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Lot Essay
During the latter months of 1889, in short order, Edouard Vuillard celebrated his twenty-first birthday, left the conservative École des Beaux-Arts, and joined forces with the circle of young avant-garde painters—Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Paul Ranson—who had recently begun to call themselves the Nabis, from a word in Hebrew and Arabic that means prophet, inspired, or chosen. The following year, in 1890, Vuillard abandoned the soft-focus, tonal method of his earliest work and adopted a radically anti-naturalist approach to picture-making, in which flat, interlocking planes of brilliant color take the place of traditional modeling. The present Lilas—or Le bouquet schématique, as Vuillard is said to have called the work—constitutes the artist’s definitive, breakthrough statement of this new and provocatively modern manner.
“Signifying the drastic nature of Vuillard’s break with academic art, this glorious outburst of youthful genius can almost be regarded as a perfect demonstration of Nabi techniques and of their way of re-creating the visual world,” Stuart Preston has written. “The group believed that appearances should not be reproduced in a literal manner; that color should be laid on in semi-arbitrary flat patches; and that nature could and should permissibly be deformed in the search for an ideal of decorative beauty. Vuillard’s bold simplifications here of flowers, leaves, and vase follow these precepts to the letter, and the results, judged by any standards, are striking, original, fresh, and fascinating” (op. cit., 1972, p. 70).
The Nabis dated the inception of their movement to autumn 1888, when Sérusier brought back from Pont-Aven a small landscape that he had painted under Gauguin’s tutelage. It was rendered in pure, unmixed colors that do not transcribe the actual appearance of nature, but rather suggest the painter’s subjective emotional response before the motif. The Nabis called this magically auspicious painting Le Talisman. “Thus was introduced to us for the first time, in a paradoxical and unforgettable form, the fertile concept of a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order,” Denis explained. “Thus we learned that every work of art was a transposition...a passionate equivalent of a sensation received” (“Définition du néo-traditionnisme” in Art et Critique, 1890; quoted in H.B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, p. 101).
Although Vuillard, solitary by nature and disinclined to doctrine, hesitated before throwing in his lot with the Nabis, by 1890—“the Sérusier year,” he later called it—he had fully embraced the pictorial revolution. “The purer the elements employed, the purer the work; the more mystical the painters, the more vivid the colors,” he recorded at that time in his journal (quoted in, op. cit., 2003, p. 68). In Les Lilas, the mauve and green harmonies of the bouquet stand out sharply against the abstract orange ground, and areas of light and shade are juxtaposed without inflection. The trapezoidal yellow highlight on the left side of the vase is sufficient to suggest its volume, which casts a blue shadow of startling brilliance across the butter-colored table top.
“This ‘schematized bouquet’ represents the death-throes of the precepts taught in the academies,” Guy Cogeval has written, “whereby objects had to be seen in the round by means of color gradation. The Lilacs may be said to be Vuillard’s Talisman” (ibid., p. 94).
“Signifying the drastic nature of Vuillard’s break with academic art, this glorious outburst of youthful genius can almost be regarded as a perfect demonstration of Nabi techniques and of their way of re-creating the visual world,” Stuart Preston has written. “The group believed that appearances should not be reproduced in a literal manner; that color should be laid on in semi-arbitrary flat patches; and that nature could and should permissibly be deformed in the search for an ideal of decorative beauty. Vuillard’s bold simplifications here of flowers, leaves, and vase follow these precepts to the letter, and the results, judged by any standards, are striking, original, fresh, and fascinating” (op. cit., 1972, p. 70).
The Nabis dated the inception of their movement to autumn 1888, when Sérusier brought back from Pont-Aven a small landscape that he had painted under Gauguin’s tutelage. It was rendered in pure, unmixed colors that do not transcribe the actual appearance of nature, but rather suggest the painter’s subjective emotional response before the motif. The Nabis called this magically auspicious painting Le Talisman. “Thus was introduced to us for the first time, in a paradoxical and unforgettable form, the fertile concept of a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order,” Denis explained. “Thus we learned that every work of art was a transposition...a passionate equivalent of a sensation received” (“Définition du néo-traditionnisme” in Art et Critique, 1890; quoted in H.B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, p. 101).
Although Vuillard, solitary by nature and disinclined to doctrine, hesitated before throwing in his lot with the Nabis, by 1890—“the Sérusier year,” he later called it—he had fully embraced the pictorial revolution. “The purer the elements employed, the purer the work; the more mystical the painters, the more vivid the colors,” he recorded at that time in his journal (quoted in, op. cit., 2003, p. 68). In Les Lilas, the mauve and green harmonies of the bouquet stand out sharply against the abstract orange ground, and areas of light and shade are juxtaposed without inflection. The trapezoidal yellow highlight on the left side of the vase is sufficient to suggest its volume, which casts a blue shadow of startling brilliance across the butter-colored table top.
“This ‘schematized bouquet’ represents the death-throes of the precepts taught in the academies,” Guy Cogeval has written, “whereby objects had to be seen in the round by means of color gradation. The Lilacs may be said to be Vuillard’s Talisman” (ibid., p. 94).