Vuillard-2012

When we look at his portrait of Misia—a painting Vuillard himself entitled with his own conscious aversion to this work’s existence as a portrait, “The Black Cups”—we confront Vuillard’s own acts of rejection—of the art of his time and of a sitter who, in his view, made a pathetic attempt to keep up with the ever-changing aspects of modernist taste in the city that defined modernism. Guy Cogeval is correct in calling this painting an “anti-portrait,” and he might have gone even further in calling it an “anti-modern anti-portrait.” Indeed, Vuillard’s modernism must be understood as anti-modern. Just as Proust would write in defiant opposition to his contemporaries, creating, in his rejection, a form of complex, layered narrative whose ambitions have the 20 th century as a rejection of that centuries’ predominant esthetic trends—trends that, as a young man, he did so much to define. Vuillard’s portrait of Misia begun in 1923 , “completed” in 1925 , and repainted in 1933 – 4 is precisely a rejection not only of his sitter, but, more precisely, of his own earlier paintings of this extraordinary woman. Misia Godebeski Natanson Edwards Sert had been Vuillard’s firstmuse andperhaps his first lover. In the 1890 ’s, she presided over a salon in the wonderfully cluttered and unpretentious apartment—called Vuillard’s modernism must be understood as anti-modern. their roots in the 19 th century multi-volume novels of Balzac and Zola, so too Vuillard defined his oeuvre of

“The Annex”—that she shared with her first husband Thadee Natanson. Here, Vuillard was enveloped in a world of loving and mutually beneficial creativity in which artists, writers, musicians, actors, and others played in a world without children. In a certain sense, “The Annex” and the Natanson’s little country villa, “le Relais,” were delightful esthetic playpens for creative adults, who came and went as the days, the weeks, and the seasons changed. Vuillard was, without question, the dominating “visualizer” of these playpens—although he shared this responsibility with Felix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and his images of these interiors and gardens—alive with pattern, visual clutter, and people of varying types—are ordered just enough to be legible without losing the wonderful tendency towards formlessness that made them so interesting to their creative inhabitants. Few rules of “correct” comportment, dress, or demeanor applied to the merry—or histrionic—goings-on in Misia’s realms, and Vuillard will be remembered as much for his representations of it as Boucher and Fragonard were for theirs of Mme. de Pompadour’s. The story of Misia in the 20 th century is one of her gradual withdrawal from this decidedly bohemian world into one made possible only with considerable wealth. Her second husband, Alfred Edwards, may even have “acquired” Misia by agreeing to pay her first husband’s debts, and, whatever the truth to this off-repeated rumor, it does make clear that she escaped from a kind of