Édouard Vuillard, the Nabis, and the Politics of Domesticity

This ground-breaking book is the first to address the feminine and feminist politics of Intimiste art - a modernist mode of art making developed in the 1890s by Édouard Vuillard while associated with the Nabi ‘brotherhood’. Coined by contemporary critics, ‘intimisme’ encapsulated the shared approach of these artists to depicting intimate settings and themes. Vuillard’s paintings, which are typically small, employ bold pigments and economic brushstrokes to depict female figures in tightly composed apartment interiors. Those portrayed include his mother and sister, just as wives and lovers dominate the art of other Nabis, including Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard. Francesca Berry comparatively analyses the gender politics of Nabi art to reveal real differences. Through skilled visual interpretation she argues that Vuillard attempted a profound engagement with the material conditions of feminine domesticity in cooperation with his first and most sustained audience: women. He did so, the author reveals, in artworks that explore a complex range of feminine experiences such as sexual initiation, stillbirth, illicit work, and unceasing housework. The personal gender politics of Intimiste practice also are foregrounded. Vuillard’s studio-bedroom afforded him access to quotidian femininity. But at what risks to his sister’s privacy and to his mother’s subjectivity? Making an artistic project of feminine domesticity also meant entering the field of politics. The 1890s was the decade of state legislation and feminist demands with respect to work in the home and women’s familial rights. Personal in motif and Symbolist in form, Berry’s extensive historical research reveals these artworks also to have been social and political, sometimes even feminist, in meaning. Transcending the structural repression of domesticity in histories of modernist art, this book powerfully overturns residual myths of aesthetic introspection and social retreat that for too long have been attached to Nabi Symbolism. Francesca Berry is Associate Professor of History of Art at University of Birmingham, UK. She is an expert in the art, visual culture and design of domesticity and the interior in France 1850–1940 and has published extensively in this field. Between 2010 and 2022 she was an Editor (and, for five years, Chair) of Oxford Art Journal. In 2018 Francesca was curator of the international loan exhibition Maman: Vuillard and Madame Vuillard at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts and co-author of its catalogue. 300 words: This ground-breaking book is the first to address the feminine and feminist politics of Intimist art – a modernist mode of art making developed in the 1890s by Édouard Vuillard while associated with the Nabi ‘brotherhood’. Coined by contemporary critics, ‘intimisme’ encapsulated the shared approach of these artists to depicting intimate settings and themes. Vuillard’s paintings, which are typically small, employ bold pigments and economic brushstrokes to depict female figures in tightly composed apartment interiors. Those portrayed include his mother and sister, just as wives and lovers dominate the art of other Nabis, including Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard. Francesca Berry comparatively analyses the gender politics of Nabi art to reveal real differences. Through skilled visual interpretation she argues that Vuillard attempted a profound engagement with the material conditions of feminine domesticity in cooperation with his first and most sustained audience: women. He did so, the author reveals, in artworks that explore a complex range of feminine experiences such as sexual initiation, stillbirth, illicit work, and unceasing housework. The personal gender politics of Intimiste practice also are foregrounded. Vuillard’s studio-bedroom afforded him access to quotidian femininity. But at what risks to his sister’s privacy and to his mother’s subjectivity? Making an artistic project of feminine domesticity also meant entering the field of politics. The 1890s was the decade of state legislation and feminist demands with respect to work in the home and women’s familial rights. Personal in motif and Synthetist in form, Berry’s extensive historical research reveals these artworks also to have been social and political, sometimes even feminist, in meaning. Transcending the structural repression of domesticity in histories of modernist art, this book powerfully overturns residual myths of aesthetic introspection and social retreat that for too long have been attached to Nabi Synthetism.