Viewing a painting of an interior scene at the Moulin Rouge from far back in the auction room had a disorienting effect on me, as if the image had materialized out of a distant desire and corrupted my sense of time and place. How many visits as a young woman had I made to Paris, to the arrondissement of Montmartre, and then walked down Boulevard de Clichy toward that historic cabaret which twirled a windmill on the roof as a motif of caprice? I knew the exterior of the Moulin Rouge so well, with its red hue like hard candy in daylight and the blades of its windmill illuminated knives at night. Yet, I had never gone inside the restored venue. The cabaret’s interior I had only seen through photographs, films that recreated its heyday at the turn of the twentieth century, artworks similar to the one now on the auction block, but never through my own entrance into the building open to tourists.
It seemed ironic that a painting titled Splendour in the Moulin Rouge would be auctioned off in the filthy white box of a rental hall. This was no Christie’s or Sotheby’s with wealthy buyers picking up works of art as investments. Here, the bidders were familiar with competition for limited resources and didn’t rely on the rulesets of auction theory for success. A quick glance at the attendees sitting in messy rows of metal chairs, plastic auction paddles at hand, confirmed the simple equation for the upcoming lot. Of the interested bidders, diminishing resolve and/or cash would reduce the number to two, and of them, one would win the painting of the Moulin Rouge because the want had proven greater than in the other.
Tonight, nothing had activated the want for me until the unframed painting appeared on the display easel up front as the final auction item. Post-impressionistic in style, about six-feet wide, the work showed a panoramic view of the cabaret during its height as a refuge for those with iconoclastic tendencies. On the left side of the canvas, four patrons lounged at a table with a red-haired femme fatale, a composition reminiscent of At the Moulin Rouge by Toulouse-Lautrec. The right side of the painting, though, differed from that renowned work. The stage was shown jutting into the foreground, throwing into relief a quartet of female dancers doing the can-can. Their black-stocking legs kicked up the pink satin of their exposed pantalets in a unison revolt against demureness, an action that in real life earned the cabaret the nickname, “The First Palace of Women.”
Before bidding started on the painting, the auctioneer gathered his staff onto the podium for a last-minute conference. This delay caused many of the resellers in the hall to pace in the narrow aisles. They came to these auctions on mass to buy things cheap for flipping to brick-and-mortar stores and online merchants. Earlier, they had been bid shading to keep the price low on some vintage items, Star Wars memorabilia, rare Rolling Stones albums. For the resellers, profit-margin fuelled the want. In this regard, they differed from the collectors in the hall, whose patience as they waited for the final lot epitomized their role as guardians of succession, overseeing the transition of a precious object from one generation to another. The previous hour, they had transferred to themselves a Qing Dynasty incense burner, a set of Victorian mourning jewellery, and other items. Their righteousness gave a boost to the want or perhaps it was their objectophilia. As for the rest of us in the hall, we didn’t qualify as resellers or collectors. We were just an eclectic bunch who showed up at these auctions and bid on things whenever stirred to do so.
Regardless of group affinity, we all came to attention when the auctioneer moved to the lectern to minister on material rewards one last time that evening. For Splendour in the Moulin Rouge, he announced a low opening price of $100, and the bidding started in increments of $25. A couple of regulars, a reseller and a collector, swapped the initial bids back and forth until I raised my auction paddle at $200 and broke their rhythm. More people then began to bid and some of them pushed closer to the painting up front, as if they were eager to enter that scene evoking La Belle Époque.
I raised my auction paddle again at $350 and wondered why I had never gone inside that cabaret. Certainly, I had intended to go on each trip to Paris during my twenties. I would stay at a hotel in the area to be within walking distance, hurrying by famous spots, Lapin Agile, the theatres of the Comédie-Française, focused on going into the Moulin Rouge for a matinee of their latest revue. Sometimes I would choose what I was going to eat for lunch beforehand from their posted menu, committing it to memory like a cuisine haiku, “Brittany Shortbread, Lemon Cream with Light Meringue.”
The bidding continued to heat up and I raised my paddle at $475. Come to think of it, at least twice I bought passes that included Parisian highlights, a cruise on the River Seine, a tour of the Louvre, with the pièce de résistance being dinner and a show at the Moulin Rouge. On every planned visit, whether day or night, the same thing happened. I arrived at the cabaret door. Then I walked past it.
More resellers than collectors were bidding on the painting now and I took the bid from one of them at $600. Strange, I had allowed myself proximity to the Moulin Rouge, but not entrance into it. Each time I walked past the door, I lingered close by, watching the Paris Hop-on Hop-off busses unload tourists who stared at the cabaret through their various lenses. I guess I also looked at the building through a lens—that of history. Standing there, I often tried to picture the evening when a horse-drawn carriage clattered to a halt and dropped off King Edward VII, who had come over to the continent to bow down before the dancer, “La Goulue.”
A woman suddenly called out from the middle of the auction hall and jumped the bid from $650 to $750, which caused a commotion, but I managed to grab the next bid at $775. The thing is, I always had an excuse ready to explain why I hadn’t gone inside the cabaret. My justifications were usually as basic as, “I wasn’t in the right mood for that event today.” The woman now jumped the bid to $900 and I figured she was a shill bidder, inflating the price of the painting for its consignor. Still, I raised my paddle at $925, determined not to walk away, not when that cabaret had come to me.
I decided to stand up to increase my visibility to the auctioneer. Doing so gave me a better view of the painting and I envisioned myself strolling into that scene of the Moulin Rouge, adorned in a daring silk moiré gown of the era. I took the bid at $1,050 and imagined accepting an invitation to join those habitués at the table and partake of the flowing champagne or maybe a glass of that Green Fairy, absinthe. Yes, I could see us all enjoying the performance together, nodding toward the can-can dancers in appreciation of the risks they took to flaunt the obscenity laws. As the quartet on stage raised their black-stocking legs in the air, I raised my paddle at $1,150.
Of course, entering an imaginary portal in a work of art couldn’t be equated with entering the modern-day Moulin Rouge. The cabaret at 82 Boulevard de Clichy welcomed people into a restored building, not into a time-machine. Tourists purchased tickets to be entertained by an illusion. I understood that concept. Didn’t I?
The bid hit $1,200, an outrageous amount for an auction item here, but when I raised my paddle again, I wasn’t thinking about the money. I was trying to remember what a friend who had visited the Moulin Rouge told me about it. I believe he said the place “brimmed with nostalgia.” That sentiment had never motivated my desire to go inside the cabaret. Curiosity about its heritage, a fascination with the Art Nouveau period in general, these things had inspired me. I raised my paddle at $1,325 and sat down.
“Nostalgia” was what I blamed for the glut of fake antiques on the market—and I had purchased my fair share before becoming more proficient at identifying them. With respect to the Moulin Rouge, I hoped it offered an authentic experience and I raised my paddle at $1,500. Not that there weren’t historic sites which took liberties with accuracy, employing contemporary touches here, using reproductions there. Once I got inside that cabaret, I might be tempted to search for faux objects, even point them out and declare, “Not real. Not real. Not real.” I suppose in that situation, I could still enjoy the stage show. Yet, when I raised my paddle at $1,625, I questioned whether it would be as thrilling to watch the can-can without its original subtext or attendant risks.
Doubts, of any type, act as a brake on the want when competing Bidder vs. Bidder and I could feel them slowing my movements as it came down to me and a collector. He took the bid at $1,725, and with some hesitation, I took it back at $1,750. If I no longer had the same desire to go into the Moulin Rouge, did I need a painting of it? The ambivalence I had met whenever arriving outside the cabaret door greeted me now in the auction hall. The collector took the bid from me at $1,800, and I took it back, albeit slower, at $1,825.
It wasn’t until the silence following the words “fair warning” that I realized the collector had stopped bidding. If he had raised his paddle again, I wouldn’t have countered it, so I can’t claim that the want in me had triumphed when the auctioneer waved his arm in my direction and shouted, “Sold for $1,825.”
I felt no elation at having won the lot, only the after-effects of an adrenaline rush that had hit at the start of bidding. With a slight tremor in my hands, I provided my payment information to the auction staff and went to collect the painting. Seeing anything up close that associates itself with “splendour” is always going to be different than viewing it from afar, however, I wasn’t prepared for the crudeness of the artwork.
I could now see that the patrons seated at the table were outlined in a heavy manner, which didn’t call to mind cultured living of that era, but rather lives of wasted hours, of false bonhomie. The can-can dancers, too, looked flattened into a single dimension, robbing them of their bold sensuality. If I had gone to the auction preview the day before and examined the piece, I would’ve noticed these aesthetic defects and not bid on the lot. So much for due diligence. I suppose if I had also gone inside the Moulin Rouge, I would’ve seen that a fantasy of La Belle Époque meant little to me, compared to the appreciation I had for that period of history.
In any case, as for the painting, it wasn’t the lack of charm that bothered me most. The work had all the tell-tale signs of a deliberate attempt to age it—scuff marks around the edges, simulated crackling over the image, obvious splinters in the wooden shims on the back. (I dated the piece to within the last decade.) Whoever painted it must have used Toulouse-Lautrec’s composition as a base before adding the stage and can-can dancers. Clearly, the fraudulent effects of age had been applied afterwards in order to dupe a bidder into thinking the piece was worth a considerable sum. It wasn’t.
I picked up the painting by the canvas stretcher and made my way back through the hall toward the exit. Passing the auctioneer and his staff, I felt self-conscious. It was as if they were staring at me, not at the artwork that had been designed to deceive, but at me, someone who had been taken in by a more subtle deception because they had not understood the want in themselves.