Vuillard-2012

oddly under-scaled blackamoor stands next to the wall near Mimi, and a completely unornamented door gives one a glimpse into the adjacent room. When compared to the rooms Misia shared with Thadée, this one has almost nothing in it, but each object is chosen with supreme care—like the long rope of large diamonds that adorns Misia’s increasingly ample neck and bosom. Her head is so small with respect to her body, that surely Vuillard was compensating pictorially for her increasing middle-aged spread by showing her seated, and her incredibly simple dress and hair speaks about her utter devotion to the mannish esthetic of her friend—and, some say, lover—Coco Chanel. For Vuillard, Misia’s attempts to be up-to-the moment à la Coco were pathetic, and his pictorial contrast between the “real” youth of Mimi and the caked-face of his former muse, Misia, tells us volumes about his attitude toward aging. Indeed, Vuillard painted a telling self-portrait in the same years, 1923 – 4 , he was painting Misia (Salomon et Cogeval XI- 167 , Private collection, New York). In it, we see him as frankly old and wearing his underwear while washing in the morning. He looks in the mirror and is surrounded by actual and reflected works of art, most of which are reproductions or copies by Vuillard himself of older art by such masters as Le Sueur, Michelangelo, and Poussin as well as a classical relief, and a Japanese print. In Vuillard’s world, there is nothing au courant. We can’t imagine a Matisse, a Picasso, or, God forbid, a Mondrian on his walls. Vuillard’s

modernism was one in which the sheer availability of many human pasts and of millions of old works of art from these pasts was much more important and interesting than what he would have considered to be the passing “fashions” of art called cubism, orphism, neo-plasticism, dada, or surrealism. In fact, if the artist was at home anywhere in Paris it was in the Louvre, which he knew well enough as to be almost pedantic in his opinions about the works in it, and his references to these works were so numerous that one can link his modernism more closely to that of the equally art-obsessed Manet than to any modern artist of his own generation. It was, however, Vuillard’s equally obsessive desire to record the actual world of his sitters in all its detail that lead to the creation of the more than 100 drawings that survive today for this single painting. (Not even Seurat made that many drawings for La Grande Jatte .) Vuillard studied the reflections of the cups on the shiny expanse of wood of the table, the details of the blackamoor, the fashionable little terrier in Misia’s lap, the iron edged glass door reflecting light from the living room, etc. etc. It is as if the painter wanted to forget nothing surrounding Misia in his attempt to avoid painting a portrait of her. And the very existence of these drawings, all of which were originally in sketchbooks, made it possible for the artist to work in his studio on the painting without the powerfully distracting presence of the sitter herself. It almost seems as if Vuillard’s approach-avoidance of Misia is part of a well-conceived “reading” of her