Revisiting the genius of Toulouse-Lautrec at Chrysler exhibit

Few artworks have announced the arrival of a new talent so spectacularly as the eye-popping poster that introduced Paris to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Pasted up all over the city in December 1891, some 3,000 copies of this startlingly large, wildly original view of the notorious Moulin Rouge cabaret burst onto the streets all at once, seizing the attention of passers-by with a sight “so new and so completely unexpected that it was immediately noticed,” late-1800s French cultural historian Ernest Maindron observed.