Customer Reviews

Toulouse-Lautrec : Reveries Series (Reveries)

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This is a small and brief (98 numbered pages) booklet, but enjoyable for what it is. Printing and paper bring the images to vivid life, and the interleaved text serves as much to thrill as to inform.

The images range from romantic or commercial to pandering and voyeuristic, as do so many of Toulouse-Lautrec's other works. Reproductions here include posters, drawings, pastels, lithos, and just about everything else this vivid mind used in making its marks. Subject matter ranges from the theater and dance, down through vaudeville and burlesque, to the daily life of the T-L's beloved brothels. Some of his most touching images show tenderness between the prostitutes in their tedious hours between johns - shifting mixes of sympathy and sapphism. T-L embraced his subjects with a clear-eyed affection that was wholly without romance, something few others have equalled.

It's an under-sized but enticing sample of T-L's work, quick and easy to enjoy, and widely available at very modest price. I recommend it highly as a first step towards passion for T-L's larger ouvre.

-- wiredweird