The most noticeable thing about the paintings of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is not their often lurid colors or the ukiyo-e-influenced compositions. Nor is it their renowned subject matter: the lively, sordid, effervescent world of fin-de-siecle Paris.
Naturally, these elements are all "high in the mix" at "Toulouse-Lautrec and His Circle," a major exhibition at the Bunkamura looking at the life, work, and connections of the diminutive French genius. But these aspects are too well-known, practically to the point of cliche, so that the experienced exhibition visitor hardly sees them. Instead, what really stands out and, in the process, gives renewed interest to Lautrec's works, is his sensibility, the mind of the artist that the paintings reveal.
As one would expect, the show has several of his paintings — usually in thinly smeared and striped oils — a few sketches, plenty of posters and lithographs and a mish-mash of artworks by other artists who swam in the same late-19th-century Parisian milieu, including Edouard Manet, Pierre Bonnard and Edgar Degas, the latter of whom Lautrec apparently idolized.