Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, Poster for the tour of Le Chat Noir, 1896
Maurice Denis, Attitudes are Easy and Chaste (Les attitudes sont faciles et chastes), 1899
Henri Gabriel Ibels, At the Circus (Au cirque), 1893
The Van Gogh Museum has been collecting fin de siècle (1890-1905) prints since a spectacular purchase in 2000, when the museum acquired 800 prints from a German private collection, courtesy of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation.
The collection is still being expanded through purchases. In recent years, the emphasis in collecting has been more on the printmaking of a generation earlier: the impressionists and other contemporaries of Vincent van Gogh. The unique corpus now runs about 2,000 prints.
Printmaking in Paris
Printmaking was all the rage among fin de siècle artists. Many artistically high-quality prints were made. Prints were traditionally mainly used as a way of reproducing paintings and drawings, but all that changed around 1890.
More and more emphasis began to be placed on artistic quality and printmaking became an art form in its own right. Virtually all the French modern artists (big names like Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, the Nabis and Steinlen) experimented with lithography, etching and woodcuts.
The beautiful and often colourful artworks that resulted were not just displayed in galleries or the homes of collectors, but all over Paris. Everyone came into contact with them, in the form of posters, theatre programmes, sheet music and books, which artists designed on a large scale. In this way, they set out to integrate their art into daily life.
