects of artificial stage lighting when he shows this wonderful Kerr character this clown on stage and to lose the truck must have learned so much from looking at dome EA not just for the caricature but also for the effect of the artificial lighting but you notice that the Toulouse Lautrec takes it to an even further degree and truly flattens out this figure it's not just because she's thinner anyway that she looks like this it's because he's really integrated something that he's learning from Japanese woodblock prints which is kind of abstraction of the figure where the silhouette becomes so interesting and expressive so here is a comparison with a wood woodblock print that you would have seen in the Kuniyoshi kunisada exhibition from the MFA collections it's just a random comparison that I picked to show you how Japanese woodblock prints include these relatively flat areas of great decorative interest but also expressive possibility and there is a nice contrast between light and dark which adds so much to the picture plane and to our interpretation of what we're seeing and sometimes the figures can be very dramatic and even sort of frightening looking like this Nikol figure now these kinds of prints were in high demand in the same group that included all of these print collectors that I'm referencing as well as the artists in Toulouse Lautrec s' circle and here is honoree Riviere who made his name at the shadow are the black cat nightclub and this is one of his most important series this print is actually in the exhibition of the Eiffel Tower where he's flattened out that view so that it becomes the kind of decorative element a very dramatic one across the picture plane and I am comparing it here with this here as she gave view of a plum estate which also comes from a series of views by the artist and this is something that's also important to European artists when they're looking at Japanese woodblock prints they're very interested in this see reality of looking at something at different times of day from different perspectives different views of the same thing the passion for Japanese woodblock prints overlapped as I said considerably with the print revival this is a membership card for a society of artists and critics who were dedicated to the appreciation of all things Japanese it is actually Fantana Tours membership card designed by brac Monde and here is brac mom's signature oh no this is Brok Monde that other artists in their circle all signed here now whose brac Monde brac Monde is this artist who made well this is one of the Gong Corps brothers one of the great appreciators of art of the past in this period and of prints see here's his portfolio and brac Monde is really highly technically gifted print maker who helped artists develop their skills as print makers and paved the way for someone like Toulouse Lautrec so designer of a membership card for a japanese-inspired society and also interested in printmaking as a part of a cultivated man's life now I just want to focus in on one thing that I think is interesting to too many people who come into the exhibition and that is toulouse-lautrec monogram and where it comes from when we're talking about Japanese woodblock prints you notice these little marks in circles on the print in this case and thank you to Sarah Thompson curator of Japanese woodblock prints for explaining this to me these two seals are the seals of the censor who inspected the preliminary drawing for the woodblock print but Toulouse Lautrec wouldn't have known that he would have just known that these were on the print and on many many prints and they look like a decorative interpretation of a signature which is what he eventually produces with T h l8 TL on Rita Toulouse Lautrec and that's his monogram here which becomes hit signature it also becomes a sign for him or kind of branding so if you think about it in terms of the celebrity culture where he's capturing the image of aresty bruja or another performer and disseminating it and making it even more famous along with that goes Toulouse Lautrec and his own brand but this probably also relates back to someone like Albert stirrer and other medieval print makers who would include their own decorative monograms within their prints so here you have one here here's another version because I couldn't actually blow this up in high enough resolution for you to be able to see it but this is our bursters decorative monogram and you see it everywhere throughout his work and mixing references is really what Toulouse Lautrec is all about let's look carefully at this series that's in the exhibition LOI the Loie fuller lithographs it's a very special to be able to have so many of them together you see they all have the same basic design but all of them look very different and this actually relates to a category of Japanese woodblock prints that Toulouse Lautrec would have known called sir emo no prints or luxury prints which use embossing and special inks and mica powders and powders that glisten have a metallic quality to glorious effect this is a Sri mona print by Mishima gegoo Tay and pardon my Japanese pronunciation it's terrible from our collection in which metallic light effects take center stage but toulouse-lautrec would have seen this in many of the ceremony prints that he could have seen in Paris especially at some very important exhibitions that took place at the Ecole des Vosges off and at the so the the center school for academic study in Paris that's where Mary Cassatt and Agha saw a lot of these Japanese woodblock prints or at the universal exhibitions so to interpret this American dancer Loie fuller Toulouse Lautrec makes a lug to reprint and here's her head here are her robes which she waved around on stage here are her feet this is the this is double bass in the orchestra pit this is the edge of the stage and each one of these there were 60 of them 60 prints is inked separately on eight stones and then metallic powders are added so each one has a different effect and it gives you a sense of the right whoops video let's see if I can make this happen myself I think it's gonna work now it gives you a sense of what her performances look like where there were colored lights changing that reflected off of her gowns this is actually an imitator of Lois Fuller who was captured in this early film by the Lumiere brothers it was a black and wave film but each pane or each frame rather was individually colored to give you a sense of that performance and that's also what happens with the Toulouse Lautrec prints now obviously there's more at stake than just inspiration from this dancer or inspiration from Japanese Sri Mona Prince Toulouse Lautrec is feeding a market for luxury prints for the kinds of collectors who would have built these print cabinets in their homes and in that respect just as with his advertising and his poster work he is a commercial success and he makes his way in his his own way as an artist and as a professional which is really quite extraordinary considering that he comes from such an aristocratic background and really had absolutely no need at all to be professionally successful he had a solid income from his family he had multiple estates in this of France and yet he wanted to participate in this commercial world now luxury prints often are thought of as being considerably less commercial but that connotation actually adds to their individual value so just putting that in real terms having six of these together in the exhibition which we do is extremely rare extremely desirable and extremely something that I'm very proud of I have to say so go and take a closer look now let's turn to something which is considered to be more obviously commercial and that is the other side of the coin from the domestic print cabinet and the luxury print collectors the poster world of the streets this is a scene by the artist John Barrow who is an artist who specialized in detailed paintings of Paris especially of Paris street scenes and here he's portraying a column known as a Morris column after Gabriel Morris the printer who started the company that built these columns and that had the exclusive right to build them and to choose the posters that went on them covered with posters at the corner of the boulevard to Kapoor scene and the Rue scribe this painting dates to 1879 notice that the posters are all text-based there isn't an illustrated poster among them so something changed and this is something that Vanita Dada explained in her first lecture was that there was a law passed in 1881 called the law of July 29th and you can actually still see this written on the sides of Paris buildings the law of 29th of July which allows proprietors to refuse to have posters on buildings and that's why you see it on certain buildings but it also allowed so many more artists to produce posters and also for all sorts of other press to take off because it reduced the amount of official censorship of public printing so with the passing of this law along with the rising interests of artists in printmaking the possibility of lucrative commissions and the availability of those steam-powered machine presses in the factories the illustrated poster took off and you get scenes like this where you see some Illustrated posters these are all act G photos and this which you see in the exhibition blown up you see a charade poster right here and this is the color version of it and it is a wonderful advertisement for throat lozenges which obviously you would need when you're in the rain sureiy was the poster artist when Bernard and Toulouse Lautrec made their posters in 1891 this was the artist with whom they were competing and his work was very different from Toulouse attracts but first let's look at how much Toulouse Lautrec was aware of sure a to the extent that there's actually this photograph of him with who someone who we think is a manager of the Moulin Rouge looking at a sure a poster for the Moulin Rouge of this pretty woman on a donkey and other people frolicking around her and we look at how different Toulouse Lautrec spurgeon of an advertising poster for the Moulin Rouge was well for one thing we immediately recognize who the woman in the middle is she's actually given a name la Gullu that was her name the glutton her nickname her real name was Louise Weber she's known as the glutton partly because she was a voluptuous dancer but also because she was known for going around and drinking the rest the leftover drinks off of customers table here she is this is her dance partner valentown the day so stay so that he's known as the boneless here he appears at the front of the poster so they're immediately recognizable also a lot of things are going on things that beg questions so she's dancing the can-can is he pointing toward her crotch what's going on there who are these characters in the background are they recognizable their hats are very expressive are they upper-class men and courtesans there's always a mix of people in in these spaces which was part of their great appeal and this poster was different also from Bernards in that same way they share this flattening out of figures that you see in the Japanese woodblock prints which has a huge impact on avant-garde art in this period but again Bernard's is a generic pretty woman surrounded by champagne and bubbles whereas toulouse-lautrec s-- is a woman who might be thought of as attractive but more as a kind of sexual athlete in in the midst of this crazy can-can dance that people talked about in the period as being absolutely scandalous especially because they showed there aren't undergarments and this poster as you know from going into the exhibition is enormous that certainly would have attracted people to it it would have been highly visible when applied to a city wall but it was also carded around town on a cart like this this is a felix volatile a wonderful print maker of you of a city street and you get a sense of how much the street life was a really key to paris in this period and how much posters were there's actually a recollection of this poster being carted around paris by one of two lose the tracks contemporaries who said I still recall the shock I had when I first saw the Moulin Rouge poster this remarkable and highly original poster was carried along the Avenue de l'Opera on a kind of small cart so it's really a spectacle in and of itself but you see that looking at things looking at posters looking at street life is really a part of Paris in this period well especially if you're going to make an advertising sign for a gallery which is what this was the saigo gallery whose eggo was also a print publisher this is a gallery that still exists in Paris today notice that this is a group of men with their top hats on but in a lot of these views of people on the street may be looking at posters a fish means poster so this is another advertisement advertisement for a poster gallery and what does that mean poster gallery what it means is that um while posters may have started out Illustrated posters as strictly advertisements printed on cheap paper really ephemeral almost immediately they were seen as potential collectors items for the same people who had those print cabinets and who collected luxury prints so urgent would run around Paris and rip posters off of the walls as soon as they were put up and also publishers and artists cottoned onto this really quickly and they started to make luxury editions of posters that were put up around Paris so that's why we have those proofs that are in the exhibition and that are in such great condition and you can also notice the difference between the ones that were obviously applied to some surface and are on very very thin paper and have seen the test of time and the ones that are on thicker more durable paper and have a much more fresh appearance that's called print connoisseurship which is something apparently that fashionable women were very interested in or at least symbolized in this period because you see image after image of fashionable women the parries yen looking at prints and this is another advertisement for that gallery sag oh this is by George booty knee a lot of these artists are much less well-known but wonderful and I wanted to show you that there is a precedent for views like this and this is a wonderful one from our collection of the headquarters of the etching revival which was this Kedah a Luke aid store which still exists in Paris I believe at least this spot does and here are women and men in 1860s but notice the real emphasis shifts so that the woman herself becomes the as much the figure of observation as the print that she's observing so it's this interesting mix of Paris fashion chic consumerism who's the consumer who's the object being consumed that happens in these works these again are from our collection on the left is a work by an artist named - rawson Foss who is from Brussels and also Russel Berg another brought Belgian artist women looking at prints and posters and there they tend to be advertisements for galleries or for framers maybe this gives you a little bit of a sense of why Toulouse Lautrec would have chosen to put the beautiful Jean have real into the studio for his print but well more about that in a minute I love these these are calling cards for stego this is a woman who's wearing a contraption that she could walk around town with she's not quite a fan sandwich which is actually a term for somebody would walk around with a with a poster on the front and the back but most it's more of a backpack I guess here in front of the Opera which was a symbol of a new Paris and the woman looking at prints in a portfolio so Toulouse Lautrec was obviously very attuned to the importance of the chic Parisian woman as a symbol of this new modern Paris and he includes her here in his own advertisement for one of his good friends the photographer Paul say so who's taking taking this very kind of closeted view of Paul says oh he's behind the camera and he was known as as being very cheeky anyway so it makes sense that there's this kind of Woody element to it as he looks at the Parisian woman and here's Toulouse Lautrec smonny Graham inside of an elephant which became one of the vignettes that he would put on some special editions of his posters and prints so they're always coming up with these new ways to identify special versions of a particular work that existed in multiple impressions confetti which is also in the exhibition the one we have on view is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art confetti had been outlawed in Paris in the 1880s because I believe it was because it clogged the city streets it was it was overused during a Mardi Gras celebration but it was going strong in London and this English manufacturer commissioned this poster from Toulouse Lautrec almost I think all of Toulouse Lautrec posters were actually commissioned either from firms like this geobella or from the performers themselves like Jane of real aresty drool and others so I hope that this has kind of given you a sense or helped you unpack why we see Jane of real as a connoisseur looking at a proof fresh off the encore press now of course a friend of toulouse lautrec she's a fashionable figure she's a parody's yen she symbolizes all those things about modern Paris but she's also in this convivial space with the master printer who was one of the first to introduce Toulouse Lautrec to how to make a lithograph and it shows you how much he very much valued the conviviality of that space I'd like to think that and I'll just read you what I wrote because I think summarize a little better than I can in the moment the dressed in a fashionable cloak and hat Jana Vril epitomizes the Parisien who is both an aesthetic object to be enjoyed by onlookers on the street or in the studio as well as an astute consumer of fashion on fashion and art a commissioner of posters and prints and a cultivator of a particular image like the artist himself now I wasn't sure how much I was going to be able to cover in this lecture but I have a few more minutes so I'm going to give you a little taste of something that relates to our lecture but also about which I'll be speaking in more depth next week at the BPL and that is the Elle portfolio the Elle portfolio is in it's on view in the gallery called behind the scenes it's a luxury Edition like the Loie fuller lithographs it was produced in concert with with a print publisher named Gustav Palais that means that he was the one who put up the money and the organizational skills to make it happen and it's dedicated to the lives of women living in brothels so in that respect it actually has inspiration from a series of Japanese woodblock prints known as twelve hours in the courtesans house or the Yoshiwara district by kita gala tomorrow and it was well-known in this period and here are three women in the process of getting dressed and here are two women going to bed the views are actually very everyday and not as sexy as you might imagine when you think of views of women in brothels and the kind of audience for these prints that the publisher surely wanted to cater to know so Gustav Palais needed the money he had lost a lot of money in a financial crisis and he had taken up print publishing as a way to recoup some income and funds and he and Toulouse Lautrec created this special paper for for the print series they also wrote down which impression this was 46 out of 100 added the collectors stamp and there's even a special watermark if you hold you can see this in the gallery a little bit because it's so so much on the surface but if you hold this delight you can see the water my mark so something that's actually put into the paper when it was created it has the publishers name and Toulouse Lautrec same so this luxurious paper the printing goes over the edges of the paper meaning that we don't even see the registration mark so it looks amazingly like a drawing if you weren't familiar with this portfolio you might actually think it was a drawing especially when it's behind glass the colors are really luxurious and delicate they recall the kind of colors that you see in these special Japanese woodblock prints and think about how the print collectors of this period must have thought about Japan as a culture where print collecting and printmaking at the highest level was really appreciated that that would have been a real attraction for them as well as the imagery that they're seeing el means she plural so it's loosely translated into the women and here's one woman with a top hat but beside her it's obviously something that maybe the viewer so you think of yourself as being perhaps the man who's viewing this and you've left your top hat in there is watching her in the process of getting dressed so think about that maybe in relation to the sex worker talk that we had earlier in this series which gave us so much insight into the world of these women and knowing that toulouse-lautrec lived with them was friends with them and that many of the performers that you see in the exhibition had spent time in brothels or as sex workers so I will speak more about that next Thursday if you care to come to my talk at the Boston Public Library or you can hear more about toulouse-lautrec next week but also from marriage on Wednesday but also from Mary Chapin Weaver who's coming to speak on celebrity culture and postermania in a different way than I did today on June 26 at 7 p.m. so thank you very much and I'm happy to take questions [Applause] yes we have a microphone so here we go thank you very much for a really interesting lecture about lithography and the poster so I was wondering whether the collection of posters was mainly done by the French or whether that extended to say that English who also were frequenting Paris at this time and to other cultures or was it mostly the French who were doing it it's definitely an international phenomenon and it existed in Boston London New York and there were big big commercial lithographer who fed that demand for example here in Boston we had louis praying and it was very lucrative actually they would produce artists posters which would first be made on the breeze a press and then would be transferred to a bigger stone using a kind of transfer paper usually because you wouldn't want the so called mother stone to break in the process and also you had to separate this whole work into the different colors so this is all it's almost like a kind of mathematical process how do you break it up and then put them on the big steam presses and produce them in the hundreds or thousands and posters now from this period can be very rare it's not because they were produced necessarily in limited editions they usually weren't it's because they were produced on thin paper that disintegrated after it was applied to the sides of buildings or in the process of being torn off they didn't survive so the rarity has to do with survival when you're talking about a poster that was actually used as a poster as opposed to a luxury poster for a collector yes hi I was wondering if you needed multiple stones for each color was each one individually drawn or how could it be that they wouldn't be exact you did have individual stones for each color sometimes you would print the same color more than once to try to intensify the color what you would need to do is you need to look at a drawing and as an artist and with the master print maker break apart where each color goes and on which stone but how would you note that they would line up exactly you have those registration marks I'll go back to it sorry I know this is terrible I can give you but if they will being hand drawn yes oh well when you're breaking it apart into multiple stones you're definitely using some tracing yeah okay so you would have your original drawing and then imagine these as stones so the drawing in Reverse you would definitely need to use that original drawing and trace it and break it up into the different parts like a graph or any kind of craft so you'd have you'd have this section would be traced from the original and then placed onto the stone for orange the same with the yellow yes so that original drawing really counts for a lot and when toulouse-lautrec is drawing directly on the stone and instead of making an original drawing on paper first the master printer might take an impression of that original drawing or multiple impressions and then break those apart you can always use printmaking itself as that as the original as the tracing mechanism and the transfer paper actually can be rubbed back onto another stone so when you use transfer paper it transfers a design it's printed from the mother stone onto the transfer paper and then the transfer paper can print onto another stone I've been wondering about the prevalence of the Japanese woodcuts at the same time were they in museums or where they had galleries or with where they did all all parts of the Parisian public be aware of them or had it too loose sort of come upon well a lot of the public were aware of the wood cuts and also Japanese culture in general from going to the international exhibitions and also from reading the news so in the 1850s when Japan was sort of opened to the outside world it had gone through a period of self-imposed isolation it was math Commodore Matthew Perry from Rhode Island who brokered the the deal basically that opened up Japan a forced Japan to open to international trade but the new government in Japan that came quickly after decided that they were going to take advantage of this and that they weren't just going to be treated by other people they were going to go and represent themselves international exhibitions also in galleries or really kind of trade houses that were set up in the West so we had some in the Boston in Boston and in Salem there were there were some in London Paris they were all over the place and some of the the Japanese collections that we have actually at this museum the roots of those are from this period as well with Bostonians going over to Japan and collecting in great depth and bringing things back here and that's why we have one of the greatest Japanese collections outside of Japan I remember at one of the previous exhibits someone's saying that the speaker saying that the original or one of the first posters of Lago Lu was really really big and on some of the really big posters did they need more than one piece of paper how did that work yes they did so the Lago Lu poster that we have in our exhibition is from the mat and we went to the mat to get that because we didn't have it in the MFA collection or the BPL collection but it is very rare I actually went to one other person who I knew had it as a backup in case the met who wouldn't lend to us and one of the big rarities about that one is that it has all three sheets that made the biggest version of that poster usually the top sheet of that combination of three sheets has been lost to time a lot of a lot we think a lot of that has to do with print collectors simply not having enough space to house all three all three sheets together so yes they existed on multiple sheets some of Toulouse attracts posters are on multiple sheets some of them look like they're on multiple sheets even though they're only on one sheet and that is because he really preferred to work with that bruise a hand press and in the encore studio when he was making his first versions of the posters so you would take a huge piece of paper and fold it in half to the size that would fit on that smaller press and so you'd run the thing through the piece of paper fold in half through multiple times to print one side of it and then you would flip it and run it through multiple times to do the other side and that's why those posters in the beginning of the exhibition of Erised Ebru won't look like they're on two pieces of paper but if you look more closely they're actually just on one really big sheet hi can you please explain the difference between the lithograph and a stereo graph you know I'm really not the best person to to explain that I just I'm so sorry I can't really you'll have to ask you have to ask one of the teachers at the s MFA to really get into that anyone else [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 4,451

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 63fk_UzcUxg

Length: 64min 42sec (3882 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2019