On paper, an encyclopedic exhibition of the lithographic work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is a grand idea. The new exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris: Selections from the Baldwin M. Baldwin Collection at the San Diego Museum of Art presents nearly 100 of the 19^th-century artist’s printed works on paper.

The Baldwin Collection of Lautrec's work was gifted to the museum in 1987. The artist’s street posters printed to advertise the Moulin Rouge and his lithographed crayon sketches of friends, horses and loves are all included in this exhibition. The collection is only on exhibit until December; then the museum will begin the process of conserving and electronically documenting the entire collection of works.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born to a noble French family. After a carefree athletic youth, at the age of 15 he suffered two minor falls that each broke one of his legs. Lautrec’s brittle legs never healed properly and became painfully stunted because he was afflicted from a genetic bone disorder.

He had a penchant for drawing, and after failing the baccalaureate due to a poor marks in French, he eventually pursued art instruction at the ateliers of Leon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon, which were both located in the bohemian district of Montmarte--filled with dance halls and prostitutes, and was home to the artsy crowd.

Lautrec eventually succumbed to the decadent charms of district and sketched and painted its cabaret entertainers. Lautrec produced his first street poster “Moulin Rouge: La Goulue” (1891) to advertise his dancing muse Louise Weber, better known as La Goulue (the Glutton—for her enthusiasm of life) and her chaotic dancing at the Moulin Rouge. Because the poster's innovative design used bold sized figures thrust forward toward the viewer with small scale type, it became highly influential making both Lautrec and La Goulue famous. The enormous lithographed poster in the exhibition is made of three large pieces of paper glued together and has a stamp permitting it to be posted on the street.

Lautrec’s posters and prints are on display in the museum’s large temporary exhibition galleries. Famous images of dancer Jane Avril, actor Aristide Bruant, and female acrobat clown Cha-U-kao are displayed in the high walled galleries along with many intimate lithographic printed drawings of Lautrec's friends and of prostitutes. A slim gold painted picture rail crowning the gallery walls to visually reduce their scale cheapens the exhibition rather than make it more intimate. Other design details such as a lonely pair of drapes and oddly hung chandeliers call even more attention the cavernous scale of the gallery in relation to the intimate artworks.

Each major and minor print is encased in a bourgeois corporate gallery gold frame, and with a minimum of intrusion, gold frame after matching gold frame trudge across the long expanses of buttercup hue painted gallery walls. By context, each matching gold framed work becomes the equal of its equivalent rendered and framed neighbor—no better, no worse with no highlights and no low lights. To vainly try and break up the tediously designed exhibition one wall of the gallery is painted a cheap red hue and another is painted a somber green. This cold modern style of picture hanging creates a monotonous atmosphere that both sanitizes and sucks out all the breath from imagery depicting the seamy night life of Paris.

This cold exhibition should have been better edited or housed in a more intimate space. Unfortunately, this encyclopedic exhibition of Toulouse-Lautrec’s printed works has all the joie de vivre of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.