Édouard Vuillard

Often described as an "intimist," Édouard Vuillard (1868 - 1940) is best known for his post-impressionist paintings of friends and families in interior settings, rich with patterned wallpapers, draperies, carpets, and clothing. Unlike contemporaries such as Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who favored busy boulevards and cabarets, Vuillard largely preferred the privacy and comfort of familiar domestic spaces, as well as the quiet corners of public gardens. Yet while Vuillard produced such intimate canvases, he also created grand decorations, stage sets, and programs for avant-garde theater, as well as landscapes and portraits.

Early Years and the Nabis

Born to a middle-class household in a small town in eastern France, Vuillard moved to Paris with his family when he was nine years old. At the Lycée Condorcet, the young Vuillard met many aspiring artists and actors, who had been attracted to the school’s progressive curriculum. Vuillard, however, thought he would enroll in a military academy following his graduation and had to be persuaded by his classmate Kerr-Xavier Roussel to pursue an artistic vocation. Vuillard began taking art classes and eventually was accepted into the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, which provided traditional academic training in the fine arts. Vuillard’s attendance at the École was short-lived, and it was instead his visits to the Louvre that provided him with his most significant art education. There Vuillard was attracted to the work of artists including old masters Titian, Veronese, and Rembrandt, and eighteenth-century French artists Watteau and Chardin.

By the end of 1889, dissatisfied with the traditional academic training that ignored the radical changes instigated by the impressionists and their successors, Vuillard left art school and with his friend Roussel soon gravitated toward an artistic brotherhood called the Nabis. It was founded in 1888 by Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, and Pierre Bonnard, who chose the name Nabi (from the Hebrew and Arabic word for "prophet") for its mystical and religious connotations.

The Nabis, loosely belonging to the larger symbolist movement, were not interested in capturing the fleeting effects of light in the outdoors as the impressionists had. Instead, they sought to distill their personal experience and emotion, using art to communicate interior feelings. It was, therefore, less important to render subjects naturally and mimic their external appearance than it was to convey the emotion a subject engendered. As a result, Nabi paintings moved away from realism and toward abstraction. Paul Gauguin, an inspiration for the young artistic brotherhood and an honorary Nabi, urged painters to use unmixed colors "as they come out of the tube." Pure colors were combined with flat surfaces and abstract forms, and there was interest in non-Western (especially Japanese) art. Influenced by Nabi ideas, Vuillard painted bold works such as his Octagonal Self-Portrait, c. 1890, in which the artist’s face is broken down into large, abstract expanses of pale pink, orange, brown, and cream. This work is an example of synthetism -- the idea that art should synthesize external appearances with the artist’s subjective feelings, through purely aesthetic considerations of line, form, and color.

Theater

Vuillard also forged strong ties with the Parisian avant-garde theater community. His friendship with the young actor Aurélien Lugné-Poe brought Vuillard in touch with several theaters, including the Théâtre-Libre and the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre (a company of which Vuillard was the cofounder). Vuillard shared with these avant-garde theaters a rejection
of excessive artifice and an embrace of synthetism , which manifested itself as a gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art," in which art, architecture, music, literature, and in-terior decoration are united as a single aesthetic statement.

Vuillard and other Nabi painters broke with longstanding boundaries and hierarchies between artists and designers. Never believing that theatrical work was below an artist, he designed stage sets and theater programs. While none of Vuillard’s stage sets survive, we have many of his program designs, such as one for the Théâtre-Libre that features a couple seated in a buggy, to whom the town crier hands programs, presumably playbills for the theater. The theater’s name curving in the lower left mimics the rounded form of the wheels of the buggy, demonstrating Vuillard’s eye for graphic detail.

Vuillard’s experience with the theater influenced the direction of his painting. The silent tension and dramatic lighting of A Family Evening, for example, is reminiscent of the symbolist plays of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. The theater also introduced Vuillard to the medium of distemper (also known as peinture à la colle), in which a pigment is mixed with a glue-based size. Distemper is particularly useful in the theater as its matte finish is quick-drying, easy to spread across the broad surfaces of stage sets, and does not reflect the glare of stage lights. Few artists have used the medium in their canvases, in part due to the difficulty of the technique, which requires the glue to be heated before being mixed with the pigment, and then to be continually warmed to maintain pliancy. The color of distemper changes dramatically when it dries, further challenging artists and their memory of color. Vuillard exploited the unique qualities of distemper, which allowed surfaces easily to be repainted and built up, lending many of his works a heavy texture.

Interiors and Decorations

Vuillard, who never married, was heavily influenced by his mother, a figure who appears in his paintings and photographs throughout his career. Shortly after Vuillard moved to Paris as a young boy, his mother opened a corset and dressmaking shop, a business that moved into the family home prior to the death of Vuillard’s father in 1883. When Vuillard began painting, it was clear that the family business had made a strong impression, for his mother, seamstresses, and textiles all became favored motifs. In The Stitch, Madame Vuillard is seen at the far end of the table bathed in light and absorbed in her work. The central figure (perhaps Vuillard’s sister Marie) is silhouetted, a frequent device employed by Vuillard to allow the application of broad expanses of flat color as well as the suggestion of dramatic lighting. The Stitch also highlights the artist’s interest in textile and decoration, as seen in the suggestions of the patterned wallpaper, tablecloth, and ornate picture frame.

Ambiguity and mystery also play a role in Vuillard’s paintings. By freezing The Stitch’s protagonist at the moment in which she pulls a threaded needle high into the air, Vuillard has converted the quotidian activity of a seamstress into a dramatic gesture, whose theatricality is heightened by her silhouetted image. Mystery is added by the looming portrait of the tuxedoed gentleman (possibly Vuillard’s deceased father) whose silent presence is nonetheless strongly felt. Loose brushstrokes also add to the ambiguity of the painting: patterns are only suggested by quick dabs of paint, and the pile of cloth in the foreground is illegible without the aid of contextual clues.

Although best known for his interiors, Vuillard’s most innovative works are perhaps his decorative screens and panels, or décorations. It was Vuillard’s early involvement with the Nabis and their rejection of traditional hierarchies in favor of a "total work of art" that validated and encouraged Vuillard’s decorative impulse. As the Dutch artist and one-time Nabi Jan Verkade exclaimed, "Away with easel pictures! Away with that unnecessary piece of furniture! . . . No more perspective! The wall must remain a plain surface, and must not be broken by the presentation of limitless horizons. There are no paintings, but only decorations!"

Vuillard’s interest in decorative arts drew upon wide-ranging influences, including medieval tapestries, the British Arts and Crafts movement, and Japanese art. Vuillard’s decorations, which he described as painted tapestries, were created as commissions for a particular client, usually a close friend. The Tapestry is part of a series of five decorative panels, commissioned by Thadée Natanson, a cofounder of the avant-garde literature and arts periodical La Revue blanche. His brother Alexandre commissioned The Public Gardens series in 1894, designed specifically for the salon of his apartment. Each of the panels from the nine-panel series represents a scene from one of two Parisian parks -- the Tuileries Gardens and the Bois de Boulogne. By using different parks, Vuillard hoped to evoke a type of place, rather than document a specific place. As he mused in his journal, "Really, for apartment decoration a subject that is objectively too exact would easily become intolerable . . .The imagination always generalizes."

The panel entitled The Questioning in many ways typifies much of Vuillard’s art. Painted in distemper, the surface is nonreflective and flat. The world that Vuillard cultivates is the realm of women. Here a mother, perhaps Alexandre Natanson’s wife Olga, bends down to talk with her young daughter. Although the gardens are a public space, Vuillard nevertheless manages to evoke the privacy and intimacy of his interiors. Similarly, the background trees and dresses allow Vuillard to show rich pattern, much like the wallpapers and fabrics of his interiors. Vuillard’s Japanese tendencies, known as japonisme, are also evident, especially in the sinuous lines of the stooping woman, whose body is delicately rendered with great economy of form.

Vuillard in His Prime

While Madame Vuillard was a continual presence throughout Vuillard’s life, two other women -- Misia Natanson, and later, Lucy Hessel -- were important influences. Misia, a Polish pianist who was married to Thadée Natanson, was at the center of the Revue blanche circle, which attracted many important cultural figures including writer Marcel Proust, poet Stéphane Mallarmé, composer Claude Debussy, as well as Vuillard and Bonnard. Known for her beauty, talent, poise, and charm, Misia was a muse not only for Vuillard, but also for others in his circle, including Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Renoir, and Mallarmé. In Misia and Vallotton at Villeneuve, Misia and the Nabi painter Félix Vallotton are depicted at the Natansons’ country home in the Paris environs, which had become a gathering place for the Revue blanche circle. In his characteristic style, Vuillard made the decorative patterns of the room -- the lace tablecloth, painted china, dress, and wallpaper -- as important as the figures. The painting on the wall refers to one of the panels that Vuillard had created for Misia and Thadée (The Stoneware Pot, 1895). This painting within a painting, a common motif in Vuillard’s oeuvre, reminds the viewer that among her other roles as friend and muse, Misia was Vuillard’s patron.

Vuillard continued to visit the Natansons at their country home until 1901, at which time their marriage was deteriorating. That same year, Vuillard began to vacation with Lucy and Jos Hessel. What initially had been a professional relationship (Jos was a dealer at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune with which Vuillard was becoming more closely affiliated) became a warm friendship. Lucy and Vuillard were especially close and remained intimate friends through the rest of his life. As with his visits to the Natansons’ homes outside of Paris, Vuillard’s visits to the Hessels’ vacation homes in Normandy and Brittany were not tourist adventures, but rather villégiatures, or restful sojourns in which the scenery changed, but daily routines remained largely undisturbed.

Comfortable with his companions and environment, Vuillard drew inspiration from his stays in the country. In Boating, Vuillard paints his impressions of the scenery of the Paris environs, which he enjoyed while visiting Misia and Thadée Natanson at their country home. While at first glance the landscapes are strikingly distinct from Vuillard’s interiors, close inspection reveals certain similarities. The inclusion of Misia’s brother, seen in the boat, lends an intimacy to the expansive landscape. Vuillard also mimics the matte effect of distemper, here using a cardboard support that absorbed many of the oils and removed the medium’s characteristic sheen. The flat patches of pure color, as seen in the sky, trees, and water, recall his early Nabi paintings.

Photography

Like other painters of the late nineteenth century, notably the impressionist Degas, Vuillard experimented with the novel photographic technology, acquiring his first camera around 1897. He favored a portable Kodak to take snapshots of ordinary moments of his daily life--most often views of his friends at gatherings and outings. The photograph of Lucy Hessel in her salon, like many of Vuillard’s paintings, emphasizes the subject’s surroundings as much as it does the figure herself.

The relationship between Vuillard’s paintings and photographs is complex. Often photographs would function as aides-mémoires, helping Vuillard recall daily details that would inform his paintings. Vuillard’s interest in photography and the camera’s ability to focus deeply brought to his painting a new interest in spatial depth, seen especially in his paintings completed after the turn of the century where there frequently is a sharp distinction between foreground and background. At times, however, it was Vuillard’s paintings that seemed to inform his photographs. Certain photographs are so closely linked to earlier dated paintings, that one is uncertain if the photograph is staged, or if the painted scene was so ordinary that it was repeated and captured on film at a later date.

Late Portraits

Although the latter decades of his career were largely devoted to portraiture, Vuillard always insisted "I don’t paint portraits. I paint people in their homes." Vuillard gave equal attention to the sitters and their surroundings, believing that individuals’ homes and possessions revealed as much of their identities as the people themselves. Thus, Vuillard’s portraits departed sharply from the tradition of portraiture in which the formally posed subject is pushed to the front of the picture plane and occupies the majority of the canvas. Such is the case of the portrait of the brothers Henry and Marcel Kapferer, who are depicted in their shared apartment. Seated at the breakfast table, the successful siblings (Henry founded the company that later became Air France; Marcel earned a fortune in the petroleum business) are glimpsed reading the newspaper, seemingly unaware of the artist’s presence. The table is pushed deep into the picture space and occupies less than half of the canvas, allowing Vuillard to include many ambient details, such as the lavish furnishings and the paintings on the wall, part of the Kapferers’ collection of modern art.

While a survey of Vuillard’s career evidences a range of painting styles, it is clear that he sustained certain aesthetic preoccupations from his earliest Nabi days to his late portraits. He never lost his early enthusiasm for the richness of pattern and textile, subtle drama heightened by ambiguity, or the intimacy of interiors. In 1938 Vuillard’s long career was honored at a retrospective exhibition at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. Shortly after this crowning achievement, Vuillard, at the encouragement of the Hessels, retreated to Brittany as the German army approached Paris. He died there in June 1940.

The exhibition is made possible by generous support from Airbus.

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