Taking Inspiration From Degas and Utamaro

Each week for the duration of the exhibition, we’ll focus on one work of art from Toulouse-Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque, on view Feb. 4 through April 30, 2017.

Divan Japonais_Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan Japonais, 1892–93. Crayon, brush, spatter, and transferred screen lithograph, printed in four colors. Key stone printed in olive green, color stones in black, yellow, and red on wove paper, 31 3/4 × 23 15⁄16 in. Private collection

Divan Japonais advertises the reopening of a café-concert located on the rue des Martyrs, renovated to be Japanese in theme. For this work, Toulouse-Lautrec adapted a Japanese aesthetic—flat cropped shapes, unusual vantage points, dark contours, and vibrant colors—featured in work like Kitagawa Utamaro’s The Nakadaya Teahouse. By the 1880s, Toulouse-Lautrec had seen ukiyo-e prints at Paris galleries and the Exposition Universelle. Like many of his contemporaries, Toulouse-Lautrec collected Japanese art and even ordered specialty supplies from Japan.

For the poster, Toulouse-Lautrec also modified key motifs from Edgar Degas’s influential painting The Orchestra at the Opera, such as the cropped view of a performance and the stage obstruction of the double bass. He shows Jane Avril as a spectator, clad in a black dress and hat, with her date, critic Édouard Dujardin, a great supporter of Japanese art. Both appear more engaged in their surroundings than the entertainment. On stage, distinguished by her long black gloves, is singer Yvette Guilbert, her head cropped by the curtain. Guilbert described the venue: “I mustn’t raise my arms incautiously or I should knock them against the ceiling. Oh! That ceiling where the heat from the gas footlights was such that our heads swam in a suffocating furnace.”

Paint What You Sense: Monet in Vétheuil

Monet_landscape on ile-saint-martin

Claude Monet, En Paysage dans I’île Saint-Martin, 1881. Oil on canvas, 28 13/16 x 23 5/8 in. Paul G. Allen Family Collection

Bright and warm, Claude Monet’s En Paysage dans I’île Saint-Martin (on view in Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Collection) depicts a nearly perfect day. Monet painted this scene in Vétheuil, a small village forty miles west of Paris, where he lived with his wife and two children, as well as the family of his patron, Ernest Hoschedé. In settling in Vétheuil, Monet hoped to find not only creative inspiration, but also imagery that could be translated into salable pictures that would replenish his dwindling financial resources. Filling the canvas with loosely applied dashes of brightly hued paint, Monet captured light and atmosphere—a goal shared by his fellow French Impressionists. One of the original members of that group of avant-garde painters, Monet painted what he sensed, not just what he saw.

Dispatches: Courier’s Perks from Paris

Louis Vitton Foundation 1_Vesela Sretenovic

Fondation Louis Vuitton

Courier trips come in a package of “pain & pleasure.” The former includes long hours of waiting in cold cargo areas with no coffee machines, at times delayed flights, riding in trucks, waiting for customs clearance, and frequent jet lag…but at the end of the tunnel, there are the pleasures of seeing new places and a lot of art! On a recent courier trip, we had the chance to visit the new Parisian museum Fondation Louis Vuitton, designed by architect Frank Gehry and opened to the public in October 2014 on the outskirts of Paris’s Bois De Boulogne. It is an amazing sailboat-like edifice made of glass and concrete that makes you feel small yet comfortable, showcasing contemporary art. In addition to the current exhibition of art from China, there are a few art commissions, including Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings for the auditorium, as well as Olafur Eliasson’s mesmerizing installation with sound. These courier’s perks make you alive and ready to jump on a plane again!

Vesela Sretenovic, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art 

Louis Vitton Foundation 2_Vesela Sretenovic

Fondation Louis Vuitton

Olafur Eliasson side by side_Vesela Sretenovic

Olafur Eliasson’s “Inside the horizon” (2014) installation

Louis Vitton Foundation 3_Vesela Sretenovic

Fondation Louis Vuitton

Ellsworth Kelly auditorium side by side_Vesela Sretenovic

Works by Ellsworth Kelly commissioned for the auditorium