Personal 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… (2023)