Place Vintimille – nikhil.io

b. 1868, Cuiseaux, Franced. 1940, La Baule, France

Place Vintimille, 1909–10

Distemper on brown Kraft paper, mounted to canvas

This urban scene painted by the Post-Impressionist artist Édouard Vuillard usually hangs in the adjacent Thannhauser Gallery, which presents works in the Guggenheim's collection dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bove has relocated the pair of paintings to the rotunda, while one of her own works temporarily occupies its customary position in the collection gallery.

Vuillard is best known for his intimate, atmospheric depictions of domestic interiors and daily life. These two elongated panels portray the view from the artist's apartment overlooking the Place Vintimille, a typical Parisian square. The everyday subject matter is destabilized through Vuillard's use of intense color harmonies and reductive, flattened space. While the composition presents the park as a continuous element, its unity is disrupted by an apparent shift in time and weather, as warm sunlight is subsumed by a more muted, overcast atmosphere. Bove has often taken the specific colors used in her "collage sculptures" from historical paintings, including works by Vuillard.