Vuillard-2012

“ancienne regime,” one sees not only the beautifully dressed children and their mother, but also their nanny, who helps the youngest to read her large book, and all the family sits in expensive—and new—historicist furniture on patterned wall to-wall carpet in front of a damask covered wall featuring a superbly framed portrait by Pietro Nelli of the then ruling Pope Pius XI. This is the way it was, of course, and how curious it must have been to Vuillard—as it would have been to Proust— that the Blochs were most likely of Jewish origin. Whether Jean Bloch or Vuillard chose what we might call the “papal backdrop” for the painting, Vuillard’s loquacious journal is silent, but neither the aspirational anxieties nor the ironies embodied in this portrait were lost on the subtle painter. This time, however, M. Bloch liked the finished painting well enough to pay for it, and it remains today in the collection of his descendents. The other works in the present exhibition form a family with the commissioned portraits discussed here. They are somewhat more modest in scale and were, with one important exception, not the result of a specific commission. Yet, they too are portraits of people who occupy complex interiors filled with books and works of art. In Venus of Milo (cat. no. 4 ), we see a particularly “up-to-date” (for 1920 ) young woman in Vuillard’s own modest apartment on the rue de Calais, with its full-scale plaster cast of the torso of the Venus de Milo in the Louvre sitting implausibly on

the mantel and wittily juxtaposed to the model. Although we know her name (Mlle. Hermion), the work is not a portrait in the sense of being commissioned by the sitter. Instead, Vuillard, as he often did, simply “used” someone he knew as a human presence in a complex interior. Thus, she is neither posing nor posed, and it seems almost as if we happen upon her as she “completes” the armless, headless, and legless Venus de Milo she confronts. She has all her appendages and is, in addition, dressed in an utterly modern, almost mannish fashion, her breasts almost hidden beneath the flat, heavy clothe of her pink dress. In this way, she contrasts again with the Venus de Milo, who exposes all that is hidden of Mlle. Hermion. Here, Vuillard places “past and “present,” “art” and “life,” in the same room and allows each its own “space” as they preside over an interior lit by an unseen window and reflected by a gorgeous over mantel mirror—mirrors and windows being the two principal metaphors for “the picture” in the western tradition. Vuillard is nothing if not clever. As one reflects on the portraits we have discussed in this short essay, it is clear that Vuillard was pictorially fascinated with “aging” and with the full spectrum of life from youth to venerable old age. He loved painting old sitters—and in this one thinks of earlier artists like Rembrandt or Goya. He also was fascinated by the whole spectacle of female fashion, and one could do as serious a study of the clothing of the 20 th century by confining oneself to Vuillard’s paintings and drawings as one