Une redoute au Moulin Rouge (A Gala Evening at the Moulin Rouge)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Lithograph in black on wove paper

Museum of Modern Art

Une redoute au Moulin Rouge depicts a festive carnival parade at the famous Montmartre dance hall, featuring two of Lautrec's iconic recurring figures: the dancer La Goulue and the female clown Cha-U-Kao, shown riding at the front of a procession of costumed performers. Created to commemorate the autumn gala celebrating the Franco-Russian alliance of 1893, the lithograph exemplifies Lautrec's mastery of the medium and his facility for capturing the energy and spectacle of Parisian nightlife with spare, incisive line and compressed spatial composition. Lautrec, born Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa in 1864 into the French aristocracy, became the defining visual chronicler of Montmartre's Belle Époque cabaret culture, working in oil, drawing, and lithography with equal distinction. Published in a small edition by the dealer Edouard Kleinmann, this print stands as a document of both Lautrec's graphic originality and the vivid social world he inhabited and depicted without sentimentality.