The Impressionist Line: From Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec

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 will showcase 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.   

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website 

IMAGE: Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917), Entrance of the Masked Dancers, c. 1879. Pastel on paper. Clark Art Institute, 1955.559

Whether or not you go, you can bring the exhibition into your home. The exhibition catalogue,The Impressionist Line from Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec: Drawings and Prints from the Clark offers a new look at works by notable French artists represented in the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Color reproductions of fifty-eight works—ranging from chalk drawings by Charles François Daubigny and Edgar Degas to woodcuts by Paul Gauguin and lithographs by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—accompany important reconsiderations of well-known works and print series. Essays by five prominent scholars consider the political, social, cultural, and market conditions that governed and motivated printmaking and drawing and examine how key artists contributed to the development of the graphic arts in 19th-century France. The volume concludes with a complete checklist of works included in the accompanying exhibition.

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