Edouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940). The Green Interior (Figure Seated by a Curtained Window), 1891. Oil on cardboard, mounted on cradled wood, 12 1/4 x 8 1/4 in. (31.1 x 21 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.222)
The more you look at them the more quietly provocative they are.
I'm Lisa Yuskavage and I'm a painter.
I, myself, would not be considered a modest painter, I suppose, because of scale and subject matter. One of the things I really love about Vuillard is because the paintings are small, domestic, rarely provocative subjects, but the more you look at them the more quietly provocative they are.
And in this painting, in particular, you could say the content of the painting is, oh, his mother is darning in a green room and that's never that interesting. But what makes the painting truly interesting is how it's painted. The painting is screaming, that color is screaming. It feels like the green is advancing. I think you actually turn green, you know, you're illuminated before it.
And then the mother, she creates the contrast to the illumination. She actually holds the picture together and weights the picture. You would imagine that this is not a pleasant figure. I mean, it's never that pleasant to live with your mom until you're, you know, an old man, but it seemed like they had a pleasant relationship. But this picture seems very ominous. It's never a good omen, that color.
Vuillard's paintings are often about voyeurism. Those two panels, we assume are windows, that just hover there—and they kind of look like eyes looking at us. They become confrontational.
There's also the sense of touch, the sensitivity that he has to putting paint on, that kind of piling up of various related colors definitely creates a kind of a buzzing. And space is created through overlap of shapes, like the way her knee overlaps that green thing lying on the floor. That type of tiny overlap creates an incredible amount of depth in this painting.
Paintings are silent: a thing that has to be taken in through the eye. And I think every artwork deserves to be looked at in person. Like, the person in the front row, usually who's asleep the whole time I'm giving a lecture, wakes up during the question and answer to say, "I hate your paintings." And I'll say, "Well, have you ever seen one in person? It's like a human being. You can tell me you hate them after you've been with one."
You're peering into another world, but it's an otherworldly experience that doesn't exist anywhere else but there.
