The Insider

By ROBERT HUGHES

Edouard Vuillard was not a simple painter, and his subtle, qualified vision endeared him to some of the most complex minds in France. "Too fastidious for plain statement, he proceeds by insinuation," Andre Gide wrote of him in 1905. "There is nothing sentimental or highfalutin about the discreet melancholy which pervades his work. Its dress is that of everyday. It is tender and caressing, and if it were not for the mastery that already marks it, I should call it timid. For all his success, I can sense in Vuillard the charm of anxiety and doubt."

Perhaps no good artist is wholly forgotten, but partial eclipses happen all the time. One shadowed Vuillard, who, between his birth in 1868 and his death in 1940, became one of the most respected names in French art. The respect, however, turned into the kind that tails off into a cough and a pause. No doubt Vuillard's own modesty contributed to the situation; thus between 1912 and 1938, the years when the big reputations were consolidating, he never had a one-man show in Paris. So it happened that Vuillard was tagged as a "minor master" and left in the waiting room of history. The needed reassessment has now begun with a magnificent Vuillard retrospective organized by English Critic John Russell for the National Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (later it will travel to the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Art Institute of Chicago).

Pretty Safe. Vuillard's background was Catholic and his upbringing strict. The son of an army officer turned provincial tax collector, Vuillard seems always to have been the soul of probity. He was forever conscious of being one of an elite, thanks partly to his education at the Lycee Concordet, one of the most demanding schools in Paris. "I think I am pretty safe in saying," wrote a friend, "that from his adolescence, every day of Vuillard's life has presented itself to him in the rainbow light of a moral predicament . . . Vuillard takes everything to heart." One might not infer that from Vuillard's subject matter, which conjures an intimate world of material satisfactions: the Third Republic interiors, with their mottled wallpaper and yellow light glowing thickly on well-stuffed chairs: the clutter of books, statuettes, lamps, dishes, forks; the poetry of possession. One of his portrait subjects is said to have told her maid to hide the cold cream, because "M. Vuillard never leaves anything out." She was, in a sense, wrong; Vuillard's eye for the telling shape was methodically acute. A domestic interior like Marthe Mellot: The Garden Gate (1910) seems the product of quite casual observation. Scrutinized, it becomes as composed as architecture in every detail --even down to the assonances between the checkered glass panes in the doors and the pattern of the matting, or the placement of the white dog. Vuillard had an exquisite, wry sense of the moment--the quirky gesture, the sudden giggle, the whole dictionary of body language.

Buried Tension. For this reason, theater delighted him. Not the heroics of Shakespeare or Racine, but the work of the new playwrights of the '90s like Ibsen and Maeterlinck, for which Vuillard designed sets at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre in Paris. Russell notes that Vuillard's interiors tend to possess "precisely the elements which Maeterlinck called for: the silence, the half-light, the tensions buried below the point of visibility." He could paint the pauses and solicitous hesitations in polite conversation as neatly as Oscar Wilde could write them.

By the academic standards of its time, the figure of Annette on the Beach at Villerville (1910) is a botch--drawn as though made of string and plasticine, the skirt rendered in weird and only semilegible notations of white paint. Yet Vuillard caught with tender and ironic precision the way that people actually stand when they are not observed--along with the scoured blue of the Atlantic sky and the distant, promenading couples. It is like an amateur snapshot. Vuillard was, in fact, one of the first artists to use a Kodak systematically. It was his habit to set up his camera and focus it while talking to friends, and startle them with a cry of "One moment, please!" and a click. Much of the angling and perspective in Vuillard's rooms seems to correspond to the distortions of an old-fashioned lens. His pictures are full of forms, gestures and profiles that get trimmed by the frame, as a photo is trimmed by its rectangular format--life scanned and sliced. In this, as in his sense of the theatrics of the commonplace, Vuillard was the natural heir of Degas.

Something Personal. There was a lot of impressionism in Vuillard, for he enjoyed what the older painters liked: the panoply of color in a new-minted atmosphere. But pattern was the core of his work, most dramatically in the 1890s, when he produced a run of paintings, including some remarkable self-portrait studies, that anticipated the later Matisse in their schematization of form. But he remained stubbornly unaffiliated; even within the Symbolist group he was somewhat an outsider to the letter of their theory since, among other points of difference, he thought Gauguin's pictures "pedantic." Vuillard never allowed method to diminish sensation. "I do not belong to any school," he declared at 23. "I simply want to do something that is personal to myself." Six years later he described how "I never, in any context, think of my actions in terms of quality. Remember what I'm like and how shy I am. If I am lucky enough to get down to work at all, it's because I have an idea that I believe in . . . I take it for granted that it has merit of some kind."

It did: from the broadly patterned interiors, still lifes and self-portraits of the early '90s, with their jewel color, through the series of big decorative murals that he painted on commission. "Decorative" was no insult to Vuillard. He thought decoration one of the higher functions of art, and he was right. Even in the stubbornly worked-out compositions of his later years, Vuillard described microcosms we can still enter--hospitable and mischievous, articulate in every detail, a long triumph of sensuous integration.

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