BONN, GERMANY.-Kunstmuseum Bonn presents today Henri Toulouse-Lautrec - His Graphic Prints, on view through November 13, 2005. With a selection of approximately 100 lithographs and posters by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) from private collections, Kunstmuseum Bonn is proud to show a high point of 19th century art. Relatively late, after an expansive oeuvre of paintings and drawings, Toulous-Lautrec in 1891 found his way to the graphic print. In the ten years that remained to him, he produced 351 lithographs, mostly working directly on the stone in chalk or ink brush. He tapped this medium to reap completely new expressive possibilities for it and for poster art, becoming a trailblazer for the art of the 20th century.

Toulouse-Lautrec's historical significance, however, also lies in his unromantic view of reality. Theaters, caf�s, cabarets, bars, bordellos, carnival fairs and the gutter were the places where the artist found his subject matter in Paris of the belle �poque. Toulouse-Lautrec was one of the greatest portrayers of the human being. With an unerring precision, he showed a person not in an anonymous group, but as an individual. He was not a caricaturist, but a sharp observer of his environment, who depicted reality not with socially critical pathos or poetically transfigured, but as unsentimental and raw.