^{Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), French
French Woman Seated by the Window (Madame Hessel in Conversation), c. 1925
Distemper on paper laid on canvas
20 ⅛ x 23 ⅞}

In French Woman Seated by the Window, Edouard Vuillard uses the interior domestic scene of women engaged in a private conversation as his subject. Through continuous exchanges between contrasting relationships of light, line, color and space, Vuillard communicates an illustrative idea of intimate communication that transpires across the understated boundaries that are always there, and transforms it into an expressive tension that plastically mirrors it.

Vuillard’s inner view is influenced by Dutch genre scenes of Vermeer, and by the French artist, Chardin, who composed tender exchanges between ordinary people spotlighted in Venetian light, amid soft atmospheres of domestic spaces as in Grace before Meal. Vuillard adapts the intimate genre of the past with dabs of bright broken color inherited from the Impressionists, as well as with the linear demarcations and washes of flat color areas inspired by Japanese prints to depict his expression of intimate conversation.

The excessively vivid, and tilted, foreground figure creates immediate curiosity, and her right arm guides the viewer into the scene, as participant, to eavesdrop on the conversation. On the left, green directional brushstrokes pull down on the bend of chair, supporting the tilted distortion that is weighted by the dim brown of the middle and back planes. The green unit initiates the artist’s intentional selection and progression of curving units that stretch out, rolling horizontally across the canvas to create the prominent sitter’s shape. Opposing verticals pull down in the delineated window frames, in the compressed wall, and in the sandwich of the narrow bands of drapery that constrict the middle area in which the other woman exists. The arc of her knees and shoulder line refer back to the foreground curves, helping to unify the picture by keeping the obvious spatial designations related, pulling them in close for the private discussion.

A dialogue of recurring square motifs presented as small, large, and oblique variations communicate with each other in a constant rhythm that moves through the space, holding the composition together despite the obvious strain of bright colors that pull against the withdrawal of the murky middle shadows. Appearing first, as a tile like pattern in the foreground woman’s hair, and in the brushwork of the chair’s brown arm, the square motif is reinvented as the green lines that become the other woman’s simplified face and neck. Like a concealing African mask, the empty face, combined with the down-cast claw hand, eliminates the verve of this woman’s features. Vuillard focuses instead on articulating the differences of personalities as the hazy dark umber glumly hangs down, like the drapes, on the figure in contrast to the charismatic foreground figure’s color. Only the stimulating blue dabs of paint, lifting in a curve on the picture’s lower right edge prevent the dim figure from sinking into the emptiness of dark space. Matisse, informed by exotic traditions will also eliminate picture details in preference to developing color areas to express an idea in his very different version of an intimate exchange between two women entitled Confidences.

Vuillard continues his repetition of angled units using them to achieve a variety of compositional results. The square screen of brown wall, situated between the proliferation of bright window panes, flattens the composition, indicating a close interior space for the discussion to take place, and keeps the picture’s volume quiet with its restrained modulated tonality despite the loud color of the foreground figure and background. The oblique center unit of furniture awkwardly positions the women to be at odds with each other, as it turns the plastic conversation from energetic color to tiresome shadows. The brown arm of the chair, in which the foreground woman sits, transitions between the square and curved units. It twists to the center of the foreground and purposely becomes the obscure spatial barrier that designates both a middle ground and a vague separation that divides the figures, supporting a sense of their contrasting individuality.
An upright indistinguishable unit on the right is the equivalent of the green chair that the foreground woman leans against. It counterbalances the visual weight of the green chair and the sitter’s vivid color. This obscure unit, working in association with the green chair, like bookends, establishes a familiarity between the two figures and holds the picture elements close, in a manner similar to Cezanne who used a solid millstone and its equivalent linear shape in Millstone in the Park at the Chateau Noir (PMA) to unite his push and pull composition.

Communication is expressed plastically as the juxtapositions of light and dark, and bright and muted colors speak to one another. The bold foreground animated with the oriental influence of lavender in the woman’s hair and the hot pink of her flesh flushes in lively reaction as the conceived color converses with the suffusion of withdrawn muted browns. The thick impasto of paint, on the left, in the woman’s hair, skin, and clothes has greater visual weight that pulls away from the contrasting application of thin paint on the right, leaving a hazy space of middle ground in which the action of communication can occur. Vuillard does not restrict the action by using the demarcations of line seen elsewhere in the picture. He maintains individuality, however, by using a diagonal to separate the figures in the composition. The implicit division is suggested by an oblique link of blue sky outside the left window, with the blue dots in the triangle of flowers in the middle ground, and with the blue curved unit at the picture’s bottom right edge. The subtlety with which Vuillard presents the diagonal division allows for the exchange of plastic ideas that flow like words, feelings, and opinions when people converse.

Delineations similar to Japanese calligraphic line support the expression of contrast and separation of the women by compartmentalizing decorative color units. The lines tell two different stories as they vary from thick expressive drawing on the left, to a more jagged broken line on the right. To serve an additional purpose, Vuillard uses broad color line as a continuous skewer that comes down on the left, through the panes, to the right edge of the foreground wing chair creating a meeting of near and far. The artist eventually decreases his demarcations on the right to coincide with the thinness of paint and the lightness of exposed bare patches of paper. Balance between the energies of interesting color, in the foreground, and the middle ground’s monotonous boring shadows is achieved here when the stimulation of additional movement and light filters in through the bare patches of paper at the window, and as green color meets purple color, and linear divisions melt away. Rothko, the 20th century artist, will push the limits of Vuillard’s washes of interactive complimentary color and vanishing line of the panes, to the right of the dark woman’s head, to new levels in large scale color abstractions such as White Center 1950. The window device used to release tension from opposing forces operating in a picture has a long history in the arts and is demonstrated in Tintoretto’s A Venetian Senator. Vuillard adopts the academic tradition of the window device to subtly adjust the dynamics of the conversation, releasing the constant repetition of opposing elements from chatter that might otherwise go nowhere.

Through the language of color, Vuillard effectively expresses the picture idea of intimate conversation as he uses vivacious high color to question low boring shadows. Thick paint answers to thin paint, as curved shape calls out to square. Aesthetic unity is achieved as the artist moves the pattern of opposites through the distinctions of their individual qualities, to find release, harmony, and freedom of expression at the open window.

Analysis by Marie Slovich