FILTER RESULTS
Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poë (1869-1940)
189119th Century
8 3/4 x 10 1/2 in. (22.2 x 26.7 cm)
Edouard Vuillard (Cuiseaux, France, 1868 – 1940, La Baule-Escoublac, France)
Object Type:
Painting
Medium and Support:
Oil on paper mounted on panel
Credit Line:
Gift of Fletcher Steele
Accession Number:
1972.18
Media
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Director Emeritus Grant Holcomb speaks about this object.
Transcript
This is one of my very favorite paintings. But, more importantly, it is one of the great works in our collection.
Vuillard was one of the key Nabis painters, a small group of late-nineteenth century French artists known for their intimate subjects and new approaches to color and tocomposition. Lugné-Poë, the sitter, was a man of the theatre---director, actor and the first to employ avant-garde artists in theatre design.
Vuillard and Poë were close friends and, in fact, this small portrait was perhaps painted in the studio that they shared in Montmarte.
Lugné-Poë is captured writing. His jet black hair, dramatically juxtaposed against a neutral background, immediately fixes our attention on the subject.
For me, the primary subject is the concentration and the intensity of a creative artist. The intensity of the writer is conveyed through the positioning of the figure at the very front of the picture plane and through such details as the concentrated gaze and the writer’s tightly pressed fingers. The undulating, electric line that moves across the figure underscores this intensity. Even the energetic lines of the folds in the jacket add to a portrait that is both intimate and intense; solitary yet vital.
And poet and novelist May Sarton agreed. Upon seeing the painting for the very first time, she wrote that she fell in love with a “tiny” painting that “suggested intensity of a very high voltage.”