BASIL & ELISE GOULANDRIS FOUNDATION
PRESENTS
BELLE ÉPOQUE
CURATED BY MARIE KOUTSOMALLIS-MOREAU AND MARINA FERRETTI BOCQUILLON


Paris learned to shout in colour, and the poster became its voice. In BELLE ÉPOQUE, the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation follows the artistic poster at the moment it left the gallery wall for the boulevard, where Toulouse-Lautrec, Mucha, Steinlen, Bonnard and Chéret turned advertising into a new art of the street. In the effervescence of electric lights, cabarets, café-concerts and the glow of Montmartre, performers became icons overnight and a city in rapid motion learned to read itself in paper and ink. Posters, drawings, paintings and pastels, joined by period photographs and early films, rebuild the boulevards of a Paris of pleasure and spectacle, with the era’s inequality and political tension close behind.