Toulouse-Lautrec's Women of the Belle Époque
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I went to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition looking for calm.
It’s been an intense week; the semester is halfway over, which means the projects for my seminars need to be at a certain point of completion. When I saw that I had an hour-long pocket in my schedule on Tuesday, I decided to fill it with some Toulouse-Lautrec prints.
Toulouse-Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is an intimate exhibition of the French artist’s prints and posters. Despite its often-theatrical subject matter, I always find Toulouse-Lautrec’s work to be calming, like the Japanese prints that he studied.
On this visit, I was particularly drawn to Toulouse-Lautrec’s representations of women. They were caught in the midst of various activities: dancing, observing, commuting, relaxing, holding cats... These women made me feel peaceful, perhaps due their flat fields of color and the artist’s flowing use of line. I completely entered into these women’s worlds and forgot about my own reality for a sweet hour.
The exhibition ends this Sunday, October 30, 2016, so there are only a few days left to experience it!
This is an installment of this month's creativity theme of CALM. If you missed it, check out a description of the project here!
Toulouse Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (until October 30, 2016)
Address: 1380 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montréal ∣ Métro: Station Peel or Station Guy-Concordia (Green Line) ∣ Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 5pm
