Vuillard-2012

TH I NK I NG AGA I N ABOU T VU I L L ARD ’ S L AT E POR T RA I T S

on february 13 , 1923 , now more than ninety years ago, Vuillard dropped by the Hotel Meurice, where his old friend, Misia, was finishing a long lunch with Coco Chanel and Pierre Bonnard. It seems that Bonnard walked Vuillard back to the apartment Misia shared with her third husband, the Catalan painter, Josep Maria Sert. From Vuillard’s brief journal entry, we know that Sert insisted then and there that Vuillard paint a portrait of Misia, which the painter commenced—seemingly against his will—in 1923 and struggled with until the late summer of 1925 , more than two years later. The resulting painting is, as Guy Cogeval neatly puts it, “one of Vuillard’s most perverse ‘anti portraits.’” (Cogeval, Vol. III, p. 1420 ), and, as such, it serves as our introduction to the fiendishly difficult and elusive world of “late Vuillard.” (cat. no. 1 ). Whereas his friend Bonnard brightened his palette, stuck to the traditional painting medium of oil on canvas, and seldom varied from the pleas ant bourgeois imagery of landscapes, flowers, fruit, women, and pets, Vuillard enmeshed himself in the baroque intricacies of Parisian cosmopolitan society, invented his own version of the old me dium of distemper (he boiled his little pots of glue mixed with pigment on his stove like a cook!), worked on canvases for years at a time, and created works that seem to resist the bracing modernism of the century in which he lived the majority of

his professional life. Perhaps, as a result of this, Sert, who had insisted that Vuillard paint his wife, never bought the painting on which the poor art ist labored so long, and both the painting and a somewhat larger distemper on paper “sketch” for it (cat. no. 2 ) , were in the painter’s studio at his death in 1940 . These two paintings, which were made simultaneously, have never been shown to gether, and only three of the more than 100 pencil “croquis” made by Vuillard in preparation for the paintings have ever been published. Here, they ap pear together to illuminate what might be called an “anti-commission” of an “anti-portrait.” Why should we care about this “perverse anti portrait?” Surely because Vuillard himself did, reworking it extensively to hang in the French Pavillion of the Venice Biennial in 1934 . Indeed, in Venice, the painting hung with the now famous series of four somewhat smaller portraits of his artist friends, Aristide Maillol, Kerr-Xavier Roussel, Pierre Bonnard, and Maurice Denis, today among the glories of the permanent collection of the Petit Palais in Paris after the city of Paris purchased them in 1937 . (Salomon et Cogeval, Vol. III; XI- 120 . 1 - 4 ) How could Vuillard have allowed a “perverse anti-portrait,” to hang with works that all agree are among the glories of his late career? Like the painting so aptly characterized by