MASP

Édouard Vuillard

The Print Dress, 1891

  • Author:
    Édouard Vuillard
  • Bio:
    Cuiseaux, França, 1868-La Baule, França ,1940
  • Title:
    The Print Dress
  • Date:
    1891
  • Medium:
    Óleo sobre tela
  • Dimensions:
    38 x 46 x 2 cm
  • Credit line:
    Aquisição, 1958
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00129
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS



From the age of 18 onward, Vuillard attended studios of artists. He was a friend of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), with whom he participated, in 1891, in the first show of nabis, a group that rejected both academic tradition as well as the impressionist experiments. Nabis artists were influenced by the bold colors and patterns of Japanese prints. Vuillard preferred intimist scenes, and his paintings adopted decorative and chromatic solutions that anticipated the expressionism of the fauve artists. The Flowered Dress (1891) shows a recurrent theme in his first artworks: his mother’s sewing workshop. There are three spatial delimitations in the room: the rear section with a fireplace, the walls in vertical lines, and the mirror at the back that reflects the woman in the foreground. The scene is pervaded by tones of green, ocher and grayish lilac, but the focus is on the printed dress. In this way, Vuillard created an atmosphere not of identities (the faces lack detail), but rather of appearances created by color fields and the motifs on the clothes and in the setting.

— MASP Curatorial Team




By Eugênia Gorini Esmeraldo
The painting The Print Dress depicts his mother’s home sewing shop, where she had to work to keep the family after her husband’s death. At that time, when the artist was connected with the Nabis, the sewing shop was quite a recurrent theme. The Masp painting has concise elements and forms; colors are flat and hues tend toward green and beige, figures are well-defined and there is little concession to decorative painting. Three distinct dimensions are shown: the background where special emphasis is placed on the fireplace; the walls forming parallel vertical lines; and the mirror, further amplifying the space. The scene is dominated by the central figure reflected in the mirror in the background and wearing a print dress, for which the work is titled. The model is most certainly Vuillard’s sister, Marie, who later on married his friend, Ker-Xavier Roussel. Marie is wearing the same dress in the canvas Le Dîner Vert, painted in that same year, now in a private collection in London. Sitting next to her, another young woman bent over a length of cloth seems to be completely engrossed in her work and judging from the position of her left elbow, seems to be seated in the foreground, in front of Marie. On the left corner of the painting, an older woman is also tending her chores and her likeness to the person portrayed in La Grand Mère de l’Artiste, 1891-1892 (Hirshhorn Collection, Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington) indicates she is probably Vuillard’s grandmother, Madame Michaud, who lived with his family. The large quantity of fabrics dominates the scene, emphasizing that this is a working environment. Easton writes that Vuillard showed in this painting a complex pictorial field and a rigorous compositional structure, with tridimensional effects that challenge the viewpoint of some scholars who claim the artist only made compositions parallel to the pictorial plane. He created a series of surfaces that leads the viewer’s gaze from the figure wearing the print dress to her mirrored reflection and then to the other two figures on the left of the canvas. According to Camesasca, “particularly admirable in Vuillard is the serene and harmonious approach that combines keen observation with an extremely refined sense of rhythm and sfumato. Actually, his meditations on a mere chair, dress, or wall-paper design serve as pretext for feverish experiments, for the clash between the artist’s innate manual skills and the demands imposed by form and technique that, in themselves, he regards as instruments of expressive plenitude”. Camesasca also shows that Vuillard’s olive green, pink, gray, and purple hues in some ways anticipate Matisse and La Fresnaye, as Roger-Marx has pointed out. After Argan, Camesasca compares Vuillard’s paintings with Mallarmé’s poems, in which the sound of verses is appreciated through pauses and omissions, whereas in our artist color hues are modulated by luminous intensity between pauses produced by other, quieter tones, without recomposing natural lighting, but suggesting a generally bourgeois atmosphere where bodies and clothing stand out. Interestingly, the artist was quite attached to this painting, which remained in his possession as long as he lived. The picture features his sister and his grandmother, at the same time that it also has a subtle allusion to his mother (and muse, according to Vuillard himself) in the dark region to the right of the canvas. For some viewers, this is a length of cloth that Marie is folding; to others, it is only a blotch of contrasting light. However, if we take this contour for a silhouette and compare it with Vuillard’s painting Les Couturières, 1892, (J. F. Clark Collection, New York), featuring Marie and the artist’s mother separated by a table and a window, it becomes clear that the silhouette is Madame Vuillard’s.

— Eugênia Gorini Esmeraldo, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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