Édouard Vuillard

French painter and printmaker

• Born: November 11, 1868
• Birthplace: Cuiseaux, France
• Died: June 21, 1940
• Place of death: La Baule, France

Vuillard’s wide experience in graphic art for the theater taught him to paint large-scale decorations, and, through his experiments with the formal elements of painting, he helped the Nabis school of painting to fulfill its primary ambition: to gain acceptance for decorative paintings.

Early Life

Édouard Vuillard (ay-dwahr vwee-yawr), the youngest of three children, was born in Cuiseaux, France. After Édouard’s father retired as a colonial officer, he married Marie Michaud, the daughter of a textile manufacturer. He died in 1883, and his wife, Marie, went into business as a corset maker to support the family. The household, though frugal, was not poverty-stricken. Marie, Vuillard’s mother, worked hard and performed her daily duties with courage and a cheerful air. She remained close to her bachelor son until her death in 1928 when he was sixty years old and she exerted a strong influence on him throughout her life.

Vuillard’s habit of collecting colored boxes and pictures demonstrated an interest in art at an early age. He began his schooling under the stringently ascetic Marist Brothers, continued at the École Rocroy, then attended the Lycée Condorcet, where he met the two young painters who were to be the most important influences on him: Ker-Xavier Roussel and Maurice Denis. (Denis is given credit for “recruiting” Vuillard into the Nabis.) Vuillard failed twice in his attempt to gain acceptance at the École des Beaux-Arts, but he was accepted on his third try. After two years of study in the crude barracks atmosphere there, the three young painters gradually began to spend more time at the Académie Julian, where they studied under Adolphe-William Bouguereau and Tony Robert Fleury. At this new school they met Pierre Bonnard and Paul Sérusier, the student monitor (massier) and leader of the Nabis, a secret brotherhood of discontented students. The Hebrew word nabis means prophet, and these young men considered themselves to be prophets of Paul Gauguin’s radical new synthetist discoveries.

Life’s Work

The year 1889 marked an important turning point in Vuillard’s life. His first drawing was accepted for exhibition at the Salon, and this was the year that Gauguin, Émile Bernard, and their friends staged a significant exhibition at the Café Volponi. In 1889, Vuillard was still more interested in naturalism and the Barbizon school painters at the Palais des Beaux-Arts than in Gauguin’s ideas, but a year later Denis had succeeded in recruiting him as a member of the Nabis.

Sérusier was the early spokesperson for the Nabis: In reaction to photography’s encroachment on the domain once occupied by artists and in direct contrast to the attitude of the Impressionists, he maintained that painters to avoid becoming machinelike copyists should work only from memory. This practice was intended to simplify the forms and exaggerate the colors that nature inspired. This idea stems directly from the earlier concept that Bernard had persuaded Gauguin to accept. Bernard believed that the imagination retained only that which is essential and thus simplified the image because only the significant and the symbolic are retained by memory. This practice, he believed, generated a simplified, rather flat, silhouette and preserved the purity of color.

Denis had published an article, which came to exert an important influence on Vuillard’s direction, in 1890 in which he argued for the primacy of formal elements over content to convey emotion in the New-Traditionism: “[A] painting, before it is a war horse, a nude woman or some anecdote, is first and foremost a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order.” Consequently, late in 1889 Vuillard wrote in his notebooks that he had begun to work from memory, painting what he called “little daubs” (petites salissures). He painted these little daubs quickly using a flat, simplified technique sometimes with textured dots on small panels or pieces of cardboard. In 1890 he began to use raw saturated color in some of his paintings and in the programs he designed for the Théâtre Libre, but he never entirely deserted his earlier use of low-key tones of color, carefully adjusted in value to avoid strong contrast in dark and light.

Vuillard, like the other Nabis, attempted to exploit the symbolic to express emotion and experience. He wrote that a woman’s head created a certain emotion in him, and he wanted to paint only that emotion; he believed that details such as a nose or an ear were of no importance. Both the strong, raw color and the simplified silhouette much like the Japanese woodblock prints that were so common in Paris during this period were critical elements in this attempt to express emotion.

During the early 1890’s, Vuillard began to enjoy some success; the critics were writing about him, and several collectors began to buy his work. He had his first two shows in 1892: the first at the offices of La Revue blanche, the second at le Barc de Boutteville’s gallery. After 1894, his work was widely exhibited in galleries and exhibitions.

The graphic arts were enjoying a strong revival during the 1890’s, and Vuillard worked in several media: prints, stained glass, colored lithographs, stage sets, and advertising playbills for the theater. The playbills and stage sets including sets for Henrik Ibsen’s plays that he painted for the experimental Théâtre de l’Oeuvre are recognized as an important step in the development of his style.

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, Vuillard kept his pictorial space ambiguous and rather shallow nearly flat in the mode of the day: His designs and flat pictorial space often suggest tapestries. Like Gauguin, Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, and most of the decorative painters of his time who sought to avoid the reflective surface and the illusion of depth associated with oil paint, Vuillard preferred a dry matte paint surface. Consequently, he used distemper as a medium in the four panels and continued thereafter to use this medium almost exclusively in both his decorative panels and his easel painting. This medium, coupled with his tendency to build up his surfaces quickly without allowing time for the first coats to dry, has led to severe cracking in some of his paintings.

Vuillard was not interested in painting posed figures or picturesque views, so he acquired a box camera in 1897 that he constantly used, as some painters use drawings, to record the candid, lifelike visual information that he painted: informal groupings and conversations, in public or at home. By 1898 his paintings were becoming more complex, rather than simplified and reductive. He began, perhaps with the help of the camera, to record the cluttered details and patterns of interior settings.

After the turn of the century, Vuillard abandoned the shallow, ambiguous pictorial space and flat figures of his earlier paintings and began to paint street scenes and landscapes in which he depicted a considerable amount of depth. These paintings featured a more volumetric treatment of the figure and a more realistic, wide-angle depiction of space, much like the fish-eye lens on an early camera. Influenced by Paul Valéry, he began to observe and paint details with more complexity.

The Nabis disbanded toward the end of the 1890’s as the stronger talents achieved independent fame and no longer identified with the group. In 1899, at an exhibition of the Nabis and the Neoimpressionists at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, critics singled out Vuillard and Bonnard as the best artists in the exhibition. During the first years of the twentieth century, both Bonnard and Vuillard regularly exhibited and sold paintings at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery and consequently enjoyed a great degree of financial security. Vuillard was given many commissions for both decorations and portraits between 1910 and 1914. In 1905, the year of the Fauves and their color revolution, the critic François Monot wrote that Vuillard was one of the first colorists of the time. Yet he was often criticized for carelessness in technique because of areas left blank or treated too quickly. He left blank areas of warm brown cardboard to harmonize with his color, and this was sometimes criticized as an affectation, a passing fad.

During the last twenty years of his life, Vuillard’s work focused on portraiture. The composition in these portraits is often organized in traditional “compositional climax.” The bottom and particularly the top sections of the painting are simplified and composed of large inactive areas, while a transition is made toward the middle area of smaller more complex shapes and details, creating an area of visual activity. Toward the end of his life, his paintings moved toward realism, complexity, and detail, finally to create a writhing surface of detailed and complex minutiae. Yet, when Vuillard was consulted about the selection of more than three hundred of his works to be shown at the major retrospective exhibition at the Pavillon de Marsan in 1938, almost half of the works included in this exhibition had been executed during that early reductionist period before 1900. At the age of seventy-one years, Vuillard died at La Baule, France, on June 21, 1940.

Significance

Vuillard the most famous member of the Nabis school of painting as well as an excellent realist painter was best known for his “decorative” paintings of French gardens and interiors and his portraits of public figures. Vuillard disliked theory and, influenced by Gauguin, relied on personal symbol, sensation, and instinct to express his emotional reaction to experience. During the course of his early career, Vuillard simplified his reductionist form and silhouette with ruthless discipline and relentless restraint to eliminate all unnecessary detail, but after the turn of the century he reversed priorities and direction to create a complex image of activity and detail.

During the first part of the twentieth century, the crucial split between the painters of classicism and the painters of genre in France was exemplified by Vuillard, the genre painter, and Denis, the classicist. Though Andy Warhol has been given credit for having reversed priorities in the relationship between fine art and graphic art, his accomplishment was preceded by the successes of Gauguin and Vuillard’s group, the Nabis. Their efforts were directed primarily toward creating a decorative graphic art of such quality that it would have to be accepted in the same spirit, with the same respect, as the works of so-called fine artists. The success of this effort is demonstrated by the attention still accorded their work and their continuing influence on painters during the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Boyer, Patricia Eckert, ed. The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde. With essays by Patricia Eckert Boyer and Elizabeth Prelinger. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press and Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1988. This 195-page book is an excellent catalog of the Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum’s exhibition of paintings from the Nabis group of painters. Several sections are devoted to Vuillard’s place within the school, and it features a good chronology of the Nabis with 232 illustrations, forty in color.

Cogeval, Guy. Vuillard: A Post-Impressionist Master. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. Examines the entire body of Vuillard’s work and explores his association with the Nabis, Symbolists, and other artists. Contains numerous reproductions of Vuillard’s artwork.

Cogeval, Guy, Kimberly Jones, Laurence des Cars, and Mary Anne Stevens. Edouard Vuillard. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2003. This book accompanied a traveling exhibition of Vuillard’s work. It contains 436 color and ninety-five black-and-white reproductions of his artwork, as well as essays analyzing his work and a detailed chronology.

Marx, Claude Roger. Vuillard: His Life and Work. New York: Éditions de la Maison Française, 1946. Marx was Vuillard’s original biographer, an early champion of the applied arts, and he has written extensively on Vuillard, beginning in the 1890’s. The book (212 pages, 204 illustrations, eight in color) is well written and accurate.

Mauner, George L. The Nabis: Their History and Their Art, 1888-1896. New York: Garland, 1978. Though apparently a product of a subsidy press, this dissertation was written under the supervision of Meyer Shapiro. It is a solid scholarly work and the best-documented history of the Nabis school. Vuillard’s contribution is well documented, and the book features 326 pages of text and 159 black-and-white illustrations forty-seven by Vuillard.

Thompson, Belinda. Vuillard. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988. Brief and easy to read but accurate and incisive, this is an excellent book for the general reader. Contains 139 illustrations (about half in color). Documents his early life and training, his relationship with the Nabis, his success, and his role in the theater. A good select bibliography is to be found at the end of the book.

Vuillard, Édouard. Edouard Vuillard. Text by Stuart Preston. New York: Abrams, 1972. This is an excellent picture book with forty-six pages of text interspersed with seventy-three black-and-white illustrations, followed by forty full-page color plates, each accompanied by a page of text about the painting. In the back is a select bibliography of books and articles; most are written in French.