Thursday, November 21, 2019

On the sofa, in the white room

Aleana Egan sent me an email which included a photograph of the cover of a new book about Édouard Vuillard, the French ‘Intimist’ painter. Further investigation quickly revealed that it was the catalogue of a summer exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath, entitled ‘The Poetry of the Everyday’, and I ordered it straight away, as Vuillard is one of my favourite painters. The same online search drew my attention to the imminent publication of another book on Vuillard, by Julia Frey, called ‘Venus Betrayed - The Private World of Edouard Vuillard’, and I ordered it too.

The texts in the modest but beautifully illustrated ‘The Poetry of the Everyday’ are conventional in their claims and explanations. Chris Stephens, in his foreword, writes that Vuillard’s ‘art is a celebration of the mundane, the everyday. Yet, in its succinct intimacy it is also highly complex, if not contradictory’. He goes on to suggest that in his early paintings ‘the quotidian becomes almost sacramental. In balancing form and content, psychological drama and abstraction, his pictures are about as close to poetry as any artist’s, and all the more brilliant for their understatement and the near imperceptibility of their craft’. In the main essay, Belinda Thomson writes uncontroversially, proposing that Vuillard’s poetic sensibility was able to transform the ugly everyday objects in his paintings, elevating them beyond rules of conventional taste.

All of this confirmed my suppositions about the artist, whose paintings I’ve known and enjoyed for many years, although I’ve never given them a great deal of thought. As suggested by his best work, he has always seemed to me to be a perceptive painter of interiors, acutely attuned to feminine sensibilities, an informal and intuitive craftsman, and often quite moody. These are the characteristics that characterise his early domestic work; Vuillard’s decorative schemes for rooms, both private and public, like his later society portraits, are not especially engaging. The former are usually attractive but generic; the latter tend to come across as somewhat brittle and unsympathetic. Compared to his friend and fellow ‘Intimist’, Pierre Bonnard, Vuillard always seems conflicted, not expansive, introspective rather than that extrovert - although it is true that Bonnard’s paintings became more complex and difficult as he grew older.

I’ve always assumed that Vuillard was unusually sympathetic to the inner lives of women, but Julia Frey’s substantial book sets out to demonstrate that this last preconception is deeply misguided. She remarks that very often Vuillard’s women are depicted in ‘uncomfortable or conflictual poses: facing away from husbands and lovers, confronting other women or pointedly ignoring them. Frequently their body language is frankly disturbing’. He also showed women sleeping, reading, sewing, or seen from behind - women who ‘do not know’ that they are being watched - and she considers this to be an invasion of their privacy. Admitting that Vuillard was a sensitive man, she nonetheless emphasizes that he ‘disguised his misdeeds, denied his vices, and occulted his sex life’. Almost all his works tell stories, Frey observes, ‘in which his secrets have a special role’. All of this is spelled out in the foreword, and in the rest of the book she unpacks psychological interpretations of a large number of Vuillard’s paintings, based on her familiarity with the artist’s journals and notebooks. It makes for engaging reading, but rarely have I finished an art book disagreeing so frequently with a writer’s reflections on the content of its images. More often than not I found them intrusive and speculative, but admittedly I ended up understanding that there is often more to Vuillard’s pictures than I have hitherto supposed. I concluded that Vuillard may have had difficulties with personal boundaries, grounded in the fact that after his father’s early death he lived in a small household with three generations of women, to all of whom he was strongly attached. He had little privacy or independence. He may, perhaps, have been fearful of being swallowed up by feminine intimacy, which gave rise to his characteristic opposition between impersonality and closeness, or attachment and detachment, but this psychological trait is far from being as odd and maladjusted as Frey suggests it is.

The novelist Julian Barnes, whose enthusiasm for the artist has led him to describe Vuillard’s work as ‘one of the most supreme and complete explosions of art in the last two hundred years’, looks at the similar issues rather differently. He astutely observes that Vuillard’s paintings ‘both offer (and withhold) a narrative’, as if their figures had ‘a life beyond the paint that depicts them’. Making a comparison with the ideas of the French Symbolist poet Mallarmé, a friend of the artist, Barnes says that Vuillard was more concerned with painting an object’s effect rather than the thing itself, and that he attempts to evoke the character of people and things by placing them deliberately in the shadows, referring to them allusively and never by name.   

I once used a Vuillard image on the cover of a small publication, called ‘Hidden’, a collection of short essays on women artists, musicians, and writers. In the first chapter I made reference to Freud’s ideas about the uncanny, the ‘unheimlich’, which is the result of the resurfacing of repressed memories, and especially those of intimacy, and to the proposal, from the perspective of Freudian theory, that the most uncanny place of all is the mother’s body. The art historian Norman Bryson, writing about still-life and genre painting, suggests that such work often bears traces of male exclusion from the ‘maternal domain’, and that from a man’s perspective nostalgia and ambivalence give to feminine space an intense power of attraction, but that it nonetheless remain’s ‘other’, out of reach. The Vuillard painting, ‘On the Sofa (in the White Room)’, a blurred and soft depiction of a woman lying on a sofa, probably reading, with her head turned away from the viewer, was used in ‘Hidden’ to suggest that idea.

Barnes, writing in an another essay about Pierre Bonnard, remarks that ‘a little biography is a dangerous thing’, and that our tendency to interpret artists’ work through their lives is often irrelevant and sometimes harmful to its understanding. Perhaps, Barnes suggests, instead of looking at an artist’s life and letting it colour or decide our view of his or her art, we should look at things from precisely the opposite direction. In this I sympathise with him - but Julia Frey would very probably disagree.


https://www.theartnewspaper.com/review/vuillard-holbourne
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/21/vuillard-and-madame-vuillard-review-barber-institute-birmingham
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/On_the_Sofa_%28The_White_Room%29_by_%C3%89douard_Vuillard.JPG