Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s images of Parisian nightlife in the 1880s and ’90s are as emblematic as they are engaging, windows into a vanished world that feels strangely familiar. You’ve seen them, even if you weren’t sure what you were looking at or who the artist was. This fall, you’ll have the chance to see and learn much more, as one of his best-known paintings—At the Moulin Rouge, on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago—is featured at Mia in an exhibition of the same name. Opening October 12 in the Bell Family Decorative Arts Court, the show will include rarely seen works from Mia’s collection highlighting the artist, his circle, and his scene in the bohemian Montmartre neighborhood.
This month, you can get a taste of it in Mia’s lobby, where an 1899 lithograph of The Jockey is on view during Disability Pride Month. Two serious injuries and a rare skeletal disorder left Toulouse-Lautrec permanently disabled as a child, and during extended periods of convalescence he turned to drawing and painting. He moved to Montmartre as a young man and soon found community and camaraderie in clubs like Le Chat and, of course, the Moulin Rouge—even as he promoted them through his work.
The Jockey, however, depicts another form of metropolitan entertainment: horse racing. Set at the Longchamp racetrack in Paris, the image makes the sport as fantastical as the cabarets, the central horse depicted in an impossible gallop with all four hooves suspended in the air. The flatness of the image, the drastic cropping of one of the horses, and the rushing perspective of the jockeys racing away from us reveal Toulouse-Lautrec’s admiration of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which were popular in Paris at the time. Toulouse-Lautrec made good use of those aesthetic influences in creating his own imaginative visual style. You’ll have to come back to see more.