HART3333 Picturing the Self: Portraiture in Nineteenth-century Europe Unit Coordinator: Dr Emily Eastgate Brink
BYRON ELLIS
‘A Decorative Modernism: Edouard Vuillard’s Intimate Portraits of the 1890s’ The absolute saturation of images into everyday life is a defining feature of the visual experience of modernity. Technological innovation and growth in art markets have meant that there is a far greater supply and demand for images than in preceding periods. This has led to the creation of an ever-present visual culture and the inception of a default way of seeing that is subtle, superficial and second nature. These effects led John Berger to describe the modern self in relation to the visual, declaring that “We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks.”1 Although Berger made this declaration in an essay in 2001, his diagnosis arguably extends into the history of portraiture in the late nineteenth century. During his period as a member of the post-impressionist group of young artists self-titled as Les Nabis, Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) produced a series of abstract and decorative portraits of his intimate circle of family and friends. These images all depict interior scenes, and these portraits are striking because of their highly decorative representations of figures and their environment. Vuillard’s ability to synthesise his experience of colour and form with the social relationship of the subjects results in visually compelling spectacles illustrating life in fin-de-siècle Paris. In these portraits Vuillard defies the conventional continuum between specificity of likeness and generality of type, as theorised by Shearer West.2 These portraits, instead, are distinctly decorative leading their subjectspecificity to not be engendered by formal likeness but by composition and design. Vuillard’s designs 82
eschew generality as well, as each figure is dressed and presented with the tailored attention to detail of a dressmaker. More than being “portraits without a face” these compositions demonstrate the decorative nature of modern social relationships, where the interpersonal is conditioned by a pattern of objects and designs, ubiquitous by nature. To frame the works that will be discussed in this essay, a brief overview of Vuillard’s theoretical and personal connection with Les Nabis will be provided. The group was formed in the latter half of 1888, when the young artists studying at the Academie Julian were exposed to the works of Gaugin by Paul Serusier who was recently returning from the artist colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany. With limited familiarity with the works of the Impressionists, a distinct change occurred in their paintings, which were until then composed in the academic tradition. Maurice Denis wrote of the change as being “unforgettable,”3 later devising the maxim “Remember that a picture... is essentially flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.”4 To conceive of painting in simplification allows for a creativity in style founded in the painter’s internal synthesis of perception and style. During this period, Vuillard expressed similar ideas in the journal he kept from 1888 to 1895: We perceive nature through the senses which give us images of forms and colours, sound, etc. no form or colour exists except in relation to another. Painting is the reproduction of nature seen in its forms and colours thus of the relationships between forms and colours. For that I transfer my eye which has just grasped a relationship of form or colour on the paper or on the canvas, I have to find the same relationship – if I fix on some point or other, I end up looking at some body or other. 20 November 18885
