Mario Naves reviews the exhibition Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 at The Jewish Museum, New York, on view through September 23, 2012.

Naves writes: "Vuillard wasn't inspired by hearth and home so much as haunted by them. In the best paintings, familial complexity is distilled into images of daunting psychological nuance. (Not for nothing is Proust's name bandied about when speaking of Vuillard's art.) A blunt emphasis on pattern and architecture reinforces a signature strain of emotional pressurization."