Nu de Dos Allonge 

Curator: Steinlen’s drawing, “Nu de Dos Allonge,” crafted with pencil, presents us with an intimate reclining nude. What captures your eye first? Editor: Well, there's something almost unfinished about it, a rawness. It’s a figure emerging from this cloud of pencil marks, lying back casually, almost daringly so. Like a daydream sketched on the fly. Curator: Absolutely. And note how the realism of the body contrasts with the suggestive lines that stand in for the bed or the floor. This approach reflects a tension in art during this time, negotiating realism with modern approaches to portraying subjects, as the labor needed for academic exactness became replaced by faster modes of production, echoing new approaches to manufacture, consumption and class divisions in turn-of-the-century Paris. Editor: It does feel incredibly modern in that way – capturing a mood, an impression more than a perfect likeness. The subject’s vulnerability, maybe even indifference is really coming through. Are we meant to empathize with the model, or view the figure with a cool detached observation? It’s all right there in the graphite. Curator: These kinds of figurative drawings allowed for more of an attention to capturing figures who weren't necessarily commissioned portrait subjects. Think of Toulouse-Lautrec’s cabaret singer drawings and posters, or Degas's many dancers, capturing slices of urban working-class life that moved from the peripheries of Paris society toward the artistic center stage. Editor: It’s so striking, isn't it, how something so simple – pencil on paper – can feel so profound, as if these modest, quiet observations carry a radical emotional charge. It's in these seemingly casual gestures that so much of life exists. Curator: Exactly, a direct connection to not just the final product but the conditions of art making itself. The labor. The mark-making, here for us to see. Editor: Ultimately, I suppose what remains are simply the many traces and reverberations between what is revealed and what stays artfully hidden.