Avenue

Vuillard's 1907 Avenue shows his intimist sensibility applied to the Parisian street — one of his relatively infrequent excursions into the outdoor urban landscape that typically occupied him less than the enclosed domestic interior. The avenue subject had a specific Impressionist resonance: Monet had painted boulevard scenes, Caillebotte had made his grand rue de Paris pictures, Pissarro had documented the Parisian streets from his apartment windows. Vuillard's approach differed fundamentally from all of these: where the Impressionists sought the instantaneous optical record of a modern street scene, Vuillard's 1907 avenue is treated with the same decorative compression he brought to his interior subjects — the perspective flattened, the figures reduced to chromatic incidents within a pattern of vertical and horizontal elements. By 1907 his relationship to Nabi doctrine had evolved considerably: the extreme flatness of 1891-94 had given way to a somewhat more spatially coherent approach, but the fundamental refusal of conventional illusionistic space remained, making his streets as intimate as his rooms.

The avenue recedes through a flattened spatial system that compresses depth in the manner influenced by Japanese prints and Nabi theory. Trees, figures, and the roadway are integrated into a pattern of vertical and horizontal colour zones, with the outdoor light handled more atmospherically than his interior subjects.