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)
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 an impressive 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 lightness of hand and streakiness, but the direction of the grain shifts from background to bedframe to vestments. If all of this amounts to something a notch less effective (because a notch dryer, more diagrammatic) than Vuillard's fuller, decorative pictures, it nevertheless demonstrates what the bones of this artist's highest achievements are. (2025)