The Intimate Eye of Edouard Vuillard [first edition]

Few artists in this century have been plagued by the question ''What if?'' more than Edouard Vuillard. Long before he died in 1940, the French painter had come to be regarded as someone who left unfulfilled the promise that was so much on view in the works he produced as a young man, during the last decade of the 19th century. What if he had given himself over fully to the Symbolist ideas that are evident in his early paintings? What if he had devoted as much care to so-called ambitious paintings, paintings of large scale, as to the miniatures in which he repeatedly depicted a small group of mostly family and friends talking, sewing and napping in their Paris apartments? ''The Intimate Eye of Edouard Vuillard,'' at the Katonah Gallery, is a reminder that such questions are, and have always been, unjust. In matters of intelligence, elegance and painterly skill, the body of work that Vuillard produced during the 1890's has few equals in the modern era.