After my return to the Upper West Side, I bristled when friends assumed my family and I were on the run from anti-Semitism. I admitted to being in the grips of an indefinable longing to return to my native land. True enough, even after 22-years, France had never quite felt like home. But I insisted that my longing had nothing to do with how we were treated as Jews in my adopted land. It is only now, years later, that I reconsider my state of denial.

This is reawakened by the Jewish Museum show, Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses. Vuillard’s wealthy Jewish patrons are his subjects and his muses, his hosts and his mistresses, his companions, his confidantes, his clients, his galeristes and his collectors. I marvel at this lost world of domestic splendor remarkably unmarred by what is referred to in passing as “the deep sectarian divisions of its time.”

Despite my interest, I never realized that the sumptuous world that inspired Vuillard’s work from the late 19th century through the 1930’s was predominantly Jewish. But then a French museum could never mount a Vuillard exhibit with this Judeo-centric angle. French curators in national institutions would avoid any such framework lest they be accused of racial profiling. Here a Jewish writer freely alleges that moneyed Jewish influence reduced Vuillard to a mere portrait painter. No French journalist could condemn the constraints of Jewish influence in the life of a major painter without an inevitable outcry. In France, we meet denial’s equal opposite — hyper-awareness and overarching vigilance.

The show argues that from the 1890’s through the 1930’s, these French Jewish tastemakers were unmarked and unhindered by their religious identity. Even if I once claimed the same prerogative for myself, I find it impossible to believe that this group, and the non-Jewish Vuillard who chronicled them, could be that deep into self-deception.

Vuillard’s romance with these prominent Jews flourishes during the 12 years when the Dreyfus affair provoked waves of anti-Semitic rioting across the country. There was no corner of French life that retained neutrality over the ensuing years of furor. Even the known painters were lined up on either side of the venomous debate. Feeling unruffled as a French Jew in the period beginning in the Dreyfus outbreaks and spanning the rise of Nazism brings denial to new heights.

I do not begrudge Vuillard and his muses their privileged and beguiling experience. Withal, I understand how this exclusive circle of Jews considered themselves to be above the fray. But that this detente is both extraordinary and fragile (if not outright delusional) is barely alluded to in the show. In the end, it misses what should be a dynamic tension provided by sociological context. How not to emphasize the irony of our clearly seeing what the paintings’ subjects do not? This exhibit loses impact, not from a stunting of Vuillard’s talent, but from its curatorial conspiracy of denial about France and its Jews.

I stand in front of a Vuillard of a 3-year old boy sitting on a massive ornate sofa. This is Claude Bernheim de Villers, painted in 1905. There is a suggestion of a woman in the left foreground. She is transparent, ghostly, a hovering presence. We learn this is Claude’s mother who perished in Auschwitz in 1943. She haunts the scene, a passing cloud, rendered weightless by the sparing brushstroke despite her grounding wealth. In a painter’s moment of prescience, she is there yet nearly gone, rising in a spiral of chimney smoke before our wishful and disbelieving eyes.

Ms. Reimer-Torn, author of the soon-to be-published memoir “And You Will Love,” blogs at susanrtorn.wordpress.com.