For years, Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) carried around a full-sized plaster torso of the Venus de Milo. Perched on the mantelpieces of numerous Paris apartments, growing more dingy and chipped with each removal, she loomed over the rooms, her face impassive and slightly scornful. This odd totem forms the centerpiece of Venus Betrayed, Julia Frey’s thematic biography of the French painter, printmaker, and decorative artist.
As the book’s subtitle suggests, Frey aims to immerse the reader in Vuillard’s life using his own journals and photographs (he was a lifelong diarist and keen photographer), ample family remembrances, and contemporary scholarship. She relies heavily on the splendid catalogue by Guy Cogeval from the 2003–04 retrospective that was seen at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Grand Palais, Paris, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London—the first for Vuillard since 1938. The result is a lavish and expansive book, but one that feels uneven and somewhat idiosyncratic.
His early paintings were pervaded by anxiety and disquiet, an overall sense of unheimlich (uncanny), as Cogeval names it.
Frey’s analysis of Vuillard’s formative years is intensely Freudian. After the death of his father and the departure of an older brother, Vuillard was the only male in a tiny apartment shared with his grandmother, mother, and older sister, all of whom worked in the family corset-making business. Privacy was nonexistent and Vuillard often encountered lady customers en deshabille. Frey describes his youth
