Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Édouard Vuillard
French; 19th-century, 20th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
84%
The Fireplace. 1901. Oil on paper mounted on canvas
This scene of Vuillard's mother reading by the fire — a tilty Symbolist arrangement par excellence — hangs together against enormous compositional odds, and in ways that make its daubs and blendings seem somewhere close to necessary. Starting from that bizarrely cropped, massive, paper-flat anchor of a body at left, the scene contracts nervously rightwards down towards a point where the corner moulding meets the floor or… wall? Here Vuillard’s decorative impulse manifests as a strength of design: painterly elisions in this room’s architecture close out the picture at right — opposite the sitter — but like her they are weighted low, hurling the mantel back across the frame into that giant lap. And there, the way that void of a newspaper, stilly angled against the painting’s active lean, sucks in the colors around it and sets off the whole composition’s fall to the right… (TFS, 2023)
Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery
82%
Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poë. 1891. Oil on paper mounted on panel
Given how obsessed he tended to be with texture and pattern, it's easy to forget that Vuillard was a gifted draftsman, which is bared in this painting. The solidity of the bed and the book and the gray monochrome wall is a wonderful excuse for the pile of lines that makes up Lugné-Poë, who manages to be both sinuous and angular in equal measure. That said, this painting's linework is less an end in itself than Vuillard's means towards pushing every aspect of his composition out onto the picture plane. The hard red border around the sitter serves to differentiate figure from ground without — and this is the rub — establishing any sort of hierarchy between them. Brushwork furthers this effect: everything is painted with the same streakiness and lightness of hand, but the direction of the paint’s “grain” shifts between background, bedframe, and vestments. If this all amounts to something a notch less effective (because a notch dryer, more diagrammatic) than Vuillard's fuller decorative pictures, it nevertheless shows us what the barest bones of his pictures actually are. (TFS, 2025)
Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art
53%
Place Saint-Augustin. 1912-1913. Distemper on brown paper (53%)
For a painter of intimacy and all sorts of interiority like Vuillard, scaling up — this here is a large piece — could present issues. (Bonnard occasionally suffered from the same problem.) Place Saint-Augustin is a noncommittal painting, and that's because of its size. All the elisions and collapsing spaces of Vuillard's little interiors have here given way to large blocks of color and countless atomized items that fail much to interact. Vuillard's brushstrokes are too adamant, his figures too severe. There are many moments of resistance in this picture — the orange light dappling that column, the white dog would-be merging with the cobblestones — but there's no absolute moment of resolution for all the tension, so the whole image seems to be pushing up against itself but never settling into a groove. The female up front, it seems, ought to have been the picture's fulcrum, but her dark coat is too much of a value contrast, and she somehow doesn't press up against the surface of the painting as much as it seems she should. Finally, there's too much weird energy in the midground that doesn't adequately disperse either backwards or forwards (fruit vendors, carriages). This is an uncharacteristically clunky work by Vuillard. (TFS, 2025)