Très Parisien, 1928, No. 2 : 17.-TRAIN BLEU.-Deux pièces (...) 1928

This fashion plate, *Très Parisien, 1928*, was printed anonymously in 1928. You can see it’s all about these blues, or rather ‘bleus’, since it is French. There's a real process happening, building color, adding dark and light. What I notice first is the flatness, like a Matisse cut-out, or maybe Stuart Davis. The hues feel good together, and it’s very graphic, but it’s also a set of gestures, I mean, those little dashes marking the pleats of the skirts. The whole image is built from these simple marks. It’s not about trompe-l'oeil, it’s about constructing a world from color. Those women are so cool, so Parisian, even though you can see the printing marks that make up their clothes. This image reminds me a little bit of Sonia Delaunay, with its graphic sensibility and its interest in fashion and design. Both artists are exploring the boundaries between art and life, abstraction and representation. To me, this piece shows that art embraces ambiguity, offering up multiple interpretations rather than fixed meanings.