L’élégante Au Moulin Rouge c. 1908 - 1909

Édouard Vuillard made this mysterious image of a woman at the Moulin Rouge with pastels, maybe charcoal, on paper. You can imagine him, sketching quickly, trying to capture a fleeting moment. I really love this kind of art. It looks unfinished, like a ghost of a memory, but it’s also completely there. Vuillard probably started with a flurry of marks, those blacks and greys, finding the form as he went. I bet he layered the colors, rubbing them in with his fingers. The image is built up from the background to the foreground. That slash of orange light – what is it? It feels like a spotlight, or some kind of electric fire. It's so suggestive, this mix of colors, like a puzzle. What could it be? It’s interesting how the image relates to the work of other artists who used a similar vocabulary of mark-making, like Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec. Artists are always in conversation, inspiring each other, even across time. Each mark is a question, an exploration. And in the end, the magic is in that ambiguity, isn't it?