The Vaudeville Show Magician

Vuillard's Vaudeville Show Magician of around 1895 connects his art to the Parisian entertainment world that was inseparable from the Nabi circle's cultural life. The Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, directed by Lugné-Poe, was the primary venue for Symbolist drama in Paris throughout the 1890s — it staged the premieres of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Ghosts in France, as well as Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, all works that the Nabis found sympathetic to their own aesthetic project of art as the evocation of inner states rather than outer appearances. Vuillard designed theater programs, contributed to the visual culture of the avant-garde stage, and maintained long friendships with actors and directors throughout his career. The vaudeville magician connects this theatrical engagement to the more popular entertainment culture that coexisted with the Symbolist stage — a subject that allowed him to explore the specifically theatrical quality of artificial light and concentrated performance in a more democratic social environment. The Bührle Collection in Zurich holds this canvas alongside major Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works assembled by the industrialist Emil Georg Bührle.

Painted on the absorbent surface of cardboard, the work has a dry, chalky luminosity typical of Vuillard's 1890s pieces. Figures are compressed into the shallow pictorial space with minimal modeling, their forms identified through dark contour and flat areas of local color rather than light-and-shadow description.