Press article : "The simple things of Vuillard" - Gazette Drouot
"The simple things of Vuillard" - Gazette Drouot
- 7/19/19
- Paintings
- XX° century
"Anémones", 1907
Delicate anemones reflect a period of transition in the work of the nabi master, between the choice of a subject always decorative and a desire for light.
The 1900s show a clear change in the work of Édouard Vuillard, with light and colour becoming more vivid and intense. Is it the influence of his new love life with Lucie Hessel, the wife of his merchant and friend, to which he will devote magnificent works?
In any case, at the approach of the forties, he delivers a painting influenced by Monet’s impressionism. In those years, he paints L'Allée, a large painting (230 x 164 cm), today at the Musée d'Orsay. He did not, however, abandon the decorative element that made him one of the Nabi masters, when, together with his friends Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Sérusier and Ker-Xavier Roussel, they invent a new pictorial movement. Intimism is his element. Better than all the others, he knows how to draw timelessness from the everyday life of a bourgeois interior, even in a simple pot of flowers. This laminated painting on a panel, executed in 1907, depicting a delicate bouquet of anemones in the centre, on a piece of furniture barely sketched and on a brushed background in broad touches of beige, slightly bluish, expresses this fusion through the shades of red of the corollas, the light that fills the whole and the simple objects arranged on either side of the rustic pitcher.
Another constant, the use of glue painting, a technique generally used for theatre sets and which it will adapt to the painting of easel. Full of historical origins –, precisely that of Jos Hessel, who acquired it directly from Vuillard, that of Bernheim de Villers –, presented three times at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1949, 1968, 1990-1991), this cardboard fixed on a parqueté panel definitely has a lot of assets to be picked on the Croisette!
AUGUST THURSDAY 15, CANNES. BESCH CANNES AUCTION OVV.
Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), Anémones, 1907, glue painting on cardboard, laminated on parqueté board, 56.8 x 57.2 cm. Estimate: 60 000/70 000 €
