At the Moulin Rouge

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At the Moulin Rouge is an oil-on-canvas painting 7/16 x 55 1/2 in. (123 x 141 cm) by French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, painted between 1892 and 1895. This painting depicts the Moulin Rouge cabaret in Paris. In this painting there seems to be a lot of tension and ambiguity while it’s capturing the sensibility of everyday life at this famous cabaret, which beside the face of the lady on the right side, is what initially attracts the viewer. The unique tones and angles in the painting convey a dreamy, almost hallucinatory feeling but there’s also this sense of realness and authenticity, which makes this piece, to almost feel like a documented photograph, a recapitulation of rowdy banquet scenes of the nightlife in Moulin Rouge. Around the table there are three gentlemen wearing hats of some sort and then two other women sitting with them. In the foreground there is an additional woman who appears to be sliding onto the right hand side of the canvas and she is looking directly at the viewer. This head is unlike any of the others in At The Moulin Rouge, both in terms of color and foreshortening. It’s grotesquely distorted by artificial lighting and provided by intense complementary shades of yellow and blue-green. Her face and the faces of all the other women are heavily made up, which makes them unnatural and almost artificial. On the foreground on the opposite side, we have part of a very large bar that is cutting us off from the conversation that’s going on at the table. The entire composition at this bar has a lot to do with it, feels very cold, very isolating as the viewer isn’t part of the actions and conversations that are going on even though we are here at the Moulin Rouge, we are not actively actually participating in what is happening. The bar itself looks somewhat distorted, perhaps because the picture plain has been torn up
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