Vuillard-2012

Bohemian adolescence into a cushioned adulthood from which she would never escape. Vuillard was effectively replaced as her official painter by Auguste Renoir, whose paintings of her as Mme. Edwards have little to do with Vuillard’s ordered chaos, and Vuillard himself found consolation in the arms of his next muse and lover, the formidable Lucy Hessel, whom he lovingly portrayed as she aged in a series of genre portraits that are, perhaps, the most complex pictorial analysis of any 20 th century woman by a great artist. Given this—and given Misia’s abandonment for an even younger woman by Edwards and Misia’s later remarriage to the wealthy Catalan painter, Josep Maria Sert, it is hardly surprising that Vuillard had trouble with a portrait commission that resulted in this telling “anti-portrait.” How did he work on The Black Cups ? First, he surely decided where and in what costume he would paint Misia. He elected—or was perhaps told—to include her favorite neice, Marie-Jeanne Godebeski, whom Misia held in her arms as a baby in Vuillard’s wonderful Lady in Blue with Child of 1899 (Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum). Marie-Jeanne—called Mimi throughout her life— was the daughter of Misia’s half-brother, Cipa Godebeski and was, with Vuillard’s own niece, one of two little girls who played walk-in parts in the early lives of the childless people in the Natanson’s world. Here, as a woman in her early 20 ’s, we see her as a “real” young woman, who stands and looks down on her seated aunt Misia, who was, in 1923

when the painting was begun, 51 —as we would say today, “going on 21 .” Mimi was to be married in 1925 , the year the painting was completed, in a society wedding in a chapel of Les Invalides and had blossomed into a young beauty. Misia herself, as we know from the luncheon at the Meurice that gave rise to the painting, was particularly close in those days to Coco Chanel, and her mature style of clothing, jewelry, and even in her fashionably bobbed hair, was very “au courrant” and very “Chanel.” How different she is than the delightful ingénue wearing almost hippy-like flowing printed fabric dresses in Vuillard’s earliest paintings of her or than the haute-couture “lady” painted by Renoir as Mme. Edwards. Here, she is androgynous—at once boy and woman—as she presides over the stylishly modern dining room in which she takes her tea or coffee. The room itself must have given Vuillard fits. With no architectural ornament of any sort, its walls are essentially unadorned surfaces of grey silk fabric, and surely the ceiling is either lacquered or silver leaf. How, he must have wondered, does one paint these surfaces with distemper? The vast varnished surface of the table fills the foreground of the picture, forcing the viewer (who, from the eye level of the picture, is also seated) into the role of a guest for coffee in the late afternoon. The interior itself has very few objects—one painting (a Bonnard landscape?) enters at stage right, a set of Chinese style dining chairs line the walls, a sideboard with an electrified candelabra sits at stage left, an