Curator Stephen Brown Spotlights Édouard Vuillard and His Muses

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 26 April 2012 00:27

Written by Laura Blum

Post-impressionist artist Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) ranks among the more intriguing characters in French art history. His penchant for intimate art and relationships is especially suited to the bespoke spaces of The Jewish Museum in the former Warburg mansion on Upper Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

From May 4 to September 23, 2012, art lovers can cozy up to the intricately patterned interiors, streets and gardens on view in the Museum's much-awaited exhibition highlighting his work and the patrons and friends who supplied inspiration. 

Dubbed Édouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, the show was curated by art historian Stephen Brown, whose previous efforts at The Jewish Museum include work on exhibitions such as Action/Abstraction (2008) and The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice (1987).

FilmFestivalTraveler.com sat down with the curator at a local French bistro, Pascalou, whose delicate wallpaper -- and vin blanc -- Vuillard would have richly approved of.

Q: Why Vuillard, and why now?

SB: The exhibition was inspired by the acquisition of a painting by The Jewish Museum at auction. We were successful in buying the painting over the telephone from a sale in London.

Q: Can you divulge the mystery painting?

SB: The painting is entitled Lucy Hessel Reading. It shows a woman sitting in a bedroom, although exactly what kind of picture this is may seem unclear, even today. This picture was painted in 1913, on the eve of the Great War (1914-18).

Q: A Painter and His Muses gives Lucy a special wink.

SB: After 1899, Lucy Hessel, who was the wife of Vuillard's dealer, Jos Hessel, became Vuillard's model and "inspiratrice."

Q: And confidante and critic, correct?

SB: And in effect his lover of 40 years. It was a very French situation. It's somewhat removed from our experience in postwar America. But in those days it was not abnormal.

Q: Before Lucy there was Misia. Who were Thadée and Misia Natanson for Vuillard?

SB: Vuillard spent about 10 years trying to figure out what kind of artist he was going to be in the 20th century. And in doing that, he made a transition from the realm of the Natansons and this kind of anarchizing liberal but very wealthy circle of the cultural review called La Revue Blanche. At that time there was a social war on in Paris with the Dreyfus Affair.

[Leftist politician] Léon Blum was writing for the Revue, with pieces from Tolstoy and other great French and European writers.  They were doing Ibsen in the theater. You know, The Master Builder! Enemy of the People! -- all part of the incandescent vanguard at the end of the century. The milieu of La Revue Blanche came to an end because Thadée Natanson's money ran out. Thadée's relationship with Misia came to an end and she was hotly pursued by Alfred Edwards, the owner of Le Matin newspaper and probably one of the richest men in Paris.

Q: And Hessel had been waiting in the wings?

SB: Jos Hessel had been watching the [avant-garde] Nabis from the early 1890s to see who was going to be the new artist. Because in 1890, if you had an eye for painting, you could find young people who were great artists and whose work was still within reach. Jos would go to Vuillard and Bonnard and say, "Look, you guys are good, and I'm buying a few here and there from you, but I'm working at the Bernheim Gallery" -- which was the best gallery in Paris -- "so why don't you exhibit with us?” 

Q: Patrons abhor a vacuum. How did Hessel go about luring these artists?

SB: Jos was making sure that they came over to his Rue de Rivoli apartment. The salon of Madame Hessel was a very welcoming and exciting scenario for artists, writers, theater people and so forth. One of the scabrous tales that has been repeated in the literature is Jos's supposed remark to Madame Hessel, "Dear Lucy, you may count yourself lucky that it was Edouard that I wanted as my artist. Otherwise I should have had to impose Bonnard on you. Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Q: Pass the absinthe…

SB: I doubt the Hessel circle drank absinthe, but, whatever it was, if you've seen the film La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), there you might find a powerful representation of the human passions and tensions beneath our story. Ultimately what really counted was art. It was a passion. Jean Renoir's film seems to have some points of contact with the subject of our exhibition.

Q: Was it based on this crowd?

SB: Renoir's film is a thinly veiled satire of upper-class French Jewish life between the wars. 

Q: Vuillard’s own family background wasn’t exactly aristocratic, was it?

SB: From his earliest childhood Vuillard was close to his mother. She was a strong woman who ran her own business purveying highly-crafted clothing to wealthy people who could both appreciate it and afford it. Her son made art for the wealthy and discerning also, for the rest of his life!

Q: Given the era’s fascination with psychoanalysis, Vuillard’s “Oedipal Complex” must have come in for quite a probing. To what extent was he attuned to the life of the mind?

SB: He analyzed himself regularly in his journal over a period of 50 years [from 1890-1940] -- analyzed himself and the way that he was feeling about things, his art and the kinds of things that he was doing, and also the people he was with. It's like being there.

Vuillard was in touch with himself in a way that may be difficult to comprehend in our age. The sensitivity of his character -- after 1930, after fascism -- seems distant from social developments. His journals were sealed after his death, until 1981.

Q: What sorts of things do they reveal?

SB: It was marvelous turning the pages of the journal -- they’re held at the Institut de France in Paris, where they remain unpublished. One can see how the artist was making drawings after Japanese printmakers and then transforming their design approach to his own world of contemporary Paris. You can see the transition. Draftmanship is an important part of his activity.

He is said to have sketched continually…this does not generally lead to presentation drawings; he's not doing it to impress you. He's doing it in order to discover a motif, this idea of the relationship between his conception and what could be put onto a flat surface. He's into visual language, as other modernist artists were, but in his own, highly-personal manner.

Q: He seems to be exploring more than just graphic dimensions, no?

SB: I think this really comes out in the photography. It's a very profound philosophy, not only of artistic creation but of being. It's about time and matter. One of the ways that this is transformed in the shorthand of visual art is the emphasis on the surface and the matter. He seems to be talking about the materiality not only of objects but also emotions and the relationships between people. On the other hand, the plunging perspectives suggest duration and time. 

Q: How cinematic.

A: Perhaps. [The artifacts in our exhibition] may indeed suggest a kind of proto-cinematic thought.

Q: New York’s last Vuillard exhibition was some two decades ago, at the Brooklyn Museum. What’s distinctive about The Jewish Museum’s approach?

SB: We believe this is a significant show, not in terms of the number of loans -- we have over 50 paintings -- but perhaps because the concept is somewhat different. The Jewish Museum is interested in returning the idea of social context to the understanding of an artist. But it's also a way of understanding this particular artist, whose work normally might be overlooked other than by connoisseurs.

His art was not a question of searching after trends, nor was it just a question of making pictures for wealthy people and then selling them back through a gallery or independently. What matters aesthetically in Vuillard is that his milieu became his subject matter. Vuillard, who never married, became the family of his patrons, and they were the ones who understood him. You can't really get to this without the context. 

Q: What points would you most want to highlight about the exhibition?

SB: Two things in particular: the artist and his intimates' highly aesthetic approach to life and what the philosophers have called "sociabilité"-- not simply a social view of art but the consideration of social life as a game. In the case of Vuillard, this performance supported his creative activity and provided its content, ultimately leading to the deeper human meanings or "truth" of his artistic creations. That's why he gravitated to the Hessels in particular. He could have gone on being a gallery artist, endlessly. But he needed a milieu because it gave him the source of his subject matter and helped him get his commissions and portraits.

Another point concerns the relationship between realism as the 19th century understood it and symbolism. It was this familiar mélange that Vuillard took with him out of the 1890s from the painter Edgar Degas and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and transformed into exquisitely moving works of the 20th century.

Q: How does The Jewish Museum's current exhibition featuring Kehinde Wiley’s decorative paintings relate to Vuillard?

SB: Wiley too was using elements of decoration in his art -- an art which affirms the expressive potential of the human figure, in his own way. The decoration in Vuillard is interesting as a concept because it reflects how he used his visual language to create the emotional relationship between himself and what he observed, in artistic terms -- and the spectator's relationship to these representations.

Q: Some of Vuillard's interior scenes are deeply intimate. At the time were they seen as something of an emotional peep show?

SB: Perhaps. [Musée d'Orsay president] Guy Cogeval argues that Vuillard's artistic drive implied manipulation of his circle. As the scholarship shows, he was known to sink into social situations as an observer, adapting people to his creations and placing them in situations to feed his own art. He was shooting for aesthetic intensity all the time.

Vuillard didn't talk much. Perhaps photography was a technique that allowed him a kind of social justification, and also a way of distancing himself.

Q: Vuillard would have loved today's mobile gadgets.

SB: Maybe. The issue of interaction, of "sociability," has certainly informed our presentation of the artist. Social context and meaning are important for The Jewish Museum. We hope our focus will help to shed light on the achievement of an important 20th-century artist.

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