Vuillard-2012

character late in life. How she reminds us of several of the society ladies who populate Proust’s late novels collectively entitled À la Recherche du temps perdu , the fifth volume ( La Prisonnière ) of which appeared in the year Vuillard’s painting of Misia was begun and the 6 th ( La Fugitive ) in the year of its completion. The point need hardly be made that Proust’s layered and obsessively detailed prose has precise analogues in Vuillard’s equally layered and “slow” pictorial surfaces. If one struggles to discover the structure of a paragraph by Proust, so too does one struggle with Vuillard’s largest late portraits, so dense are their compressed and layered recording of his detailed visual analyses. The point that must be made in the context of this focused gathering of “late” works by Vuillard is that they too take a long time to see. We simply cannot walk easily by them as we do most works in the galleries of a museum and remember their basic pictorial structure, because Vuillard didn’t want us to do that. If Pissarro said that “the eye of the passer-by is not for me,” Vuillard meant it. For that reason, it will be in the quiet and contemplative rooms at Jill Newhouse Gallery that these paintings can be, in effect, lived with. The best way to see this exhibition is not once, but several times; and not for short periods, but for long ones, when one can stand or sit quietly casting one’s eyes back and forth between the tiny penciled surfaces of the drawings to the thickly layered and even pock marked distemper surfaces of the paintings. And, for the first time, we can

quietly gauge Vuillard’s fascinating decision to work on a full-scale “study” and the finished painting at the same time, probably abandoning the “sketch” when he had finished the painting Sert never bought, allowing us to see what the latter might have looked like in 1925 before he repainted it in Venice in 1933 – 4 . We shall then have the time to come to a better understanding of the extraordinary group portrait of Mme. Bloch (cat. no. 3 ) , her three children, and the nanny, of which Vuillard painted not two but four full-scale versions over a period of three full years before sending the finished one to the family. The present work is considered to be the penultimate of the four and, like the first three, remained with the painter until his death. Even the ever sympathetic Guy Gogeval was a little critical of the finished portrait of Mme. Bloch and her children, for which the present work

is the final one of four large-scale studies. Yet, we have to understand the larger role of Vuillard as a portrayer not only of individual people, but

If Pissarro said the “the eye of the passer-by is not for me,” Vuillard meant it.

of haute-bourgeois Parisian society in what we might call its “Proustian” complexity. Jean Bloch, who commissioned the picture of his pretty wife and adorable children, made a fortune producing kitchen and bathroom fixtures for the newly “plumbing-conscious” Parisian market. Yet, with this expensive and elegant interior redolent of the