Edouard Vuillard

The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard
(The Brooklyn Museum, May 18–July 20, 1990)

The idea of copying nature had been like a ball and chain for our pictorial instincts. Gauguin set us free.—Maurice Denis

If Edouard Vuillard (1868–1940) has not yet achieved the blockbuster museum show by which success for artists is measured these days, he does have a small but growing legion of devoted admirers. While he might, for the time being, be claimed as a private treasure, it is inevitable that his pivotal place in art history become more widely recognized and more fully appreciated. For Vuillard, at the turn of the century, brought painting to that thrilling crest where it could remain figurative but at the same time show the way towards abstraction. The last major Vuillard exhibition in New York was in 1954 at MoMA. With this current exhibition, which brings together 60 paintings from his strongest period, the 1890s, the word on Vuillard should begin to penetrate beyond those already convinced. It's a cause for celebration.
   Photography and the arrival of Japanese prints changed everything in avant-garde circles in Europe in the last half of the 19th century. Both brought a freshness of perspective and an esteem for a candid subject matter. No longer were artists forced to comply with the outmoded traditions of academic focus. With the snapshot and the Japanese grasp of perspective without the Renaissance's orderly and systematic vanishing point, artists could relax. They could dispense with the pigeonholing genres and rigid sense of composition they'd been obliged to perpetuate for a market conservative and set in its pleasure. The camera abolished the need for life-like renderings in paint. No longer were monumental landscapes or allegorical scenes needed. The camera forced the issue: now it's time to do something new with painting. The canvas no longer had to show the dramatic, decisive moment. It could be in between moments.
   This fissure enabled the Impressionists to start painting more than what was merely seen. Their brushes were liberated and their palettes bloomed, freed from the tyranny of accurate renderings. Now the artist could paint expressively. The picture surface became a plaything for the artists' sensual awakening. Maurice Denis recalls in a memoir of the Symbolist era how Gauguin's influence on the stage sets that Denis, Vuillard and others were very involved with at the time (mid–1890s) steered them away from trompe-de-l'oeil and representational realism and nudged them toward imaginative settings, like a tapestried dreamworld. It is, to my mind, Edouard Vuillard who most characterizes the progression from the 19th century stance of easel painting—the canvas being a rigid-edged window onto nature—into the 20th century's excitement at the picture surface itself, where the artist's emotional reaction is allowed expression. Before Vuillard there was only one way to think about painting: recreate the scene. There had been some gestures toward abstraction—Monet's waterlilies and haystacks, i.e.—but those paintings were still solidly based in making recognizable images, in creating a representation. It is with Vuillard and his Nabi circle that this particular fetish, perpetuated since cave drawings, is finally unwound. Several generations and a slew of art movements away, and Vuillard's playing with complacent expectations and his angles and the ways he composes a scene, are still nothing less than shocking.
   By setting up his compositions at odd angles and by juxtaposing the objects in a room in bold new ways, he made the ordinary seem extraordinary. The perspective in a typical Vuillard is as if we're looking down on the scene from a step ladder or gazing up while sprawled on the parlor floor. Rather than being simply a quirky trick in a manner to achieve something different, Vuillard's compression of spatial relationships and his wide-lens views brought a new way of looking at the familiar. His vantage points were liberating. He loaded a scene with space or compressed it out for the same effect: to disorient the viewer, to force new appreciations of the quiet scenes and still objects we might take for granted. His paintings treat depth as an illusion. There's not a doubt that the rooms recede yet the eye is treated to a funhouse ride conjuring out the solids of the composition. Often the surface is a wash of patterns. The busy William Morris, flowered wallpapers might appear to be on the same plane as the strong patterns of a dress or coat of a person before it. The figures don't stand out. All blends together in a study of context.
   Vuillard learnt from studying the 18th-century painter Chardin at the Louvre how to give solidity and an earthbound weight to the objects he painted but, more than Chardin, he was interested in showing how the tones and textures that made up each object could merge harmoniously to create a unified field. The painter and critic Fairfield Porter pointed out how Vuillard, continuing on from the progress made by the Impressionists, united the visual data of a scene into a single harmonious shimmer. This is what makes Vuillard continue to look so modern and precisely where he gives so much pleasure: satisfying the need for a traditional, recognizable, solidly rendered scene while at the same time updating the approach to use freer ideas about the surface that recognizes the art. One section of canvas is no more important than any other. For the first time easel painting announces itself as being a manipulation with one foot in the late nineteenth and one in the twentieth centuries. The scene is discerned and the viewer locks in but the canvas goes beyond the familiar and becomes a whole fever of patterns and fields of color moving in the direction of cubism and pure abstraction. The viewer is left dazzled in the parlor.
   On the first wall of this current show, two early still lifes announce the influence of Chardin in their earthy textures but while the earlier Still Life with Tea Cup, c. 1887–88, succeeds in revealing the sunlight coming in through the curtains, the next one, Still Life with Bottle and Carafe, c. 1889–90, done just a year later already announces the agenda Vuillard would pursue for the rest of his life: transforming the objects and the scene itself into patches of paint on a flat surface and showing how the elements of each blend into a harmonious whole. That is, he's showing his passion for the textures each object has and how the textures of each surface blend into a sweet harmony. Wineglass, flask, table surface, building plane out a window are all matched in tone, permeated by equal helpings of texture. Each object is distinct yet there's a fierce overall persuasion that the surface of the canvas is at least as vital as the scene. "He did not separate things," as Vuillard's nephew, Jacques Salomon wrote, "he connected them."
   The scenes Vuillard rendered were the epitome of ordinary. Like Proust who created his epic by zeroing in on the very details of his immediate surroundings and explored his reactions in a braver manner than anyone had before, Vuillard hardly strayed for subject matter beyond the apartment interiors of his family and closest friends. His friend Pierre Bonnard ranged his subject matter and palette more but Vuillard painted what he was most familiar with and where he was most comfortable. If Bonnard's paintings were symphonies, Vuillard's were string quartets. Madame Vuillard Sewing, c. 1895, shows the artist's mother barely discernable among the strong blocks of color and patterning that make up the wall behind and the patch of fabric she's concentrating on. Yet the serenity of the moment is translatable from the canvas. The bolder Misia, Valotton and Thadee Natanson from 1899 also depicts a usually unheralded moment of dailiness. His good friends are depicted in their drawing room but they must share the spotlight with the outrageousness of the patterned wallpaper and fabrics. Even in the quick sketch, Lady at Tea Table, c. 1910–1920s, Vuillard is handling vantage points from different perspectives, a way of seeing that the photographic image revealed. We're looking slightly down at the tea service in the foreground, but at the same time being pulled back and into the depth of the image by the lady sitting. And in the tasty watercolor, The Lamp, c. 1892, a corner of a room is featured as it never had been before: a slightly askew glance from a point looking up at an end table with lamp. The persistence of this sort of intimacy in his succinct tableaux left a chronicling of France's Third Republic that offers us telling views into the private lives of the various spheres of society he inhabited. They reveal home lives, ambiances and psychological portraits of the couples and intimates he dined with.

   It is the album of lithographs, Paysages et interieurs, published by the dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1889, that is the revelation of this show. Assembled together, which has rarely happened, the suite of 13 plates clearly reveal why Vuillard is celebrated for his pioneering achievements in the medium. The colors, flattened surfaces and odd perspectives still seem startling to the eye trained to seek the stability of a vanishing point. His sense of fun is here, too, playing with scale. The effects are lighter and more delicate not having the thick layering of paint and hardy brushwork to absorb our gaze. In one scene, open doors pull us deeper and deeper into the chasm of these comfortable but unfamiliar rooms; in another, our vantage point fisheyes an entire room at an almost dizzying angle.

(Cover, May 1990)