The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters and Ray Johnson Designs at The Museum Of Modern Art.

I was somewhat disappointed with this show that I saw the other day. I was expecting a boisterous swirling exhibition to match this great artists life and career, but instead I found a careful and timid small cramped display placed in the unspacious print and book galleries with works taken from the Museum’s collection. Maybe I had my hopes up that this would be a show on the grand scale of the recently closed Gauguin exhibition, but a clue that it wouldn’t be very grand was that there weren’t any members previews, a Moma sure sign that this was not a major exhibition. And it isn’t.  This is one of those Moma shows geared to the crowds of tourists that buckle and break my patience and it’s going to run forever, (at least to March).  Toulouse-Lautrec was probably the first artist I was aware of as a child, having gone with my mother to see the John Huston film “Moulin Rouge” back in 1952 when I was 5 years old.   I was so impressed and awed by it’s color and movement that it stayed with me throughout my life. At that age I was a bundle of questions that no doubt drove my mother crazy as she tried to watch the film. This is one of the films that influenced me, that made me want to be an artist and to make things.  Of course at only five years old I found Jose Ferrer as Lautrec scary, but oddly inviting. He seemed not that much bigger than me, and his distorted body made no sense to my five year old experience, he was like a monster from one of my childhood nightmares, but he sure could draw. I was also confused by all the women in the film, and didn’t understand his relationship to the prostitute played wonderfully by Colette Marchand, and I’m sure I gave my mother palpations when I asked her about their relationship. Then there was his death scene which was fantastic to me, as Zsa Zsa Gabor and all the people and performers who he loved appeared to him as he lay dying and the beautiful song “Where Is Your Heart” floated over the scene. All this was way too much for me to handle at that age and for years I was confused about what I had seen at the old Normandy Theatre in Borough Park Brooklyn, until as a late teen I saw the film again, and was once more taken with its intensity but this time I got it. What this exhibition doesn’t do (at least for me) is to transfer this intensity of Lautrec and his work to the cramped galleries. It’s a safe group of works   with the usual labels and notes giving us the historical lowdown and it has the usual look and feel of a Museum of Modern Art installation neat, clean and spiffy. To be sure there are some lovely works included, but there is also unnecessary filler, do we really need a display case of theatre programs by other artists and designers of the period, most of which are just ordinary?  The other show I took in was “Ray Johnson Designs” which was also dismal and disappointing and not because of the work. Shoved into a corner in the hideous “mezzanine” near the Moma’s third theatre. This “exhibition” and I use that term lightly consists of several display cases filled with   some of Johnson’s early mail art, flyers and graphic work for book covers and record albums with most of the work if not all from their Museum’s library permanent collection. This “mezzanine” by the way  might very well be the ugliest space in the entire city, clumsy and hard to get to if you don’t know your way around the place (the guard I asked had no idea where it was.) The Moma does Johnson a bigger disservice than a favor by this so-called exhibition. This is the kind of show that should have been installed in the print and book galleries, bigger and more expansive than a few display cases.