Vuillard-2012

that phrase, the answer to that question is layered and complex and is, in the end, the subject of this highly focused exhibition designed to complement the much larger retrospective of Vuillard’s career at the Jewish Museum in New York. It must be said simply that important critics and historians of modern art have struggled to understand Vuillard’s art of the 20 th century. Indeed, their struggle has resulted in a fairly consistent consensus that the four decades of his art in the last century form a long decline from the brilliant youthful career of the 1890 ’s when Vuillard is considered to have been one of the major forces in progressive avant-garde art. His “late” (he was only 32 in 1900 !) paintings, pastels, watercolors, gouaches, and drawings still command a certain respect in the art market, but at prices well below those of his friend Bonnard, who, by contrast, seems to have done everything right in critical terms as a 20 th century painter. In an essay in the catalogue of the Jewish Museum exhibition devoted to Vuillard’s brilliant portraits of members of the Kapferer family, I argue that Vuillard’s form of 20 th century modernism has greater resonance with the literary modernism of his contemporary, Marcel Proust, than it does with the pictorial modernism championed by the Museum of Modern Art. We simply cannot imagine any of the paintings in this exhibition or most of the 20 th century paintings in the Jewish Museum’s exhibition in the galleries of MOMA. Yet, Vuillard’s refusal to play by the rules of pictorial

modernism set by critics and historians of modern art is perhaps his most important quality—and we must attempt to understand what he rejected of that modernism as we define what is modern about his 20 th century art. The great literary critic, Harold Bloom, is now famous for defining the progressive history of western literature as a series of creative and willful “mis-readings” of canonical texts by increasingly burdened later writers striving themselves to become canonical. He often strains our credibility by defining certain texts in one literary form by their mis-reading of texts in another—Blake’s mis-readings of Shakespeare, for example. But, we could extend his analysis to French literature, with its own vast canon. Proust, in this way of reasoning, gained strength as a novelist by mis-reading Balzac and Zola, both of whom he disliked, as he attempted to better them, and, to extend this idea, Proust’s very esthetic can actually be defined as a form of betrayal of these earlier figures he worked to supplant. How, then, does one apply this kind of literary analysis to the art of representational painting in the 20 th century and specifically to the art of Vuillard? It was, in the end, Vuillard’s deliberate misreading of the fast-moving trends in the art of his own time that lead him to a path that stubbornly resists almost all that he saw as the dominate traits of that art. Vuillard was precisely “modern” in his aggressive attempts not to be modern. His very rejection constitutes a peculiar form of modernism.