cas : cas presentations Dialogue on Toulouse-Lautrec May 3, 2001 Thursday, 3:00 p.m. Room 62, Krannert Art Museum 500 East Peabody Drive University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 3:00 p.m. Opening Remarks Welcome: Masumi Iriye, Assistant Director, Center for Advanced Study Introduction: Josef Helfenstein, Director, Krannert Art Museum 3:15 p.m. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Music Halls and Brothels, Aristocracy & Anarchist Reinhold Heller, Professor, Art History and Germanic Studies, University of Chicago Abstract: In his paintings and posters, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec frequently focused on the demimonde of Montmartre, especially the world of music hall entertainers and audiences, and also that of fashionable brothels. This talk considers these aspects of Lautrec’s work and views them in the context of his relationship to his family as well as to contemporary political situations of the 1890s in Paris. 4:00 p.m. Art for the ‘Universal Soul’--Toulouse-Lautrec and the Modern Metropolis Stephen F. Eisenman, Professor, Art History, Northwestern University Abstract: There is the appearance of a new mass audience for visual art in Paris toward the end of the nineteenth-century, and the efforts of artists to devise appropriately metropolitan forms and styles. Toulouse-Lautrec is particularly interesting in this regard, because he clearly sought to steer a path between realism (a tradition generally derived from Courbet) and modernism or expressionism (a lineage that may be traced back to Manet and the Impressionists). Toulouse-Lautrec’s most ambitious efforts in this respect, and for this reason probably his greatest failures, are his posters. Though Roger-Marx spoke of their appeal to the ‘Universal soul’, and compared them to “the art of the fresco,” they in fact played little if any role in the education or liberation of popular consciousness. UIUC faculty discussion panel organized by David O'Brien, Professor, History of Art Exhibition will be open until 7:00 p.m. This dialogue is held in conjunction with Toulouse-Lautrec: Artist of Montmartre, on view at the Krannert Art Museum through August 5, 2001, showcasing the Museum's substantial holdings of more than forty lithographs, posters, and drawings by the French nineteenth-century modernist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. For further information about lectures, tours, and films related to the exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec: Artist of Montmartre, please phone 217/333-1861 or consult www.art.uiuc.edu/kam.