Volume 37, Number 11 · June 28, 1990
'A Sort of Intimate Whirlwind'
By John Updike
The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard
an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum May 18 to July 30, 1990
The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard
catalog of the exhibition by Elizabeth Wynne Easton
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/The Smithsonian Institution Press, 152 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Edouard Vuillard is generally counted among modernism's disappointments. The note of disappointment is struck by even so nonjudgmental a source as the Columbia Encyclopedia, which in the second of its two sentences on the artist says that his early paintings of home life 'have a brooding tension that was supplanted by works of a lighter, more decorative vein after 1900.' Like De Chirico and Kandinsky, he lost it, that old brooding tension we love so well, in a fussy middleaged pedantry, a mistaken attempt at refinement and broadening. Vuillard suffers from comparison with his close contemporary, lifelong friend, fellow Nabi, and name-mate Bonnard; as Bonnard aged, he moved south to the Côte d'Azur and got wilder and freer in his coloring, and gave modernism some of its most luscious masterpieces, breakfast tables and bathing women painted with a playful, incandescent fury that, after so much false fury in these intervening decades, still seems startlingly fresh.
Review, 2820 words
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