Original 19th century artwork doesn’t typically travel much, but this weekend, it’s making a trip for an extended stay at the LSU Museum of Art.
The museum will open its “Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1880-1910” exhibit — a showcase full of famous painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and other artists’ Parisian art from 1880 to 1910.
The exhibit will feature the original works of Toulouse-Lautrec and a variety of memorabilia, including other original works from avant-garde artists of the time period, rare shadow puppets and programs from Parisian theaters and cabarets.
Associate director of development at LSU MOA Sarah Cortell Vandersypen said she expects Louisiana French culture to attract people to the exhibit.
“We’re recommitting ourselves as an institution to showing Louisiana art,” Vandersypen said, “and the influences on Louisiana art, and there’s a really strong French connection in Louisiana. So we can talk about those cultural influences, and this exhibit starts that conversation.”
Vandersypen said it’s also important that this exhibition is full of original 100-year-old art because most people, particularly in this region, will never have the chance to see such items first hand.
“All of it is original from the time period, so when we talk about the Toulouse-Lautrec posters, it’s not like the poster sale on campus,” Vandersypen said. “It’s the original prints and lithographs they were making for the cabarets at the time.”
LSU MOA also will present workshops, lectures and other events in conjunction with the exhibit. Vandersypen said the museum wanted not only to do the show but to have people delve into experiencing French culture. So in connection with the exhibit, there also will be a French culinary series featuring wine and food tasting.
This art in particular is only making about eight to 10 stops in the U.S. and Canada for exhibition, LSU MOA being one of them. The museum had to book its spot two years in advance.
“Every couple of years, we’ll do that big blockbuster exhibition and this is it,” Vandersypen said. “So you get to see really fantastic art that you won’t see in the rest of the state, or maybe even country since this is coming from private foreign museums and collections.”
Vandersypen said the LSU MOA staff who are surrounded by art every day were excited when they unpacked this art.
Assistant director for collections management at LSU MOA Fran Huber said she was one of the staff members who was ecstatic to unpack the art.
Huber said aside from the art being beautiful with its quality radiating through the museum, it’s also intriguing because though it’s now considered classic, it wasn’t accepted at the time of its creation.
“All of this art comes at a time of French experimentation. There had been a system of academic rules in teaching art that had become very rigid,” Huber said. “About the middle of the 19th century, this group of artists in Paris started rebelling against those rules and the rigidity.”
Huber said she believes these 19th century artists changed a lot, not only within the French art community, but in modern art as well. She said the art is easy to take in, and some of it is filled with plenty of satire and caricature, which broke all the rules of the time period.
“Everything’s new, everything’s fresh and the energy goes from the artist onto the work,” Huber said.
“Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1880-1910” opens to the public at LSU MOA on Sept. 6 and closes Nov. 15.