Vuillard, Painting Takes the Stage

Musée d’Orsay will devote a major exhibition to Édouard Vuillard, focusing on a central but less explored aspect of his work: his relationship with the theatre. Vuillard. Théâtres intimes, the first monographic exhibition dedicated to the artist in France for almost twenty-five years, traces this connection from the early 1890s to the late 1930s. Organised with the Phillips Collection in Washington, the exhibition will subsequently travel to the United States. Born in 1868, Vuillard was one of the leading figures of the Nabis, the group of young artists who, at the end of the 19th century, challenged naturalistic representation through flat surfaces, colour and decorative patterns. He is best known for his domestic interiors, often constructed through dense arrangements of wallpaper, fabrics, furniture and figures that seem to merge with their surroundings. The theatre provides a different perspective from which to examine this painting. Vuillard was an avid theatregoer. He frequented cabarets and café-concerts, attended classical tragedies and followed the Symbolist and avant-garde experiments that animated the Parisian stage in the 1890s. But his relationship with the theatre was not confined to the audience. Closely involved with some of its most innovative circles, he worked behind the scenes, creating programmes and stage sets, while actors, playwrights and critics became regular subjects of his work. This experience also entered his painting. Vuillard’s interiors are often organised like theatrical spaces: figures occupy enclosed settings, furnishings define the field of vision, while curtains, doors, tables and walls structure the composition. The boundary between the stage and private space thus becomes one of the themes explored by the exhibition. Vuillard’s relationship with the theatre continued throughout his career. In the early decades of the 20th century, he also painted figures from the world of boulevard theatre and received major decorative commissions for the interiors of two Parisian theatres, once again choosing the world of performance as his subject. Théâtres intimes therefore traces more than fifty years of exchanges between painting and the stage, examining the extent to which Vuillard’s experience of theatre influenced his construction of space, his choice of subjects and his decorative work.