Edouard Vuillard, La table servie, 1915, Pastel sur papier beige, 26,7 x 31,9 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris (Madame Asselain, 1978).
Feb. 21, 2003
In his middle 20's the French painter Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was at the epicenter of a certain Paris. He was close to the avant-garde theater of Lugne-Poe. He was a friend and ally of Pierre Bonnard, the best young painter around. He knew the brightest women in Paris, and his octagonal self-portrait was way ahead of its time.
So here we have a whole succession of figures in interiors, hardly ever posing in any formal sense but going about the most mundane tasks, all of which Vuillard succeeded in investing with mysterious and deeply attractive elegance. It is the flicker of light and color that counts in these acts of delicate observation.
Vuillard seems to catch time on the wing, pinning it down with myriad exquisite touches. How wise he was, being his special kind of painter, to stick to subject matter he knew so well. He only falters in his rare commissioned portraits, done late in life, from which the spark of reciprocal sympathy is lacking.
Taste such as Vuillard's enabled him to paint as well some large decorative subjects, mostly of landscape. Like the conversation pieces, these more ambitious projects contain his poetic feeling, served by a sharp eye and a fastidious mind. All in all, he was a captivating artist.
The Vuillard exhibition will be open to the public through Nov. 21, 10 to 5:30 daily, closed on Sunday. Admission is $1.
---
ART REVIEW; Vuillard the Spectator, Poised at Life's Windows
...Victor Hugo's remark that ''there is nothing more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening'' neatly describes Vuillard's talent. In his prime, during the 1890's, he conveyed the qualities you find in works by Chardin, Vermeer and Bonnard: restraint, intimation, a sense of time arrested, figures inward-turning and oblivious of us but also mysterious and often slightly bizarre.
He was, like Bonnard, a painter of memory, not spontaneous observation, memory being like a dream through which experience becomes abstracted and muffled. Something is always happening in these pictures that, as a stranger looking in on them as if into a neighbor's window, you can't quite put your finger on -- something alarming or oppressive or funny or wicked or tender, or some combination of the above. Also, something particular to do with light and space.
His ''Stitch,'' one of the very beautiful pictures in the show, is an example. While paying homage to Vermeer, it casts three seamstresses in the disorienting glare of hard light through tall-paned windows. The longer you look, the less like Vermeer it seems. Light strikes the far wall and obscures the faces of two of the women, one of them cut off by the painting's left edge, her hand caught in mid-stitch; the third woman, at the center of the picture, is a blue-trimmed silhouette against a strip of flowery wallpaper that cleaves the image in two.
The effect is typical of Vuillard: he captures the hazy experience of trying to see a form in bright light against a busy pattern and how that form flattens as a result. The scene is, as usual with Vuillard, a quiet, overstuffed room, cozily decorated. But light animates the domestic silence, and colors suddenly pop forward as independent abstract shapes: the orange of the chair on the left; the violet and butter-yellow of scraps of fabric piled on the table to the right; the patch of red framed by the central woman's arm, torso and hip. (Is the red a swatch of fabric, too? Probably. In the glare, the shape is hard to make out.)
Ambiguity stirs anxiety: the vertical strip of wallpaper dividing the picture separates two rather different scenes, which you register at first only subliminally. In half the picture, women quietly sew in an airy space against a bare, silvery wall; in the other half, the room seems to thrust toward us, the table abruptly foreshortened, and a large, dark, framed portrait of a man leans ominously from the wall, as if over the women, blocking our view of the window's edge, like a storm cloud moving across the sky.
Light is the principal actor. Vuillard was the master of flat pattern and private theater, but it is light that frequently, almost surreptitiously, propels the drama -- the way light makes things look out of the corner of your eye, or squinting into the sun or staring from shadow into a lamp or window.
In ''Lunchtime,'' backlighting, through a lattice window at the center of the picture, transforms an ordinary image of women gathered around a laden table. The light bounces off the three women's faces, off the utensils and decanters, like a pinball; then it focuses our gaze on the strange, telescoped angle whereby Vuillard implies that the unattended fourth plate at the bottom of the picture, which we gaze straight down on, is there for us.
The women go about their chores, not looking up when we enter. They seem to know us already. But we don't know them. We can barely make them out, in fact. The light through the window is in our eyes, and the room looks inexplicably gloomy, an artistic liberty on Vuillard's part that intensifies the awkwardness.
We do know the women, actually. They were Vuillard's mother, grandmother and sister. Vuillard, who was born in 1868, lived with his widowed mother, who ran a corsetry and dressmaking business until she died in 1928. ''It was Madame Vuillard,'' writes Guy Cogeval, the show's chief curator, in the catalog, ''who was his guiding star.'' He also calls her his guardian angel. Still, you have to wonder about a man who lived to the age of 60 with his mother.
Look again at ''The Stitch'' or ''Lunchtime.'' Call it familial shorthand, or is it suffocation? Mr. Cogeval has turned up various family dramas, including Vuillard's role in arranging his sister's unhappy marriage to his philandering friend, the painter Kerr-Xavier Roussel, which Mr. Cogeval believes accounts for undercurrents of tension and misery he sees in some pictures of the family silently gathered together.
Maybe so. Silence, in a painting, can imply many things, including contentment. The melancholy that pervades Vuillard's early work, which is undeniable, is at least partly elegiac. Memory casts everything in the Proustian mode of an experience painstakingly retrieved but inevitably out of reach. Like Bonnard, Vuillard was a painter not of domestic life but of the evanescence of the pleasures and discontentments of domestic life, a different thing.
The obvious connections to Maeterlinck, Strindberg and Ibsen are well illustrated in the exhibition. Vuillard was a set designer for their plays. His lithographs for playbills are minor masterworks of elliptical expression. The abstract, murmuring, indirect, claustrophobic quality of Symbolist drama dovetailed with his artistic inclinations.
Painting sets and illustrating playbills also made the point that fine art and decoration were both serious pursuits, which Vuillard believed, and theater work paved the way for large decorative panels, rich commissions for houses and public spaces, to which he increasingly dedicated himself.
The show argues for the seriousness of these decorative ensembles. This case has been made before. It still seems a stretch. These are public projects. Vuillard's gift was for private, keyhole views, intense, oddly cropped and voyeuristic, which seem to speak a secret language, like a joke between friends or lovers.
You see it in a comedic work like ''Misia and Vallotton at Villeneuve'': the head of the painter Félix Vallotton is wryly framed by the picture on the wall behind him, while Thadée Natanson, Misia's husband, to whom she conspicuously has her back turned as if in disdain, is barely visible as a funny sliver cut off by the left side of the canvas.
The picture resembles a snapshot. Vuillard took endless photographs with a Kodak, dozens of which are exhibited here for the first time. They have a spontaneity the paintings don't. Perhaps the camera hastened changes in Vuillard's work after the turn of the century -- the move toward more traditional, mundane depictions of space and light.
Increasingly, Vuillard took on commissions from the upper classes, in whose circles he spent his later years. The last rooms of the exhibition are devoted to these late portraits, which he painted almost until his death in 1940, and to works like ''The Surgeons,'' which tries to enshrine a urologist named Antonin Gosset. Gosset ministers to a patient in an operating theater, surrounded by nurses and mustached observers in hospital gowns. Harking weakly back to Rembrandt, the result is a jumbo banality.
Naturally, Mr. Cogeval thinks otherwise. He sees in the late portraits ''an incomparable psychologist.'' Vuillard is Stravinsky, he writes: a radical Neo-Classicist, slyly subversive (''an incredible character assassination,'' ''ferocious,'' ''shameless,'' Mr. Cogeval intuits about various portraits.)
I can't see it. I see obedience and anonymity. The exceptions only underscore what is in general absent from the late pictures here: the good ones have a glossy, soigné, over-the-top quality that implies the influence of the movies. I am thinking of the louche 1920's portrait of Jane Renouardt, the actress, and her lapdog in a room of mirrors and red velvet, or ''In the Salon, Evening, Rue de Naples,'' a 1933 drawing room melodrama in saturated Technicolor. It looks like a still from a Vincente Minnelli film before the fact.
A couple of these late pictures might have made the case better for later Vuillard. Maybe there isn't a case to be made; it's hard to know from this show. Big retrospectives, like this one, please overzealous curators, punctilious academics and museum officials desirous of blockbusters, but they don't necessarily serve the art. Painters paint pictures one at a time, after all, which is how their works are meant to be seen. Few artists look good when 200 or 300 paintings are shown together.
Vuillard's virtue was to paint small pictures wildly out of proportion in significance to their size. Understatement was his angle. There is a photograph by him, typically understated, of his mother just before she died. She is a fragile, toothless bird in a white bonnet and nightgown, smiling on the edge of her bed, beautiful and immodest in her old age. She's hard to make out. The picture is blurry, like a fading memory.
The Édouard Vuillard retrospective opens on Sunday at the National Gallery of Art, on the Mall between Third and Ninth Streets NW, Washington, (202) 737-4215. It is there through April 20 and then travels to Montreal in May, to Paris in September and to London in January 2004.
French.jpg)
.jpeg)
