The high period of poster art was celebrated last week in Manhattan. Hanging on the Norlyst Gallery walls were some 37 of the bold-hued works which peeled off Parisian litho-stones in the '80s and '90s and plastered the boulevard kiosks of those gaudy decades.
That was a period when the top French painters recognized no distinction between commercial and "pure" art—and when many took advertising commissions. Inevitably dominating the show, as he did the posters of his time, was the work of stunted, aristocratic Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa, who put his hand to almost...
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