Démolition rue de Calais (60.1.3)

Démolition rue de Calais (60.1.3) of 1927 belongs to a series of three paintings Vuillard made depicting the demolition of buildings on the rue de Calais in the 17th arrondissement — a significant subject for a painter who had spent most of his life in this neighborhood and who was witnessing the physical transformation of the streets and buildings that had formed the backdrop of his career. Urban demolition was an unusual subject for intimism, which typically celebrated the enclosed and preserved rather than the destroyed and exposed. But the demolition site offered Vuillard a specific visual opportunity: the revealed cross-sections of demolished apartments, with their surviving wallpapers, fireplaces, and decorative elements exposed to the open air, created a strange kind of involuntary domestic interior — the private rooms he had spent his career painting made suddenly public and fragmentary by destruction. The series of three canvases on this subject shows him approaching an unusual subject with the same sustained attention he gave to any domestic environment.

In pastel, Vuillard can achieve the dusty, chalky quality of demolition debris and exposed masonry with particular aptness. The raw, broken surfaces of the demolished building are rendered in earth tones, whites, and grays that evoke both the material reality of construction rubble and the particular light of a Parisian street scene.