Vuillard’s Interiors

Heightening the Domestic Drama: Vuillard’s Interiors

Jazmine da Costa, Princeton Class of 2009

Edouard Vuillard was a shy, family oriented, loving artist in the late nineteenth century. And yet he invented situations for his two favorite subjects, his sister Marie and his mother, that manifest a violent hostility between them that does not reflect their relationship in real life. Rather than painting the two women sewing and smiling at each other, Vuillard manipulated their relationship by placing them in front of backgrounds of busy, patterned wall paper that heightens the tension between the two women and distorts their real relationship. It is important to question why a man who so loved his mother, and went as far as to call her his muse (Kimelman 3), would represent her as hostile and why he would make the sister he adored rejected and empty. That Vuillard could produce paintings that were anything but tranquil despite his loving environment raises the question of why he would do so. Were there really undertones of hate in the family? Was Vuillard's manipulation of his sister a cruel joke? Or do these paintings reveal something deeper, like the artist's own deep insecurities?

After all, as an artist, Vuillard was more a complex and innovative than to simply paint what he saw in front of him. Vuillard created what he painted. Vuillard loved his family, but he had a hunger for drama that authors like Cogeval connect to Vuillard's links to the theatre of the day. (Cogeval 264) He seems to have wanted to create a symbolist drama in his paintings as if he were "determined to introduce his interest in misfortune, reinforced by his reading of Maeterlinck and Ibsen, into his home environment." (Cogeval 265) It was the dramatist in Vuillard who wanted to take ordinary family squabbles to a more developed, darker place. To do this, he personally sets the stage in his own paintings for drama to ensue, and when it is not really there, he creates it by manipulating the patterns on walls and clothing just as a set designer would manipulate a stage. He lights it dramatically and establishes his protagonist and antagonist according to how they are represented within their setting. Most importantly, Vuillard's backdrops for his scenes add tension to the scene between his two characters, in which Marie possibly even plays himself, enacting Vuillard's personal drama.

The Exhibit
Theatricalities
Early Attempts
Marie vs. the Wall
Shrouded Identity
Winner: Wall 2-0
Works Cited
About the Author

The Gallery
Edouard Vuillard: A Brief Biography
Vuillard's Self Portraits
True Reflections of Madame Vuillard
Vuillard in the Drama
Tranquility. but Still the Master of Manipulation

Images

Vuillard, Edouard, Self-Portrait (Autoportrait). 1887-1888. Private collection
Vuillard, Edouard, Madame Vuillard in Profile. 1888. The Art Institute of Chicago
Vuillard, Edouard, DinnerTime. 1889. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Vuillard, Edouard, La Berceuse.Marie Roussel in Bed. 1894. Muse`e Picasso, Paris.