ISBN: 9788417173074
English. Hardcover binding
240 pages. Dimensions: 23 x 27.5 cm.
2 essays with illustrations and 115 colour reproductions of the works in the exhibition. Texts by the curators: Paloma Alarcó, Chief Curator of Modern Art at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum; Francisco Calvo Serraller, Art Critic and Professor.
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) never met. When the very young Picasso visited Paris for the first time in October 1900, Lautrec was already very ill and would die prematurely a year later. Despite this, Lautrec's radical work, the initiative to integrate high and low culture, art and advertising, which represented a way of understanding modernity, had a very powerful impact on the young Picasso. Through him, Picasso discovered the pluralism of modern society, which conditioned his way of understanding art and led to a new creative perception.
Although these affinities are well known, Picasso/Lautrec is the first comparative study of these two great masters of modernity. Through a hundred works organized around the themes that interested both of them - caricature portraits, the nocturnal world of cafés, cabarets, theatres, the harsh reality of marginal beings, the spectacle of the circus or the erotic universe of brothels - we can see the appropriation by the young Picasso of certain elements of Toulouse-Lautrec, but also the affinities existing between the works of both and the continuity of these resonances in the late work of the Spanish painter, which on the other hand represents the greatest contribution of the project.
