Interior with Pink Wallpaper III (1899)
Courtesy Holburne Museum
A temporary loan show should complement a museum's permanent collection, which, philosophically, is its heart and soul. A show might contextualise a great work in the collection. It can treat a period in which the collection is strong but in which also some narrow movement is absent. It might focus on an artist for which the collection is famous. Some camaraderie with something is essential. Otherwise, the show makes no sense.
It was a delight, then, to see Edouard Vuillard: the Poetry of the Everyday at the Holburne Museum in Bath, a show calibrated to the size, collection, feel, and mission of the museum in a most sophisticated way. Indeed, "intimate" is the Holburne's brand, so showing the artist who pioneered the movement called Intimisme is smart, even though Vuillard's work isn't in the collection. Vuillard's small, richly patterned scenes—mostly interiors—sing in perfect harmony with the museum's silver, porcelain, portrait miniatures, coins, enamels and glass as well as its homey galleries.
The show, about small, precious works by Vuillard early in his career, is itself small—about thirty paintings and lithographs—and in one gallery. Many of the pictures are in private hands so in showing them the Holburne is offering its visitors a special treat. Even the intelligent, stylish catalogue is small.
I'll dispose of Vuillard's art history with dispatch. He was one of the Nabis, Post-Impressionist, representational, and design-oriented artists like Maurice Denis, Paul Serusier, and Pierre Bonnard. Their palette is bright and saturated with surprising, abrupt contrasts.
For them, interior decoration was a bourgeois obsession, but when isn't it? More precisely, in their day, the bourgeois aesthetic was not "less is more" or "form follows function" but "more is more"—more pattern and more stuff—and, while you're at it, add lots of frill and flounce.
Vuillard is a Nabi with a difference. He opts for odd points of views that surprise but also supply ambiguity and sometimes tension. In Woman By an Open Door from 1893, an open white door, a flat rectangle, seems gigantic, dwarfing the blob of a figure in black space, blocking part of the window, a papered wall and possibly a figure who opened the door. The door, boldly white and dead-centre, only seems to rule the room. While it wants to gobble parts of everything else, the picture is a study of glimpses and fragments.
Vuillard's brushstrokes have this quality. They are never geometric like Cezanne's or slashing like Boldini's or Sargent's. There isn't any sense of finish, either. The show is about close looking, and that means looking at his technique. It's a pleasurable job the Holburne rewards with perfect choices of objects, juxtapositions, lighting, and a rich blue wall colour.
Vuillard paints in dabs uneven in shape and depth, each freestanding and each like an aerial view of a tiny island. His explicit subjects—people, furniture, and decoration—might be static but these dabs of colour give the scenes a buzz.
The Chat (1883)
Courtes Holburne
Sometimes Vuillard's angles are oblique, and this is where these pretty little things ooze tension. The Chat and The Artist's Sister with a Cup of Coffee are also from 1893. In The Chat, Vuillard's mother and sister sit in a room where the patterned background is darkened but its angles where walls meet with each other, furniture, or the ceiling are crisp. There are lots of aggressive points and diagonals. The sister wears white, the mother black, which makes for a contrast of opposites. Silence reigns uneasily.
Biography counts here and it weaves in and out of the show's story. Vuillard's feuding sister and her husband lived with him and his mother at the time. To rid herself of the soon-to-split couple, Vuillard's mother moved the family to an apartment so small it would force the combatants to leave the nest. In The Artist's Sister with a Cup of Coffee, the figure sits in a dark space, isolated from the brightness in the next room, her face half in the dark. She looks sad and alone, as she will be before long.
The Vuillards moved a lot, seven times during the twenty-two years between the first and last domestic interior in the show. Their apartments weren't spacious and things were often crammed in tight spaces. That things were always closely quartered but never stagnant was a boon to Vuillard.
He obviously savoured the problem-solving, like painting interiors with views from one tiny, truncated room into another. Interior with Pink Wallpaper III (1899) is one of the brilliant lithographs in the show. In this single print, Vuillard gives us three different spaces and a clash between the expanse of red patterned wallpaper and the far less cluttered but distant passages of two spaces beyond it. The two people are diminished at the expense of inanimate wallpaper that sizzles. The show has some paintings of figures outside, too, and a couple of straightforward landscapes. They're never open spaces, though, but awkwardly confined ones.
Vuillard's still lifes like The Candlestick (1900) are handsome takes on shapes and colours. It measures 15 by 26 inches and is one of the biggest things in the show. Hard, flat monochromatic passages vie with densely patterned ones: a soft, rectangular, big leather bag with a tall, slender, zig-zagging brass canRead More – Source
[contf]
[contfnew]
the art news paper
[contfnewc]
[contfnewc]
