HART3333 Picturing the Self: Portraiture in Nineteenth-century Europe

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 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

Image caption: Edouard Vuillard, The Suitor or Interior with Work Table (1893), oil on millboard panel, 31.75 x 36.35cm.

These ideas underpin Vuillard’s “method”, which does not “depend on a passing impression”6 rather the considered observation and expression of perceived natural and formal relationships. Although Les Nabis were a stylistically heterogenous group, their close bonds were shown through serious approaches to theory and shared exhibitions. The core group of Nabi painters: Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Ker-Xavier Roussel and the late-comer Felix Vallotton repeatedly portrayed each other in their paintings and were keen collectors. Additionally, Vuillard and the others formed close relationships with the influential Natanson family, who established and ran La Revue Blanche, one of the leading art and literary magazines of the day. These relationships, along with those of his family, are represented in the following intimate portraits by Vuillard. ….

Vuillard returned repeatedly to depictions of his sister and her husband fellow Nabi Ker-Xavier Roussel. The series of portraits he produced including The Suitor or Interior with Work-Table (1893) and the later Married Life (c. 1894) document the development of their relationship closely.7 Vuillard’s representations of his sister give her more authority and agency within each image over time but for the most part avoid the conception of subject-specificity through likeness. The premise contained in The Suitor is simple as it represents Roussel, still in his courtship phase with Marie, peering from around an open door into a workshop where she and another woman are working with cloth. The attention given to the relationship explored within the image is marginal when compared to the environment it takes place in. The wallpaper covering the rear wall of the room is a supreme example of Vuillard ‘s decorative approach. The pattern composed of reddish floral motifs surrounded by small white and black brush strokes overwhelms the scene.

Importantly, Vuillard’s treatment of shadow in the image principally through the modulation of wallpaper’s hues on the back of the opening door does not deepen the available space to the figures represented in the painting. Nor is space deepened by the representation of the world outside the work room as through the open window there is only the suggestion of light created by the pattern of white and gold dabs, which is viewed at the same register as the back wall and door.

Vuillard’s use of small blocks of colour to create atmosphere is not unique to this painting as it is key to the (albeit darker) mood of The Stevedores (1890) and My Grandmother (1892). The strategic deployment of light and dark is consistent with the broadly flat composition, which allows for the decorative elements to take precedence over the figures. Vuillard’s sister Marie occupies the foreground of the image with her back to the viewer, she is painted in a dark, black and yellow dress, which clothes her subtly, the soft folds in the skirt defined by the increased density of the irregular black circles. As a result of the bold patterning but overall lack of volume in the figure it appears almost as if the dress is collaged onto the rear wall’s decoration. Roussel who emerges around the opening door appears as if he is wedged between two screens. Vuillard had a deep familiarity with the screens in his mother’s workshop for trying on clothes and the painting’s composition recalls the decorative screens he and other Nabis were producing at the time such as the Desmarais Screens (1893). ….

The series of decorative portraits Vuillard produced in the 1890s treat their sitters in varied and progressive ways. In many respects, characterisation of a sitter through their clothing or in relation to their environment is not new to Vuillard or unique to him, however the total integration of

the sitter’s likeness into his designs pose a serious modernist challenge to conventional portraiture. Where positive statements made through fashionable clothing and intricate room decoration had hitherto only been made in representations of gentry and aristocracy, Vuillard makes them in relation to bourgeois and petit-bourgeois subjects. In doing so, he projects and reflects the changing social relations of France in the nineteenth century. The social relations engendered by the commodity form run through the portraits discussed in this essay, as sitters are clothed in garments that wear them and sport faceless expressions. Vuillard’s decorative ability exceeds his figures’ inner lives as he paints his intimate relations in states of comfort and discomfort. Were these images not to be considered portraits, they would be a succinct illustration of John Berger’s declaration that “We live in a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks.”

Endnotes 1. John Berger, “Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible,” The

Shape of a Pockel (London: Vintage, 2001). Republished in Steps

Towards a Small Theory of the Visible (London: Penguin, 2020), 77. 2. Shearer West, “What is a Portrait?” Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2004) 21. 3. Maurice Denis in Guy Cogeval, Vuillard. Master if the Intimate

Interior (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 116. 4. Maurice Denis in A.C. Ritchie, Edouard Vuillard (New York:

Museum of Modem Art, 1954), 12. 5. Vuillard in Cogeval, 114. 6. Ibid, 115. 7. Susan Sidlauskas, “Contesting Femininity: Vuillard’s Family

Pictures,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (March 1997), 91.