What made Toulouse Lautrec a great artist was his amazing ability to capture people. In the show at the Phillips Collection, most of the posters are caricatures of loose women and lecherous sinister portly men. He could draw like an angel by the time he was a teenager, and he was able to capture this exuberant time and place. The Belle Époque — full of music and dance and life and debauchery with no rules – but the value in what he captured was immense. He didn’t live long enough to change directions or experiment with the innovations in art that he might have. But he hit his stride early and rode it.

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