Édouard Vuillard
Programme pour le théâtre de l’Œuvre (Programme for the Théâtre de l’Œuvre), 1894

The avant-garde Parisian Théâtre de l’Œuvre was established in 1893 by the actor Lugné-Poe, the writer Camille Mauclair and the artist Édouard Vuillard. All three were overtly critical of France’s government-backed theatres and the illusionism of André Antoine’s Théâtre libre and declared an interest in seeking out groundbreaking new styles of theatre against the backdrop of Symbolism. They were joined in their new venture by several young artists who produced lithographs to illustrate programmes for their subscribers and designed and made stage sets and costumes. Vuillard and his fellow Nabis were at the forefront of the group.

In its early days, The Théâtre de l’Œuvre worked with French symbolist authors and promoted the new Nordic theatre of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. This programme features two of Vuillard’s lithographs. On the left is an advertisement for La Revue blanche, a magazine edited by the Natanson brothers, who had been high school classmates of Lugné-Poe at the Lycée Fontanes. On the right are the titles and casts of two plays performed on 13 February, 1894, at the Bouffes du Nord theatre – Au-dessus des forces humaines by the Norwegian playwright Bjørnson and L’Araignée de cristal by the French author and playwright Rachilde. On one side of the sheet, a dark, gloomy crowd is gathered around a dead body under a crucifix, while on the other are three pretty young women in an untidy, girlishly decorated Paris apartment. The programme cover features brushwork lettering and swathes of black with blank spaces traced with a feather. The back cover is characterised by light, airy, delicate pencil strokes. Art critics found its overt modernity off-putting: one even described it as “a piece of paper smeared with coarse lettering and besmirched with a puerile drawing”.