Toulouse Lautrec

While being more than just am art form or style of design, Art Nouveau was present in many different facets of life at the time. From street lamps to furniture and from posters to sculpture, Art Nouveau dominated the late eighteen hundreds. Art nouveau was characterised by its inspiration from the natural world and its use of curvilinearity.

Arguably most well-known for his prints and posters, Toulouse Lautrec was a French painter of the post-impressionist era. Toulouse often depicted the many aspects of his theatrical life in his work.

This image here is a poster for the ‘La Goulue, concert balll’. In terms of our themes, I choose to prioritize movement for this piece. The first and possibly most obvious reason I hose movement is the dynamic nature of the piece.  If I were to deconstruct this piece into the formal elements that compose it, we could clearly see, for one, the use of line in this work. Deriving  from the Japanese prints, the bold and curvilinear lines have a strong effect on this piece and many pieces  done in the Art Nouveau style. These lines make this piece dynamic, the lines themselves appear to be caught in motion.

Something not to overlook would be the use of type at the top of the poster. The artist, Toulouse, has chosen to use repetition in the word Moulin Rouge. While his reasons are his own, I feel like this repetition has only added to the movement found in this piece, which makes sense considering the dynamic nature of the Moulin Rouge.

Movement can also be found in a more subtle detail of the piece. The artist has chosen to split this poster into three parts. Foreground, middle ground, and background. While one could argue that is a very common decision for most artwork, in this work, these different grounds have be joined together through the use of a single point perspective.  By using this perspective, our eyes seem to move through the scene as if we were in the Moulin Rouge itself. This is the detail I personally enjoy the most. What better way for a poster to work, than making the viewer feel so immersed in the place it is advertising.  

References:

Image:[http://ipaintingsforsale.com/artist/henri_de_toulouse-lautrec.html]

toulouse-lautrec-foundation.org-2013 [http://www.toulouse-lautrec-foundation.org/][Last accessed on 28th October 2013]