Vuillard-2012

could 19 th century fashion by studying Manet, Renoir, or Degas. Indeed, the word “vintage”— much used in preference to “old” in the parlance of America’s youth oriented society—is one that applies well to Vuillard’s peculiar and personal modernity. Vuillard preserved for the indefinite

to be as flattering as they might have hoped. To flatter was not Vuillard’s aim, not because he couldn’t flatter, but because he would rather tell the truth. His truths were told visually, and the results are often painful—like those told in the portraits of Giacometti or Soutine or Bacon or Freud. It is to this difficult modernity—a modernity steeped in the past and unafraid of complexity—to which Vuillard makes such a compelling and important contribution. There is probably no other 20 th century artist who more honestly—and more clinically—portrayed that anxious century in a great city that was, even in its own eyes, beginning a long, slow decline into a cluttered and infinitely interesting past.

future of “art” a world that had itself preserved so much of that art and made it central to the life of the people doing the preservation. If modernity is almost always defined as future driven, there is also an

His truths were told visually, and the results are often painful—like those told in the portraits of Giacometti or Soutine or Bacon or Freud.

equally important dimension of it that links us imaginatively to various human pasts—both our own and those of others. Vuillard’s modernity was of the latter type—a search, like that of Proust, for lost time preserved in art. It is hoped that this small exhibition will provide New Yorkers with the chance to stop a moment from their frantically busy lives and slip into former ones. Oddly, it does so in a way that is completely original, for Vuillard never considered himself to be a “society portrait painter” just as Proust never thought of himself as a “society novelist.” It is easy to see, when looking at Misia’s thick and utterly ugly face, why her husband never bought the portrait, and it is equally easy to see that the Blochs or many of Vuillard’s other socially prominent sitters might not have found his portraits of them

By Richard R. Brettell, Margaret McDermott Distinguished Chair, the University of Texas at Dallas