This virtual exhibition is a digital version of the exhibition entitled "Toulouse-Lautrec. The Origin of the Modern Poster", which in turn, forms part of the Project called"The Picture on the Wall", which has brought together in Valencia one of the most important collections of posters in Europe over the past few years.

"Toulouse-Lautrec. The Origin of the Modern Poster" brings together the collection from the Musée d’Ixelles de Bruselas, in the Alfons Roig Salon in the Museo Valenciano de la Illustración y Modernidad (MUVIM), which belongs to Diputación de Valencia. The exhibition can be seen until 24 de diciembre de 2005, in the calle Quevedo, 10, from tuesday to saturday, from 10h to 14h & 16h to 20h and Sundays from 10h to 20h continuos.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Albi, 1864-Malromé, 1901) is considered to be one of the most representative figures of French neo-impressionists; creator of the illustrated poster form, a new artistic genre, Toulouse Lautrec demonstrated, as shown in this collection, his acute awareness of publicity format and put the expressive simplifications which this new technique allowed at the services of immediate legibility of the image. He thereby renounced the contemporary art form substituting it for a communicative art within Parisian society, where cabaret shows and café entertainment abounded and hence the poster.

The technique used by Toulouse Lautrec, related to that developed by Pierre Bonnard, is characterised at a formal level by the influences of Japanese prints. This tendency supposed one of the aesthetic alternatives, which, since the XIX century, was in stark contrast to traditional western academism. In Japanese prints, he discovered the expressive force of contrasting background colours, later adapting them to lithography.

The exhibition represents the totality of Toulouse Lautrec´s poster work: 32 works from the Musée d’Ixelles de Bruselas as well as the poster "La Gitane" from the Kunsthalle-Bremen. Among the most noteworthy is the series of posters for famous artistes of the times, Jane Avril y Aristides Bruant; those related to cabarets such as Le Moulin Rouge & La Galette; those meant for magazines and newspapers of the period, as well as others promoting commercial enterprises.

To view the Virtual Tour properly you have to use two of the most popular viewers: Quick Time for generate the virtual tour and Shockwave Flash to zoom in on the poster details. If you can see the header of this website you already have the flash player plug-in installed..

You can download the viewer from Quick Time here.

You can download the viewer from Shockwave Flash here.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivs 2.5 Spain License.

This Project has been made air possible thanks to the cooperation of the Museo Valenciano de la Ilustración y la Modernidad (MuVIM) and all those who set up the exhibition.

Both the images and the permissions to take the photos have been given by MuVIM.