Art 2 - Richard Cork finds Vuillard was most at home painting the small moments of family life
When the adolescent Edouard Vuillard came home from school, he would find his widowed mother cutting, sewing and fitting dresses in the narrow confines of their old-fashioned Parisian house. She had been left to fend for herself when her far older husband died, and Vuillard was enormously attached to this indomitable woman. Some of his earliest paintings show her at home, either brooding half-hidden in the shadows or emerging from a decorative background spattered with oddly claustrophobic wallpaper. He remained devoted to her until her death, often including her in paintings or taking photographs that chart her progress from stern, middle-aged vigour to gaunt, shrunken fragility.
Perhaps because of this attachment, Vuillard never married. He enjoyed dalliances with society ladies who bought his work, most notably the formidable Madame Hessel who earned herself the waspish nickname "le dragon de Vuillard". And his willingness to concentrate on family life, in most of the finest paintings from the 1890s in the Royal Academy's retrospective, suggests that he gained huge satisfaction from observing parents and their offspring at a suitable remove. Not that Vuillard's art is cold or distant. Although he never hesitated to dramatise moments of family tension, he cherished the men, women and children who appear, at their ease, in his most affectionate work.
Early on, he became associated with a group of restless young French artists who dubbed themselves the Nabis. They borrowed the Hebrew word for "prophet" to declare their impatient desire for a radically simplified art of flattened forms and bold colours. Friendship with contemporaries as experimental as Bonnard helped to ensure that Vuillard did not pursue a conventional path. In his quiet, self-effacing way, the young man with the luxuriant brown beard quickly transformed himself into one of the most daring painters of his generation.
So a paradox is lodged at the heart of Vuillard's work. Even as he explored a highly simplified style, rejecting naturalistic detail in favour of a broken, patchwork alternative, the reality of daily life was still his central concern. However decorative his paintings became, with colour and form seemingly handled with the freedom of a born abstractionist, Vuillard never lost his involvement with the people and surroundings he knew best. He may have reduced his figures to their essence, almost merging them with the densely patterned surfaces of the rooms they inhabit, but they remain identifiable as Vuillard's ever-watchful mother, his hesitant sister Marie, her wayward husband Roussel or even a self-portrait of the artist, looking gravely professorial and older than his years in a pale straw hat.
Anyone tempted to hail Vuillard simply as a forerunner of abstract art is therefore mistaken. For all its scintillating modernity, Vuillard's early work always stops short of rejecting observable reality. In this sense, he remains close to Degas and is far removed from Gauguin, seen as the prime inspiration for the Nabis. Vuillard had no desire to pursue Gauguin's obsession with exotic themes in a primitive paradise utterly distant from contemporary French life.
Sometimes Vuillard went outside his domestic confines and explored, like Degas before him, the allure of the theatre. One of Vuillard's closest school friends, Lugne-Poe, became a leading actor-writer-producer and commissioned him to produce scenery designs as well as to illustrate theatre programmes. His later decorations for the Comedie des Champs-Elysees take theatre productions as their subject, revelling in the costumes, sets, gestures and lighting. Sadly, most of the scenery paintings he produced for Lugne-Poe's pioneering Theatre de l'Oeuvre have not survived and were not documented at the time.
His later work became far less audacious, often elaborate and disappointingly traditional portraits of the leisured bourgeoisie. He thrived in their company, and knew how to evoke their opulent surroundings with the maximum atmospheric aplomb. After his mother died in 1928, he survived as an artist for another decade and even tackled a monumental mural for the Palais des Nations in Geneva. While reflecting his commitment to peace, its uncomfortable reliance on allegory and classical draperies showed how far he had strayed from the radicalism of his youth.
The last rooms of the Royal Academy show prove that Vuillard was now quite out of step with adventurous contemporaries such as Matisse, and the outbreak of the Second World War shattered his spirit. Back in 1917, he had accepted an official war commission and produced, in a painting called Interrogation of the Prisoner, the most sombre and unsettling work of his entire career. Now, in 1939, that same feeling of grim, tense expectancy returned. Everything he most valued - above all, the tender consolations of family life - was threatened more gravely than ever when the French army surrendered to Hitler. Overcome by the mood of national despair, the 71-year-old artist died in 1940. The world he had once celebrated with such optimistic flair seemed to have been obliterated, and he could not withstand its loss.
"Vuillard: from post-impressionist to modern master" is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (020 7300 8000) until 18 April
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
