"The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard," New York City Tribune, May 28, 1990, pp.16, 14.

The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard

by Jason Edward Kaufman

Whereas Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Gauguin, and many other late-19th-century French artists have been virtually canonized, the majority of their contemporaries have not enjoyed the same elevation. One such figure whose name and oeuvre have remained on the fringe of celebrity is the Post-Impressionist Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940).

By the time he was thirty years old, Vuillard had attained a reputation in Parisian art circles. He had secured commissions to design decoration for the interiors of prestigious residences; he had collaborated with publishers of books and prints; he had involved himself in set design for the avant-garde theater. When Maurice Denis and Henri Fantin-Latour painted their group portraits of the Parisian avant-garde, Vuillard was included.

Nevertheless, the last time Vuillard was the subject of a major museum exhibition was 1971, when John Russell organized a show of his work in Toronto. And the last time New York City hosted a Vuillard show was almost 20 years before that.

This being the 50th anniversary of the artist's death, an exhibition of his small-scale works from the 1890s has been touring the country, and is currently concluding its tour at The Brooklyn Museum. "The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard" includes 110 oils, gouaches, drawings, and lithographs, many of which are loaned from private collections.

The concept for the show emerged from doctoral research being conducted at Yale University by Elizabeth Easton, now Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at The Brooklyn Museum. Ms. Easton organized the exhibition with her former colleague at Yale, George Shackelford, Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the show premiered before appearing at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.. Six paintings and nearly 40 works on paper have been added for the Brooklyn venue.

Vuillard's entire life was spent in Paris. He never married, sharing an apartment with his mother until she died in 1928, when he was 60 years old. From the time he was eleven, Madame Vuillard ran a corset making business out of the family living room. She, her daughter, Marie, and two or three assistants provided the subject matter for many of her son's pictures.

If not the sewing workshop, Vuillard painted self-portraits, family life, or his dear friends, Misia and Thadee Natanson. His "intimate interiors" open a window onto the social, material, and interpersonal environment of the Parisian bourgeoisie at the fin de siecle.

It is particularly important to recognize that most of these paintings were executed by Vuillard while he was in his twenties, before having reached artistic maturity. But, already, one is struck by the remarkable consistency of technique, the coherence of his paintings as a group.

Their unity lies not so much in the restricted range of sitters and settings, as in the manner in which Vuillard defined forms and treated space. His palette, paint handling, compositions, and attitude towards his subjects varies only insignificantly from image to image. In a sense, even before he was thirty, Vuillard had established a stable pictorial mode.

Vuillard's manner did not evolve out of a vacuum. Rather, it was built on the foundation of academic realism he had acquired at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. But, like every young artist in Paris at that time, he was anxious to find his own means of expression. His search led him through a veritable swarm of influences, all of which are discernible in his work from the 1890s.

Early in the decade, for example, Vuillard flirted with the broad shapes of Gauguin's synthetisme and experimented with Seurat's Neoimpressionism. His heavy impastos sometimes resemble Monet's encrusted paintings, and his softened tonality bears comparison with Corot's. In some instances, his almost caricaturish delineation of family members can be reminiscent of Daumier's types, and his penchant for profiles perdu brings to mind Toulouse-Lautrec. His domestic themes were reiterated by Bonnard (with whom he shared a studio), and his casual, often oblique perspectives recall those of Degas.

But, Vuillard's personal style was a unique amalgamation of all of these influences. Above all a formalist, he believed that shapes and colors had intrinsic emotive and decorative properties. His palette consisted of creamy brown, ocher, gold, blue, burgundy, gray, and black pigments which, when applied to cardboard, as was frequently the case, yielded a leached, matte, gouache-like tonality.

Owing to his formalist sensibility, Vuillard incorporated only sparse detail into his images and avoided conventional modeling in light and shade. Rarely did he bring passages into sharp focus, preferring instead to emphasize color harmonies and patterns.

Nonetheless, there is an insistent impression of verisimilitude in his vignettes. No matter how loosely articulated, the contents of his rooms appear accurately positioned and well- proportioned. Varying the texture of his muted pigments, the painter suggests the physical character of diverse materials, and bathes the scenes in a convincing aura of natural or gas light.

A founding member of the Nabis, a group of young artists closely related to the Symbolists, he believed the aim of the artist was to record nature as seen through his own temperament. Though his works are less mystical, exotic, and supernatural than those of such Symbolists as Redon or Moreau, Vuillard nevertheless conveyed a psychological ambience.

Viewed from oblique angles, even vulgar objects and mundane activities take on a peculiar aspect -- what the critic Claude Roger-Marx called "the everyday mystery." The silence, subdued tones, and lack of movement tend to induce introspection on the part of the spectator. These are not so much illustrations of domestic interiors, as evocations from which the conscious mind of the artist emanates.

Are there metaphorical readings that expand on the redundant subject matter? Curator Easton suggests: "The interior was for Vuillard a potential metaphor for himself -- an inner space, self-controlled and cut off from the world, but rife with possibilities."

"What possibilities?" one wonders. If these household scenes are metaphors of the artist's inner life, the condition they disclose is one of complete detachment. Perhaps the most potent aspect of Vuillard's "intimate interiors" is their ability to evoke solitude and ennui. Moreover, if these are reflections of Vuillard's emotions, they reveal how superficially he regarded the lives of those around him.

According to Roger-Marx, "The secret force of these intimate studies resides in the fidelity of the painter to such attitudes, such lights and such rites as are repeated like the hours and the seasons." Yet, more than document the hapless lots of lower-middle-class corsetieres, the repetitiveness of Vuillard's art might also be interpreted as evidence of the artist's veritable fear of more challenging subject matter.

Vuillard never gets close enough to penetrate individual psyches. Like an agoraphobe, the man appears never to have ventured out beyond the four walls of his apartment. And within it, he has maintained a safe distance from those around him. The intimation of almost decadent inwardness finds outward expression in his pathetic self-portrait in which he portrays himself incestuously embracing his sister.

Rather than for their limited social and intellectual rewards, it is for their decorative qualities that Vuillard's works can best be appreciated. Owing to his eschewal of volumetric elaboration, many of Vuillard's images read as pure designs. Human subjects often appear contiguous with their surroundings, united in a single plane sandwiched between background and foreground. While this contraction of space can be somewhat claustrophobic and dehumanizing, Vuillard often exploited its expressive potentialities: "There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows," he wrote in his journal. "It is this that one calls the music of painting."

In the panels from a suite of murals executed in 1895 for the Natanson home, the artist orchestrated color and pattern in a glorious, abstract ensemble. Sprays of green-leafed lemon-colored flowers explode around the pink faces and orange hair of the figures, set against a tapestry-like field of stippled green and maroon wallpaper. These dynamic scenes, perhaps Vuillard's greatest achievements, conjure a Redonesque dream, eliciting contemplation of aesthetic beauty midst the tranquility of bourgeoisie life.

The 152-page catalogue by Elizabeth Easton (published by Smithsonian Institution Press) includes 65 color plates and 30 additional illustrations. The book incorporates information gleaned from the artist's journals, which were sealed at his request for 40 years following his death in 1940.

"The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard" continues at The Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, through July 30. The exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from the Cantor Fitzgerald Foundation. For further information call (718) 638-5000.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©