ABSTRACT
The career of Edouard Vuillard evokes for us a world almost as remote from the tensions and pressures of contemporary life as the world of Fragonard. It is a world in which the cultivated bourgeoisie is still secure in its privileges and in its taste—a world in which art, money, comfort, talent, and new ideas exist in an untroubled harmony, a world insulated from catastrophe. The one respect in which Vuillard's small paintings of the nineties are linked to what painting—abstract painting, anyway—has become is in their radical reduction of every form to a "flat" field of color that articulates a continuous decorative surface. The complaint about the small size of Vuillard's pictures—in effect, a complaint about the small size of his ambition—came early, and unfortunately, Vuillard himself shared in it. The landscape called "The Saltings" is surely one of the greatest of Vuillard's paintings, a miracle of chromatic subtlety.
