Another constraint is the need for a concise, efficient precision in the descriptions
of paintings which are going to be held up for auction.
Feneon was widely considered the best French art critic since Baudelaire; here, as in the Faits Divers, he is finding ways to give both the exact information required, and within such narrow limits, to create via a written style and an aesthetic eye the invitation to the potential buyer to "both read and see," as W C Williams has it in Spring and All. Williams' book is dedicated to the painter Demuth and makes use of a black and white newspaper reproduction of a painting by Juan Gris.
The perceptual actions in the writing make visible in the reader's eye both the words and the painting as black and white "negatives" which are "developed"
into color pictures.
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| Fig. 1 Édouard Vuillard, Le corsage rayé, from the Album series, 1895. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon (1983.1.38). Digital image © 2002 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris |
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| Fig. 2 Édouard Vuillard, L'album (detail), from the Album series, 1895. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Partial Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 2000 (2000.93.2). Photograph © 1994 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris |
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| Fig. 3 Édouard Vuillard, La tapisserie, from the Album series, 1895. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Estate of John Hay Whitney (294.1983). Digital image ©The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY. © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris |
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| Fig. 4 Édouard Vuillard, La table de toilette, from the Album series, 1895. Oil on canvas. Private collection. © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris |
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| Fig. 5 Édouard Vuillard, Le pot de grès, from the Album series, 1895. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Digital Image © Christie's Images, New York. © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
Feneon on Paintings by Vuillard from Cataloge
The panels mentioned by Vuillard in his journal are without a doubt the present five paintings, which were sold by Thadée Natanson at auction in 1908, several years after his divorce from Misia. In the catalogue written by Félix Fénéon to accompany the sale, the five paintings were entitled and described in terms of a decorative ensemble. For Fénéon the unity of the series is most readily perceived through Vuillard's continuous development of an exquisite, overall chromatic harmony. Since Vuillard's suggestively imprecise, densely textured paintings are at times hard to read and his sumptuous accords of color difficult to reproduce accurately in color reproduction, it seems worth reprinting Fénéon's catalogue descriptions here: L'album (fig. 2): In the center, a group of three women on a canapé, looking at an open album. Another woman, to the right, is arranging flowers. Two others are grouped together at left; the seventh is at the edge of the frame. . . . An overall effect of red and green enlivened by yellow. This effect is condensed in the background, in small juxtaposed dabs, but is diffused in varying tones in the rest of the composition, the red descending all the way to chestnuts and blacks in order to ascend as far as vermilions and pinks, the yellow fading all the way to beige. The paint [is] sometimes applied in tiny brush strokes, at others is spread in barely nuanced solid areas (masses), the two procedures contrasting nowhere more than in the center.9 Le pot de grès (fig. 5): On a table where flowers, odds and ends of cloth, notebooks, and boxes are lying about, a stoneware vase holds a bouquet in full bloom. Four women grouped in pairs, one seated and three standing, surround the vase moving from the right-hand foreground to the left-hand background. Almost all the color components seen in L'album and La table de toilette.10 La table de toilette (fig. 4): Between two bouquets of flowers and at different ends of a table, two women. Of one nothing appears but the top of the head, a part of the blouse, an arm, and the skirt with its folds; of the other, only the chignon, the hidden profile, the nape of the neck, the back, and the arms; in the foreground, her hands rest on a draped piece of furniture. The still life includes a vase, a box, a mirror, and some pieces of cloth. What distinguishes the general impression here, analogous to that of L'album, is two dull tones of gray harmonized with tender pinks and beiges, and enlivened by reds, a flashing orange accent, a red heightened with black, and a green and orange accord.11 La tapisserie (fig. 3): With her left hand a young woman embroiders her yarns on the stretched canvas; on her knee her right hand holds a skein of yarn from which strands hang down to the balls of yarn in the basket. Between the weaver and the window, the curtain of which is being drawn back by the two hands of a young girl, a bush of flowering branches intervenes. Opposite the young woman, another child of whom we see only the upper torso. The only particularity, a large black area on which a bright red arabesque stands out.12 Le corsage rayé (fig. 1): Two women are smelling flowers arranged in vases. A child enters in the rear. The general effect, here more condensed, appears all the more precious. The new feature would be, along with a yellow and pink flash in the upper right, a woven patch of red and beige.1
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