The Impressionist Line

From Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec

November 5, 2017–January 7, 2018

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge

1892
Lithograph
Clark Art Institute, 1968.17

In the late nineteenth century, artistic visionaries saw the drawn and printed line as a signpost of modernity. Long overshadowed by oil paintings, prints and drawings created from the 1860s to the 1890s have a different story to tell, one of artistic spontaneity and experimentation. This exhibition showcases the hallmarks of the "Impressionist line,” including drawings by Claude Monet, color woodcuts by Paul Gauguin, etchings by Édouard Manet, pastels by Edgar Degas, and color lithographs by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Laborers, performers, and racehorses populate these images in settings that vary from the French countryside and far-flung islands to Parisian cafés and dancehalls.