Congratulations! Toulouse-Lautrec Poster Contest Winners

Our judges were blown away by the quality and variety of submissions to our Toulouse-Lautrec poster contest! We asked participants to show us what the belle époque of today is in a modern-day poster, using Toulouse-Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque as inspiration. Without further ado: here are the winners! Thanks to everyone who submitted. These five posters, along with a selection of staff favorites, will be on view at Phillips after 5 on April 6. 

GRAND PRIZE WINNER: Carolyn Wright 

“As an untrained artist who really only went to school to learn how to teach others about words and stories, any foray into art is an experiment for me. Toulouse-Lautrec’s work is as accessible for me as it was for Paris.  Like Toulouse-Lautrec, I’m drawn most to capturing people: their expressions and their reactions to the world around them, showcasing movement and joy when I can. I love to showcase the resilience and talent of youth the most, probably because the majority of my day is spent convincing children that their potential is infinite and their skills extraordinary. I used cut paper and brush tip pens to put a modern spin on Toulouse-Lautrec’s signature style.” 

HONORABLE MENTION: Sam Feigenbaum 

“What I’ve always loved about Toulouse-Lautrec was his deeply humanizing affectation towards the private lives of the women close to him. All over Europe, artists of great renown are painting women as high-class objects of desire, and here is Toulouse-Lautrec: painting low-class objects of desire as women. And while his lithographs are more conservative than his paintings, what I see Toulouse-Lautrec drawn to today is a curiosity with what the most resilient women in his life would’ve been drawn to. So I made a poster, with deference to the greatly talented artist, of a women’s march movement in his style.” 

HONORABLE MENTION: Victoria Chao 

“Paying homage to the whimsy of Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters’ typography and the drama of his subjects’ clothing, this piece envisions the belle époque of today as a social media fueled era of experience-seeking over material-possessing. A musician stands onstage surrounded by a sea of flashing smartphones, posed similarly as Toulouse-Lautrec did in many of his posters—slightly off-center with movement in both the foreground and background, but with the focus always on the colorful subject.” 

HONORABLE MENTION: Daniel Venne 

“This poster design is an update of Toulouse-Lautrec’s images of dance halls and night-time gathering spots. Rather than a depiction of a specific nightclub, this is for the ‘bar crawls’ that partiers enjoy—specifically one that might take place in Dupont, home of The Phillips Collection. The young woman’s head-wrap is a nod to the scarf worn by the performer Aristide Bruant in Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters. Although today’s nightclubs are less likely to have a real star appear, the two partiers in the background seem to see themselves as stars—taking a selfie.” 

HONORABLE MENTION: Stephen Breighner 

“[My poster is done in the loose style] that was Toulouse-Lautrec’s style; vague in some respects yet tight in others, especially the women, great lines, great  impressions amidst unusually odd-colored backgrounds, such as  greenish-yellow or yellow. I wonder if it represented the atmosphere he felt in places such as the Moulin Rouge or was more to do with an absinthe-induced haze, or both. Heavy contrast as well. My entry depicts a young woman on her way into the Apres Five at The Phillips Collection with the date of the April edition.”