Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Édouard Vuillard
French; 19th-century, 20th-century
New York, NY: Skarstedt Gallery (Exhibition: Édouard Vuillard: Early Interiors)
86%
Grandmother at the Sink. c1890. Oil on cardboard mounted on cradled panel
Damn. It's a joke on pointillism, obviously — Seurat taken past any point of logical conclusion. Or, it's like one of Vuillard's famous patterns has blown up and scattered itself across the whole of the canvas. What's remarkable, though, is that the red dots, while mostly seeming to exist beyond or in front of the image, at times also claim a diegetic function within it — they don't overtake the window in the top left (are they actually dappling sunbeams coming through that window? are they reflected light?) and they seem to respect the contours of the grandma's body and the basin before her. But then again, in the top right the dots are a a swarm, and they're overtaking the woman's face and arms. The point here isn't to try and litigate the "real" function of the dots for the representational logic of Vuillard's picture — at the end of the day they don't have a consistent representational function, and that's their brilliance — but rather to gesture at how Vuillard's "decorativeness" is (or can be, when it works as well as it does here) a structural principle set deep within his pictures that by turns undergirds and undermines their plasticity. (TFS, 2026)
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)
New York, NY: Skarstedt Gallery (Exhibition: Édouard Vuillard: Early Interiors)
82%
The Cook with a Candle. c1892. Oil on canvas
Often the indefinability in Vuillard's paintings comes out of the way his application of paint dissipates masses and blurs distinctions between forms, but here the ambiguousness is more structural — a result of the way light is interacting with space — and in that sense it's even more deeply rooted than is typical for this artist. The silhouetted outline of the stove appears to be right on the picture plane, but then the windows on the opposite side of the canvas seem (perhaps) to extend out further forward; the space between the faintly illuminated back of the cook and the far right edge of the painting hurls itself either towards or away from the front of the image, depending on which other forms you situate it against. Of course, there's still plenty of Vuillard's characteristic brushiness and daubs — on the fervid stovetop, during the darkest passages at center — but in their impact on the picture's coming-together as a totality, they're subordinate to the arrangement. (TFS, 2026)
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)
New York, NY: Skarstedt Gallery (Exhibition: Édouard Vuillard: Early Interiors)
73%
The Newspaper. 1896-1898. Oil on cardboard mounted on cradled panel
Vuillard often gave his pictures, so full of flux, some sort of anchor point, a spot where the colors and forms in their state of flowing into and out of each other could pause, recuperate. Seldom, though, is it as well-defined (overdetermined?) as the shouting red triangle of tablecloth that roots this scene at its lower right. It's a moment of unmitigated intensity uncommon for Vuillard, but it also disrupts the image at the same time as it grounds it — every other inch of the canvas refers back to this one loud shape, providing an odd and undeniable logic to the scene but also stemming the development of any other structural relationships. That one spot in this painting is perhaps "better" than the painting as a whole. It shows that the centering structures in Vuillard's paintings are better whispered than yelled. (TFS, 2026)
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
55%
Dining Room, Rue de Naples, Paris. 1935. Oil on board
This is not an exceptional Vuillard, mostly because it seems over-painted. All its objects are, for the most part, too "rendered," and there's very little of the painter's characteristic blending and elision of space. A good Vuillard confronts you first as the depiction of an undifferentiated atmosphere, and then it reveals the individual forms that comprise that spatial unity. This painting instead works up from forms to atmosphere, to its detriment. The unjustified ugliness of the palette is a symptom of this: the blue in the dish and the woman's collar and that one splotch on the wall behind her left shoulder looks imposed on the yellow-orange from somewhere outside it. Vuillard's brushiness, too, seems to have been layered on top of the scene, rather than to have emerged as an aspect of its coming-into-being. Honorable mention, though: the red tip of the wine bottle at the edge of the table, which is angled to the right slightly more than it ought to be. (TFS, 2026)
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)