La porte ouverte

Painted in 1902-1903, The Open Door belongs to Edouard Vuillard's celebrated series of intimiste family interiors of the turn of the century. The space is alive with movement and light: the doors and window are wide open and the chairs askew, whilst a female figure bustles to the left; natural light pours in through the window on the right, whilst the curtain flutters in the breeze. The composition echoes the seventeenth-century Dutch interior scenes of Jan Vermeer, the challenging viewpoint presented by the enfilade allowing the artist great freedom in his depiction of depth and space. After 1897, when Vuillard acquired a Kodak camera, he used photographs along with sketches as the foundation of his work, which resulted in the staggered planes evident in this work. In fact, such is the complexity of the multitudinous use of frames - no fewer than four door and window frames in a single composition - that play with the viewer's notions of space and imagined depth, that the painting almost transcends its subject matter, becoming instead a semi-abstract study of shape and form.

The influence of the interior scenes of Vuillard can be seen in works by Edward Le Bas, who owned this painting before it entered the celebrated Armand Hammer Collection, Los Angeles (cf. Edward Le Bas, Interior, 1951, Tate Modern, London, no. N06010). The Open Door was presented by the Armand Hammer Foundation to UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, circa 1971, after which it travelled around the world with the museum's exhibition of Five Centuries of Masterpieces. Armand Hammer's life-long familial, economic and cultural links with the USSR and his belief in the power of art and culture to build understanding between peoples prompted the exhibition of a group of these works in Moscow and Leningrad during the Cold War.