PARLOR MUSIC.(artist Edouard Vuillard, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Edouard Vuillard, who is the subject of a huge retrospective of paintings, drawings, prints, decorative projects, and photographs at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., was one of the great fin-de-siecle neurotics who established self-conscious subjectivity as a standard spiritual appliance of twentieth-century culture. He was also the leading homebody among modern masters, a nervous Parisian mama's boy whose intimate subject matter and love of decor extoll the bourgeois nest. I have often thought that Vuillard is absurdly underrated. The density of emotion, the subtle beauty, and the excruciating sense of the eros of private life in his paintings can make other twentieth-century artists seem like louts. I've looked forward to a retrospective like this one (it runs until April 20th) for some time, hoping that it would bring Vuillard's achievement into focus and make firm judgments possible. No such luck. Greater familiarity with this artist makes one's assessment of him more tentative rather than less. His best pictures exude a hypersensitive, ambiguous aura of grace. When you are under their spell, you may shudder at the gaucherie of ever wanting something more definite. Even then, however, there is something not all there about him.

Vuillard was born in 1868, the...

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