Démolition rue de Calais (60.1.2)

Démolition rue de Calais (60.1.2) is the second canvas in Vuillard's 1927 series depicting the demolition of buildings on this rue in his own neighborhood. His decision to paint the same demolition site three times — approaching it as a series in the manner of the Impressionist serial investigations — shows his systematic engagement with an unusual subject that challenged his intimist method in productive ways. The second canvas likely showed the demolition from a different viewpoint or at a different stage of the work, exploring how the subject's visual character changed as the destruction proceeded. His neighborhood's physical transformation was both documentary and personal — the streets of the 17th arrondissement were as much part of his domestic world as the interiors he more typically depicted, and their alteration by demolition and construction represented a kind of external domestic change analogous to the internal changes of the interiors he had spent his career documenting.

Like its companion piece, this pastel uses the medium's chalky texture to capture the gritty materiality of demolished masonry. The composition likely focuses on a different aspect of the same demolition site, with Vuillard's characteristic formal organization imposing decorative coherence on what might otherwise seem chaotic subject matter.