La Parisienne (20) 1902

Jacques Villon made this print, La Parisienne, sometime in the early 20th century, and you can see how he’s just letting the plate do its thing. The aquatint gives it this dreamy, almost dissolving look, like a memory. Look at the chair. It's all rosy and soft, made of quick, light touches, but it holds the whole picture together. It’s interesting to see how Villon uses a kind of shorthand here, suggesting details without fully defining them, which reminds me of Vuillard and the way he captures fleeting moments of modern life. There is this beautiful sense of light and airiness and it has an unfinished quality, embracing ambiguity. Villon comes from a family of artists, including his brothers Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. Each explored different avenues of modernism, but here we can see how Villon is in conversation with the Impressionists. It makes you think about the push and pull between tradition and innovation in art.