Les journaux

In February 1913 this picture was in New York, at the Armory Show, the exhibition that brought modern European painting to American audiences on a large scale and is remembered above all for the uproar over Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. Vuillard's Newspapers hung there as number 471, then travelled with the show to Chicago and Boston. It belonged at the time to his Paris dealers, who had bought it from him in 1909. It did not find a buyer in America, and in 1915 the dealers handed it back to the painter. The subject could hardly be quieter for such a journey. Newspapers lie open on a table beside a coffee cup and a tall lamp, and a woman in blue leans over the pages. The paint is glue-based colour on paper, later mounted on canvas.