ART: Du côtè de chez Vuillard
Vuillard: From Post-Impressionist to Modern Master at the RA
A confession
This is, perhaps, a moment for honesty. Until I arrived at the Royal Academy the other day and spent a couple of hours wandering around the current Eduard Vuillard retrospective, I’d had entirely the wrong idea about Vuillard and his work. He’d been filed away in my mind as one of those infinitely tedious nineteenth century French painters who spent their time founding self-conscious movements, falling out with one another, fussing about with ‘light’ and ‘colour’ for their own sake — and what could be more dreary than ‘light’ or ‘colour’? — and receiving far more attention than either common sense or the connoisseur’s eye should really accord them. That is to say, I associated him less with Gauguin or Matisse than with Bonnard, that dreary poet of the tepid bathwater, and the sort of sensibility that spawned the thousand bad English copies that still turn up regularly at every Chelsea Town Hall art fair. People talk a lot of nonsense about ‘modern art’, thinking that it was people like Picasso who curdled and crazed the craft of painting, where in fact they should pin a lot more of the blame upon artists like Renoir, Seurat and even Monet. And this, I suppose, is the burden of guilt I had heaped upon Vuillard, and the reason I made my way to the RA with a heavy and halting step. For whatever it is that I want art to do, I felt pretty sure that Vuillard was not going to deliver it. But as mentioned above, it turns out that I was wrong.
It has to be said, though, that most people seem to have the wrong idea about Vuillard, too — or rather, a variety of different wrong ideas. First of all, there are acolytes of the youthful T. J. Clark for whom Vuillard is the embarrassingly fogeyish parent of trendy, right-on modernism, a painter incapable of detachment or irony in the face of bourgeois affectation — a painter whose pretty Parisian parks are not swarming with syphilitic whores, who spent more time portraying his grandma and mother than he did his mistresses, who seems quite happy painting from within his cosy world rather than trying to blast it apart with critiques of various sorts — and, worst of all, whose painting only became more classical and less ‘progressive’ the older he got, until by the end of his life the society portraits executed by this ‘modern master’ occasionally skim dangerously close to those of, say, de Laszlo. Incidentally I should probably add that when I say this account of Vuillard is ‘wrong’, I am not disputing the accuracy of its facts, which are pretty much beyond dispute. Rather, I think they only matter in a world where the yardstick of merit is delineated solely in terms of modernist progress — and that isn’t my world. For me, in fact, the dullest works in the present exhibition were those where Vuillard was straining the hardest to be bold, radical, at the front of the avant garde. In contrast, my favourites were often those where, having attained fame and financial security, Vuillard could afford to forget the critics and could concentrate on the very bourgeois strictures of his friends and patrons, and of his own painterly intuition, instead.
When do we get to the compulsory Greenberg reference?
The other wrong strand of thought about Vuillard is set at perpendicular angles to the one above. Its concerns are formal, rather than historical, although ultimately its narrative is also lashed tight to the linear history of modernism. Here Vuillard becomes important because it is hard, now, to look at some of the older painter’s works without being reminded of Matisse, who was quite clearly influenced by him. And here Matisse, a blue-chip Modern Master by any standard, can provide the requisite validation for any lack of critical bite on Vuillard’ s part, e.g. in Matisse’s straight-faced declaration, much mocked by those who preferred Picasso:
What I dream of is an art of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter […] a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue.
This leads us from Roger Fry along past Clement Greenberg, and drops us finally amongst Howard Hodgkin’s agreeably decorated tea-trays and the blandly colourful disengagement of the St Ives’ School. Narrative, other than a heretic strand of autobiographical confidence, ceases to matter, because the mark-making across the flatness of the picture-plane is everything. This, I think, is wrong because it is pointlessly anachronistic, stripping out a whole layer of the meaning of these works for no good reason, and also because it is pointlessly teleological. It means ignoring more or less everything Vuillard painted during, say, the last 40 years of his life, which is simply wasteful. And it means, in practice, thinking of his work as ‘art’, as if it had been painted to be hung in a white cube somewhere, rather than amidst the close-patterned surfaces and clutter of a Parisian apartment at the turn of the last century, which is just silly. Surely there is some way of making sense of Vuillard that is not flawed in such a fashion?
The third wrong way of thinking about Vuillard, which in fact intersects in its own way with those above, is that one has to find some way of promoting him to the status of a great artist — the ‘Modern Master’ of the exhibition’s title — in order to justify showing his paintings at the RA (or in Montreal or New York or Paris, where this exhibition has already appeared). The exhibition’s curators all, in their various ways, seem intent on trying to do this. I wish, though, that they had not, because it is hard to avoid a sense that they are trying to make this highly individual, interesting, versatile painter into something he isn’t, and this note of falsity brings an unwelcome sense of discomfort, the sole flaw in a delightful, absorbing exhibition. If you want my own suggestion for how best to approach Vuillard, it is to forget all you have been told about him, let the work wash over you and see where you end up.
On the other hand, it is true of Vuillard — much more than it is of many artists — that his life is everywhere in his work. Born in 1868 to a semi-retired military man and the daughter of a textile manufacturer, Vuillard drew from an early age. One set of powerful influences upon his work came from the group of friends (including Bonnard, Roussel, Serusier and others) who called themselves the Nabis (from the Hebrew word for ‘prophet’ — typically self-conscious art-movementish nonsense), but another came from the presiding geniuses of non-academic French art at the time (Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec and most of all Gauguin), while he also spent enough time drawing in the Louvre to become indebted to everyone from Le Seur and Poussin to Ingres — a debt that grew more pressing as the years passed. But as Brian Sewell has rightly pointed out (a rare example of someone who is not wrong about Vuillard), it is also worth noting the individuals and movements by whom Vuillard remained, thorough the course of a longish life, unmoved — a lengthy list that includes the Fauves, Cazanne, Cubism, Picasso, Matisse (that traffic ran in one direction only), Expressionism and Surrealism. Sewell calls Vuillard ‘a private man with no interest in esoteric theories and bombastic manifestos’. So much for my early preconceptions about Vuillard!
Beyond interior decorating
Vuillard, having quickly escaped the Academy for his Nabi circle, now seems very much the creature of a particular time and place. I suppose this is one reason why it is easy to work out that he is not a genius. Yet there is something warmly endearing about the willingness of this exhibition, despite its ‘Modern Master’ rhetoric, to be honest about Vuillard’s activities at this point, however alien they may seem to ideas of ‘art’ in our own times. As it turns out, Vuillard not only listened to Wagner and read Nietzsche, designed for experimental theatre and drew for literary magazines, but was perfectly happy to work as an interior designer — not just painting those marvellous, evocative screens and panels, but designing their surroundings, too. Somehow this realisation not only works to pin down Vuillard’s understanding of ‘art’ — something, Ruskin-like, capable of working everywhere in the world, transforming and improving everything — but says something about Vuillard’s own obsession with the insides of rooms — with the dialectic played out between spaces and their inhabitants. ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go,’ said a tediously self-dramatising author, dying in a shabby Paris hotel room in 1900. Vuillard, one suspects, would have felt all too sharply the painful splinter of seriousness embedded in what seems to us, now, a pointlessly dandyish, nihilistic remark.
Vuillard’s most important achievement, in art-historical terms, was probably the numerous paintings he executed — often in very thin paint so that stripey darkened wood-grain the board beneath now shows proudly through — of domestic interiors. Here, though, the visual tropes of Dutch genre paintings have been reformed into a sort of Ibsen-in-paint, in which domestic dramas are played out on the stage of a small Parisian apartment by a cast of relatives and friends. It was a way of seeing that came to be categorised as Intimiste, and is the means by which Vuillard got his bad name as a bourgeois comfort-seeker. Many such works are on show at the RA — enough to demonstrate the considerable variety, both in formal and expressive terms, available within the constraints that Vuillard set himself. Certainly, they are more interesting — offering more for the eye to explore and the mind to unpick — than the repetitive, obsessive alternative offered by Bonnard, whose paintings surely must have been more interesting to himself than they ever will be to us. Whereas Vuillard’s interiors still seem to me, at least, to offer something approaching a voyeuristic charge — the compulsive fascination of a sneaking glance into a lit window on a dark evening, where the most minor gesture or innocent object seems to take on a frightening level of significance.
The catalogue for the Vuillard exhibition is remarkable in a number of ways. Not least, it is 499 pages long, weighs in at just over 7 lbs, and has elicited remarkably unoriginal comments along the lines of ‘what an enormous catalogue that is!’ from everyone who has come into my kitchen for the past week. It is also, as it happens, mostly very well-written (sometimes astoundingly so, notably in the contributions by Guy Cogeval, the Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), illustrated in very true colours (important, really, as Vuillard work often depends on very delicate gradations of tone) and full of the sorts of circumstantial information that add enormously to an intelligent appreciation of Vuillard’s work. But for my money, at least, it overplays the dramatic interpretation of some of these interior scenes, emphasising a level of conflict and menace that I completely failed to detect when first viewing this work. There are several paintings, for instance, in which the catalogue authors detect epic levels of mother-daughter antagonism — one sort of horror to which I am, I’d have thought, reasonably alert — whereas I’d seen simply an impressively honest, evocative rendition of how women look when they are absorbed in their work — not always smiling, not always looking pretty, and not always focused on the needs of male companions.
This is not, however, to deny that Vuillard managed to pack a fair amount of domestic drama, much of it very real and personal, into his paintings. He managed, for instance, to marry off his somewhat unprepossessing spinster sister to his best friend Roussel, a charismatic womaniser who was seven years younger than she was, with predictably disastrous results, echoes of which surface periodically in his art. The more one learns about his stock characters and their stories, the more one appreciates the expressiveness of Vuillard’s colour and handling, and the care with which he executed those apparently effortless, snapshot-like compositions. Far more than with many artists, one gets a real sense of access to a world with an independent life all of its own, that somehow carries on even after one has stopped looking — a world more rich and complicated, for all its bourgeois comfort, than one will ever really understand.
The city and the plane
All of which brings us to Proust. There is a seductive sort of wrongness about Vuillard which I am struggling to avoid here … but with limited success. Proust was, by any standard, a great artist in a way that Vuillard certainly was not, with a breadth and depth and capacity to produce astonishment that Vuillard never even approached. All the same, though, there’s a very real sense in which spending time amongst Vuillard’s paintings, especially those from the 1890s, sends one back to those salons, those powerful matrons, those pretty parks full of children, those cramped spaces nurturing emotional volcanoes of A la recherché du temps perdu. Proust, I suppose, moved in a marginally grander world than did Vuillard, but their paths crossed on several occasions — in the hostesses who encouraged them, in the small magazines to which they contributed, in their fondness for Brittany, in their networks of friends and patrons. Proust’s Elstir is based, in part, on Vuillard. Each man had, ultimately, generous things to say about the other. But what connects Vuillard to Proust in this exhibition is not simply the Parisian, duchess-enriched content, but something like a hint of the other qualities that make Proust adorable, intimate and inexhaustible: the humour, the specificity, the acid glance cast repeatedly over his nearest and dearest. As with Proust, family members, friends and lovers were ground down, sometimes quite viciously, by the overwhelming imperatives of the need for source material. Then there is also that insistent sense of artistry at work, creating all of these effects but never collapsing under the weight of heavy self-consciousness.
Vuillard’s painting was not restricted to Paris. He spent a number of summers staying with friends on extended holidays in the country, often with one or another of the older women who, in a very French sort of arrangement, served as muse, financial support, surrogate mother and sexual conquest. (Vuillard, who constantly surrounded himself with women, never married.) Yet it must be said that, unlike the travels of, say, Monet, where novelty and the incorporation of new visions seemed to be ends in themselves, Vuillard’s countryside was an extension of his beloved Paris — populated with the same cast of characters, the same loves and jealousies, the same aesthetic — although during these villegiatures, the gently shimmering mosaic of leaves and flowers, or the oyster-shell puddling of sunlight on gravel, has to stand in for that omni-present wallpaper. Somehow, even the few pure landscapes seem like stage-sets awaiting an entrance. Vuillard was, pretty clearly, more interested in the interaction between people than he was in the spaces surrounding them. I don’t think that the way things actually looked meant much to him at all. In that way, he is an enormous improvement on the Impressionists.
Inside or outside, in the earlier part of his career in particular, the rejection of illusionism was a steady feature of Vuillard’s work, less out of dogma or lack of skill than something approaching native indifference. Rejecting illusionism meant, among other things, rejecting modelling — Western art’s conventional shorthand for asserting the three-dimensionality of objects — or by stylising it into absurdity. He is, if nothing else, a marvellous painter of flatness. This was, perhaps, his great gift to Matisse, and by extension, to Matisse’s followers. For those who want to make a case for Vuillard’s modernity, it offers ammunition of a sort. Here his influences were, as far as we can tell, as Catholic as those of so many painters of the day — Japanese prints, medieval illuminated manuscripts, even photography — a medium which, contrary to vulgar opinion, is more rigid in its stylisation, its little tropes and tricks, than is handmade art. But that, really, is neither here nor there. One of the interesting features of the RA’s Vuillard retrospective is the fairly large collection of his photography, which he eventually took to keeping in shoe-boxes and using for inspiration. Here we see his friends and lovers — looking as archaic and far-away as photos of people from the 1890s generally do — but also the semi-arbitrary cropping, the weird distortions of perspective, the aggressive light effects that the camera imposes on the world around it. That Vuillard was apparently happy to work from photos suggests something else, too — the extent to which his colour was purely expressive or attractive, rather than representational. The paradox, of course, it that real life sometimes does look like a Vuillard painting. Walking along the Serpentine the other night, I was struck not only by how flat everything looked — the water, the far bank, the trees and the sky seemed to have been cut out of sheets of coloured paper — but also at the silvery-and-black, ‘unrealistic’ palette in which it had all been executed. No camera could, I think, have captured this effect accurately. But for anyone who had been looking at Vuillard’s images all day, it seemed the most ‘natural’ thing in the world.
The path not taken?
Between about 1900, when the Nabis’ esoteric circle had more or less dissolved, and his death in 1940 — which is to say, during those years wherein Braque, Picasso, Matisse and others, most of them based in Paris, revolutionised Western art — Vuillard spent a great deal of his time painting portraits. He was, by then, an acknowledged ‘great’ and met his clients on terms of equality — sometimes, indeed, perhaps more than that. But his clients were often his friends, or friends of friends, so it is not always possible to distinguish these works from his interior scenes, especially as the portraits are notable less for their depiction of an individual’s physical features (Vuillard struggled mightily over these, and sometimes failed catastrophically) than for the expressive, almost allegorical quality of the rooms in which his subjects are placed. As he put it himself, ‘I do not paint portraits. I paint people in their homes.’ In producing these distinctive, almost eccentric works, Vuillard developed a style that moved ‘back’ from the bold planes and modish arabesques of his early years to something far more classical, far less ‘modern’ and far more heavily indebted to Ingres and other painters whom Vuillard had long admired. Indeed, Vuillard is, like de Chirico, an artist whose modernist credentials were thoroughly undermined by the latter half (or more) of his career.
What does the RA retrospective, with its brave, silly ‘Modern Master’ claim, make of this? Not much. Rightly, they allow the last two rooms to lapse into what this exhibition always threatens to lapse into, which is to say, an enjoyable essay in French social history — a cheap way of escaping wet, wintery London in favour of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Paris, as time spent in front of a work like the five-panel screen for Marguerite Chapin depicting the Place Vintimille (1911), or ever ‘The Staircase Landing, Rue de Miromesnil’ (1891) makes all too clear. So just as the scenery designs and lithographed theatre programmes in the early rooms recall the gay Paris, city of light, that must at the time have seemed the centre of the cultural world, drawing in everyone from Sickert to Picasso, the later rooms recall a slightly different city — the home of Coco Chanel and Collette, actors and industrialists, businesslike Jeanne Lanvin and the drug-addicted Anna de Noailles, all the big mirrors and little dogs, the obsessive eye for interior decoration and the all-revealing detail. Some of these portraits sail so close to unpleasant caricature that one is actually surprised that the subjects didn’t sue. Some of them are also rather badly painted, with the portrait of Countess Marie-Blanche de Polignac displaying proleptically something of Lucian Freud’s sludgy paint and anatomical uncertainty. There is also something ugly, if accurate, in the harsh electric light depicted in so many of these later works. But at their best, they are both marvellously evocative of a particular era, and for reasons connected with their periodic bursts of raw malice, occasionally very funny, too. In ‘Madame Vuillard lighting the stove’ (1924), for instance, the painter’s elderly mother, looking dowdy and dour in her widow’s weeds, is depicted crouching in front of the hearth — overshadowed by the long-necked elegance, gleaming plaster surfaces and sprightly bare breasts of an enormous cast of the Venus de Milo. The schoolboy inclination to tease and provoke never entirely deserted Vuillard. He doesn’t even seem to take himself very seriously. It’s a pleasing quality that, once again, helps to separate him from his contemporary Bonnard.
So while I would not, by any stretch of the imagination, label Vuillard a great painter — not even, as far as that goes, a ‘Modern Master’ — I am still delighted to have seen this marvellous exhibition, and to have been set right on the subject of a painter whose work I have, over the past week, come to enjoy enormously. Vuillard occupies an ambiguous position in art history. If he seems to fit uncomfortably into most art-historical narratives, this may have less to do with Vuillard’s defects or merits than with the deformities of those narratives themselves. For this reason — for giving us the opportunity to get to know Vuillard, both in his youth and in his prosperous maturity, and to try to find a place for him in our understanding of modern art — the RA is to be congratulated for offering a stopping-place to this retrospective. It is interesting, wandering through the successive rooms, to wonder whether what we are seeing is a strand of modernism or the search for a riposte to it. Ultimately, though, I shall remember this exhibition less for its theoretical implications or the odd tendentious curatorial assertion than for the strand of pure pleasure running through its elegantly-applied colours, its dandyish lines, its glamorous Proustian cast of characters. Vuillard, after all, seems to have been bored rigid by theory — perhaps we, too, should leave it at the door of this informative, handsome, timely exhibition.
Vuillard: From Post-Impressionist to Modern Master will be at the Royal Academy from 31 January to 18 April 2004. Admission costs £9. Various concessions apply. The fully-illustrated catalogue costs £24.95 softback.
Bunny Smedley, February 1, 2004 01:42 PM