A peek through Vuillard’s window
Édouard Vuillard takes the great impressionist experiment close to the abstract frontier with “The Conversation”. Sotheby’s is selling this painting next month in New York as “La Conversation”, but gives no date in the catalogue — or any other clue how this fits into the disintegration of Vuillard’s decorative vision.
This oil on panel is a telling contrast to his much better known “The Conversation” from 1891, shown below, which is endlessly copied from the original at the US National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Interestingly, the auction house is expecting only $25,000 to $35,000 for the undated oil, which I think by far is the more evocative of the two. The low price certainly attests to what Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New Yorker, reviewing a 2003 exhibition:
“I have often thought that Vuillard is absurdly underrated. The density of emotion, the subtle beauty, and the excruciating sense of the eros of private life in his paintings can make other twentieth-century artists seem like louts.”
Of eros I think not, but private life — home life, that is — may well be the subject matter in both Conversations, though the one on sale at Sotheby’s bears a resemblance to another work, “Chez Maxime”, suggesting that the setting is the celebrated restaurant in Paris (or is it Aix-en-Provence?) rather than his own home or a friend’s.
Still, Vuillard was certainly a homebody, and it’s easy to presume that the women engaged in “La Conversation” are his mother and grandmother. He proudly called them and his older sister Marie, also in the apartment on Rue Truffaut, his “muses”. He lived with his widowed mother until her death, by which time he was already 60.
Here is Édouard’s snapshot of his mum, taken with the Kodak Brownie he bought in 1897.
Mama was a dressmaker, from which Vuillard developed a love of textures and patterns. “La Conversation” is so jarringly diffused that my first thought was of a glimpse through the rough glass of an old-fashioned window, but he was more likely trying to see how far he could push the lines before they pixellated beyond recognition.
The spectral figure in the foreground of the painting — Grandmama, let’s say — dominates the picture at the convergence of jazzy lines of colour, possibly Mama’s fabric swatches. These are the flashes of Japanese art that Vuillard and his fellow Nabi Pierre Bonnard embraced, and which found their way, along with other lively decorative flourishes from far-off lands, into many Parisian homes at the time.
Amateur photo- grapher Vuillard managed a self-portrait in 1905 with Tristan Bernard and Louise and Lucy Hessel. He is in the back, as described by Schjeldahl: “A thin-faced, bearded man, he was chronically insecure about his looks and his capacities.”
How does “La Conversation” fit into the confusing tale of Vuillard’s wonderful decorative panels for his friends’ and patrons’ homes? I have no idea.
The Musée d’Orsay in Paris is quite proud that it has five of the original nine panels of “The Public Gardens” cycle commissioned in 1894 by Alexandre Natanson, director of La Revue Blanche, a literature and art journal that featured Nabi work. They together adorned the dining room of his mansion, but were split up and sold separately in 1929.
L’Encyclopédie de L’Agora on this page lists “La Conversation” among the panels done in 1894 for Natanson, but its image link is to the 1891 Washington version. The National Gallery site says it’s an oil on canvas, rather than wood, so it’s unlikely to have been part of the Natanson array.
Finally, Annette Leduc Beaulieu and Brooks Beaulieu, in a very informative article for Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide about a 2002 Vuillard show in the US, outline in detail the five-panel collection known as “The Album” that was painted in 1895 for Thadée Natanson, Alexandre’s brother.
They include “richly textured interior scenes of varying formats, represent young bourgeois women engaged in simple domestic activities, sharing an album, quietly conversing, arranging flowers, sewing and embroidering”.
But despite the reference to sewing, there is no “Conversation” among them. To learn more of “The Conversation” at the top of this post, we’ll have to read lips.
