One of the best things about The Museum of Modern Art's website is that many of the most exciting pastels in the museums collection are accompanied by wonderful, insightful reviews that place the painting in an artistic and historical context. Consider this passage on Degas' painting, At the Milliner's (pictured here): "Pastel, an important drawing medium at the end of the nineteenth century due in part to a new preoccupation with color, appropriately expresses, through its inherent fragility, the ephemeral encounter between two women of different milieus that lies at the heart of Degas's composition."

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