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| Édouard Vuillard At the Theater 1892 wash drawing Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Édouard Vuillard Backstage at Théâtre de l'Oeuvre ca. 1894 oil on panel Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Édouard Vuillard Une galerie au Théâtre du Gymnase 1900 lithograph British Museum |
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| Édouard Vuillard En chemin de fer ca. 1900 oil on cardboard Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco |
Le deuxième sexe
The famous Polish poet calls Simone de Beauvoir a Nazi hag
but to me she will always be her famous book,
the one with the Matisse paper cut on the cover,
a sad blue nude I took into the woods.
Where we college girls went to coax the big picture
from her, as if she could tell us how to use
all the strange blades on our Swiss Army knives –
the firewood we arranged in either log cabin or tepee,
a little house built to be burned down.
Which could be a metaphor:
Simone as the wind puffing the damp flames,
a cloud with a mouth that became obsolete
once we started using gasoline. Still,
she gave me one lesson that sticks, which is:
do not take a paperback camping in the rain
or it may swell to many times its original size,
and if you start with a big book you'll end up
with a cinderblock. In that vein I pictured Simone as huge
until (much later) I read that her size was near-midget –
imagine, if we took Gertrude Stein, we'd be there still,
trying to build some kind of travois to drag her body out.
The other thing I remember, a word, immanence –
meaning, you get stuck with the cooking and laundry
while the man gets to hit on all your friends in Paris.
Sure you can put the wet book in the oven
and try baking it like a cake. But the seam will stay soggy
even when the pages rise, ruffled like French pastry.
As far as laundry goes, it's best I steer clear,
what with my tendency to forget the tissues
wadded in my sleeves. What happens is
I think I'm being so careful, and everything
still comes out like the clearing where we woke.
Covered in flakes that were then the real thing:
snow. Which sounds more la-di-da in French.
But then the sun came up and all la neige vanished
like those chapters we grew bored with and had skipped.
– Lucia Perillo (2016), from Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones
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| Édouard Vuillard Les Tuileries 1895 lithograph Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Édouard Vuillard Les Tuileries 1895 lithograph Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Édouard Vuillard Les deux belles-soeurs ca. 1900 lithograph British Museum |
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| Édouard Vuillard Nu à la chaise ca. 1904 oil on cardboard Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Édouard Vuillard The artist's sister, rue Saint-Honoré ca. 1891 watercolor and gouache on paper Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Édouard Vuillard Alexandre Vuillard ca. 1890 watercolor Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Édouard Vuillard A game of checkers ca. 1898-99 lithograph Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Édouard Vuillard Place Saint-Augustin 1912-13 distemper on paper Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Édouard Vuillard Nurse with child in a sailor suit 1895 oil on cardboard Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Édouard Vuillard Child and nurse in the garden (Project for a screen) ca. 1892 drawing with watercolor Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |