vuillard the window
Edouard Vuillard | l'Etang-la-Ville.com
During the late 1880s, a group of disaffected young art students in Paris formed a quasi-mystical brotherhood which they labeled the "Nabis" (Hebrew for "prophets") and which exhibited collectively through the next decade. The artists of this group, whose greatest exponents were Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, rejected the naturalism of their academic training. Instead, they embraced the revolutionary teachings of Gauguin after he had departed from Impressionism. Gauguin's "Synthetism," a branch of Postimpressionism, called for a synthesis of natural form and artistic feeling which emphasized the imagination. The Nabis' paintings, usually small in scale (especially Vuillard's), concentrated on decorative qualities such as patterns, simplicity of design, and flat fields of vibrant color with bold contours–all features of the present work–which were inspired by Gauguin and Japanese prints.
In the painting above, Vuillard has depicted a landscape in a manner similar to that of his interiors of the mid-1890s. Both have a spatial ambiguity created by the avoidance of indications of depth, and both focus on patterns and textures (of wallpaper, fabrics, and carpets in the interiors and of trees in the present work).
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Interior at L'Etang-la Ville, Édouard Vuillard, 1893. |
Vuillard's art challenges and plays with our peripheral vision. Interior at L'Etang-la Ville (1893) represents a pattern of black, brown, beige and blue dots that are repeated in the woman's dress, the wallpaper and the window curtain. At right, a combination of white and beige dots suggests an area of light coming from a window that is left open, bringing in a flow of air that moves the tablecloth. Although the repeated dots disallow the spectator's illusion of depth, the dotted blurriness matches our peripheral vision and suggests an illusion of passing moment. Vuillard's painting seems to float, even having an element of movement. It is as if the man had just opened the door, the woman at right had just got up from her chair to greet him, and the woman at left had just opened the window. As no area is painted on a precise manner, our eye struggles to find a point of focus. The eye takes momentary refuge on the non-dotted black clothes of the man and the woman at right and then moves on to the blue tablecloth and the red wardrobe. However, none of these elements satisfy our fovea vision, the center of gaze, as they lack a detailed visual acuity. Thus, Vuillard's technique of dots appears less specific than, for instance, Paul Signac's (1863-1935) or Georges Seurat's (1859-1891) pointillist technique.
La Jacanette à l'Etang-la-ville," peinture à la colle on paper, 71 by 90 centimeters, circa 1908
Edouard Vuillard. Window overlooking the Woods, 1899. Oil on canvas.
The Art Institute of Chicago, L.L. & A.S. Coburn Fund, M.E. Leverone Fund, Charles N. Owen Fund & anonymous restricted gift
The 12-foot-long Window overlooking the Woods is one of a pair of mural-like paintings Edouard Vuillard painted for the wealthy Parisian banker Adam Natanson. The second canvas, First Fruits, is in the collection of the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena. Although he depicted a contemporary view, Vuillard may have chosen a palette and ornamental border reminiscent of 17th-century Flemish tapestries as a means of connecting his decorative vision to the tastes of his patron, who owned several such tapestries. The painting's ambitious scale also reflects Vuillard's experience with theatrical design and popular panoramas, which were either displayed in circular rooms or unrolled before spectators, a portion at a time.
Despite the fact that he here reduced his landscape to a series of horizontal bands and simplified shapes, Vuillard still believed in the direct observation of nature. Window overlooking the Woods represents the area around L'Etang-la-Ville, a wooded, hilly suburb of Paris where the artist often visited his sister Marie, her husband Ker Xavier Roussel and their daughter Annette.
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