Art - Goût - Beauté, Feuillets de l' élégance féminine, Mars 1929, No. 103, 9e Année, p. 18 1929

This page showing fashion designs was made by R. Drivon around 1929. It’s a lithograph, so the colours are flat and blocky, more about conveying information than anything painterly. Yet even here, the choice of colour, and the way they are juxtaposed, creates a mood, a feeling. I am drawn to the salmon-coloured dress in the centre. The soft lines and flat application of the colour is both appealing and somehow fragile. I keep thinking about the paper it’s printed on. Paper can be pulpy and soft, or brittle and hard, and it has its own colour, which plays into the overall feel of the lithograph. Here it’s creamy, like old parchment. The lack of depth is interesting too – it’s so flat that it reminds me of a painting by Alex Katz. In both, there is an emphasis on flatness and surface, a kind of deliberate anti-illusionism that draws our attention to the artifice of representation. Like all good art, this work embraces a kind of ambiguity, inviting multiple interpretations rather than offering fixed meanings.