Skarstedt is proud to present Édouard Vuillard: Early Interiors. Spanning the full breadth of his Nabi period from circa 1890 to 1905, the exhibition brings together important examples from public and private collections that trace Vuillard’s exploration of light, color, and pattern during this pivotal period of his career.
Unlike some of his Nabi peers who employed mystical symbolism or exotic subject matter, Vuillard tightly focused his gaze on the domestic interior and its seemingly mundane activities. The close quarters of his family apartment— which also doubled as his mother’s corset atelier—became Vuillard’s principal theater, where he observed the comings and goings of friends and clients, the daily rituals of family life, and his mother and sister’s quiet labor in the atelier. Yet, despite their intimacy, Vuillard imbued these familiar rooms with a certain eeriness as spectral figures appear in shadowy doorways and faceless women hunch over their fabrics. These claustrophobic interiors often hint at tense family dynamics, particularly the strained relationship between Vuillard’s mother and his sister, Marie. For instance, the arrangement of the three ghoulish figures in The Flowered Dress (1891) suggests emotional distance rather than maternal intimacy. However, this implicit psychological or narrative tension is subsumed by the lyrical rhythm that dances across the surface of the canvas as Vuillard juxtaposes flat planes of color with efflorescent passages of pattern.
For Vuillard and les Nabis, the figurative or representational dimension of painting was secondary to the formal relationships between color, line, and pattern, as Maurice Denis had famously articulated in 1890: “Remember that a painting—before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or an anecdote of some sort—is above all a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.” As John Russell points out, Denis was not advocating in favor of pure abstraction, but rather “a kind of painting which would combine the tension of dexterous flat patterning with the fullest possible realization of the given subject-matter. It was a matter of ‘and’, and not of ‘either/or’.” It is this tension between a persistent figuration and an emergent abstract pictorial order that animates Vuillard’s interiors, as the viewer is constantly forced to switch between objective and non-objective modes of perception.
Although Vuillard repeatedly depicted the familiar rooms of his social and family life, the early interiors are full of visual paradoxes, skewed perspectives, and spatial ambiguities. For instance, although the arrangement of the four figures in The Drawer (1893) within the receding hallway seems to imply a certain spatial relationship, the lack of shading throughout the composition undermines this illusion. The distorted perspective and the complex interplay of flat planes of color and areas of intense pattern transform and flatten the architectural space as the composition decomposes into a geometric network of abstract shapes. Furthermore, although the young girl in the foreground is the focus of the scene’s narrative drama, even she almost completely disappears into the black dress of the woman behind her. Divorced from a narrative function, her silhouetted figure becomes a sinuous arabesque within the otherwise rectilinear composition. Perched on one foot, this black silhouette embodies the secret lyricism of Vuillard’s early interiors, which constantly flicker between flatness and depth, recognizability and obscurity, figuration and abstraction.
As the viewer’s eye repeatedly shifts between these two registers, Vuillard’s highly ordinary rooms become the stage for what Katharine M. Kuenzli refers to as the “defamiliarization of the everyday.” Deeply immersed in the Symbolist, artistic and intellectual milieu of fin-de-siècle Paris, Vuillard aimed to reawaken the mystery of everyday experience, to reveal the latent quality of abstraction that pervades even the most ordinary scenes. As his friend, Romain Coolus wrote, “Vuillard ... took pleasure in bringing out the secret poetry, the deep harmonies ... that are contained even in the most familiar objects. A tablecloth and a carafe on a table, a bit of fabric on a chair, the sad paper covering a wall, a dress just emerging from a corner—any of these suffices for him to acknowledge the wealth of emotion we can all call forth from everything around us ... if we know how to see.”