Le Grand Intérieur aux six personnages (étude)

This oil sketch is a study of Edouard Vuillard's large-scale major work 'Le Grand Intérieur aux six personnages' (also Kunsthaus Zürich), painted in the same year. According to Guy Cogeval, Vuillard's finished painting bears witness to the marital crisis of Vuillard's sister Marie and her husband Kerr-Xavier Roussel, who was having an affair with Germaine Rousseau.[1] Vuillard's painting style, however, does not clarify this complicated story with his painting style; rather, the narration is inserted into a complex fabric of textile patterns, spatial contortions and merely suggested psychological constellations. In the free-form oil sketch, the content dimension is even more subordinate to the structure of the colour design developed on the picture surface. Vuillard's painting and oil sketch perfectly illustrate the concerns of the Nabis, who were under the influence of a new conception of art - strongly influenced by the Breton work of Gauguin. Now, art with its formal elements should serve the expression of the idea and therefore be symbolistic, furthermore also synthetic, subjective - and decorative. Reality, illusionism and trompe-l'oeil, however, were to be banished from art.[2] Vuillard gave his large composition in 1898 to his artist friend Félix Vallotton, who himself belonged to the Nabis from 1892 to 1899, but maintained his own position and preferred clearly contoured surfaces to the fluffy colourism of Vuillard and Bonnard (as they also strongly characterise his print works). This is beautifully demonstrated by two painted intérieurs by Vallotton from 1898, in which Vuillard's large painting can be seen: 'Femme en robe violette sous la lampe' as well as 'La Chambre rouge' (where Vuillard's painting can be seen in the mirror, but not laterally reversed).[3] In his paintings, Vallotton deprives Vuillard's composition of the painterly "peinture" of the original. He approximates the friend's painting to his own style of painting, which is far more determined by clear outlines, as he uses it in his two paintings for the depiction of the interiors in which he lets Vuillard's work appear. Whereas in Vuillard's work narration of content only goes as far as his fluffy colourism can carry it, Vallotton's Nabis art is thus conversely narration without 'peinture'. In Vuillard's sketch and painting, the composition is still entirely atmospheric, but in Vallotton's alienating quotations it is translated into a cooler, now fully modern idiom. [1] Antoine Salomon et Guy Cogeval, Vuillard. Le regard innombrable. Catalogue critique des peintures et pastels, Paris 2003, vol. I, nos. IV-214 (sketch) and IV-215 (painting), pp. 346-349. On Vuillard as a whole, see most recently: Édouard Vuillard 1868-1940; ed. by Dieter Schwarz, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur 2014. [2] See Gabriel-Albert Aurier, "Le symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin", in: Mercure de France, vol. II, no. 15, Paris, March 1891, pp. 155-165, here p. 162 f. [3] According to Guy Cogeval, see note 1, p. 347, Vallotton showed in the first-mentioned painting a preliminary state of Vuillard's picture, which the latter would have toned down in the second version. Source