The post-holiday season is a great time to visit galleries and museums, and the Columbus Museum of Art has two colorful exhibitions that will be up together as the year begins.
Beyond Impressionism – Paris, Fin de Siècle: Signac, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec and Their Contemporaries has some outstanding works, including a good number of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) prints. Lautrec was renowned for his skill as a draftsman, as well a painter and printmaker.
“There’s a pretty good historical record of painters making prints,” says local painter and printmaker Sophie Knee. “Think of Goya’s Bulls of Bordeaux lithographs, made toward the end of his career, and at a time when lithography was relatively new technology.”
Knee’s work is a good example of the combination. She will be having an exhibition of both in October at Sharon Weiss Gallery.
“Fast-forward a generation or two, and lithography has become the state-of-the-art color printing medium, and Toulouse-Lautrec uses it to create posters that are simultaneously advertising and art,” Knee says. “My prints, like my paintings, begin as drawings, although I don’t see drawing as an exercise in imitating reality in two-dimensional space. I am interested in how the world is, but not in such a literal sense.”
I hope you can get down to the museum soon and get a blast of color and light from these exhibitions.
Closing Jan. 21: Beyond Impressionism – Paris, Fin de Siècle: Signac, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec and Their Contemporaries
CMA is the only U.S. venue for this extraordinary exhibition.
Closing April 22: James R. Hopkins: Faces of the Heartland
Michael McEwan teaches oil painting classes in his Summit Street studio. His paintings are available exclusively from Keny Galleries. Learn more at www.michaelmcewan.com.
RELATED READS