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Sinister World

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Vuillard lived with his mother and sister. The shy painter spent all his time either representing them in his small, pursed canvases or writing in his journal. A short distance away workers labored to construct that ugliest of monuments: The Eiffel Tower.

His older sister Marie was, to her mother's disappointment, not yet married. The static scenes of the two women we find again and again in the artist's early work characterize the relationship between mother and daughter, but it was a subject easily exhausted. Vuillard resolved to change this: he would get his sister married.

Self Portrait with Sister

Vuillard was sustained by the women in his life. After he convinced his best friend Roussel to marry Marie, who was seven years the man's elder, he was forced to find other females to surround him. He met women in the parks of Paris, the only place he could freely move about without anxiety. it was there that he came upon Misia Nathanson and her husband Thadee.

Seducing painters had always been Misia's metier. She loved toying with them, making them fall in love with her, putting them off and on. She was as charismatic as she was intelligent, finally perishing in Paris in the year 1950. Before then, she lived off her skills as a pianist. Vuillard professed his love almost immediately. He wrote her letters:

I have always been shy in your presence, but the security, the assurance of a perfect understanding relieved me of all embarrassment; nothing was lost by this understanding being a wordless one. Now that we have been so long without seeing each other I have sometimes anxiously wondered if it is still as perfect as it once was. Your postcard arrived in answer to my question.

And no, I found nothing ridiculous in your thought: I saw it simply as a token of your affection. You met halfway a desire that flashed across my mind yesterday and that I was afraid of not having time to mention to you. So there is something better than wireless communication. The best thing was that you were there! It seems to me I am happy now, thanks to you. I am calm...

his 1925 painting of Misia and her niece and the black cups Liaisons of this sort were nothing new for Misia. Later, she would take up with Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec among others. But now her omnipotent position in Vuillard's work started to make some of his patrons uncomfortable. After all, she was a married woman. A painter in Paris could sleep with a married woman, or paint her without any repercussions, but not both.

Misia was his love instructor more than his intended, however. In his sights was another married woman, Lucy Hessel.

lucy hessel

Keeping his affairs a secret was not exactly Vuillard's strong point. Soon enough people knew that he and Lucy weren't platonic simply by the volume of their public screaming matches. They began spending the summers together, half-encouraged by her husband Jos Hessel, who sold his wife's lover's paintings for a lucrative profit. The three spent the next forty years in a perversion of symbiosis.

the reader, 1896

Vuillard kept his journal faithfully during this period, but it was destroyed by Jos after his death. Confidence in his work and love life filled him. The attraction of two outstanding women to his person enabled him to conceive of soliciting others to the position. He dallied with models in his studio until he became absorbed by an actress named Lucie Belin. It is no surprise that Vuillard's favorite play was A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In 1897, he bought his first camera, a Kodak. He immediately set to work taking pictures of his aging, sick mother. I mean, what else was there?

It is one thing to be a great artist and another completely to be told that you are in your lifetime. Even for painters there is a sophomore slump, a momentary lull in creativity. Vuillard's first representations of his life resembled a turtle poking out of its shell; his characterizations afterwards lacked that artistic caution. Japanese and medieval art constituted the pillars he returned to; a shy man loves history because it justifies his prejudice that the world is filled with terrors.

Yet artistic confidence can overcome whatever the passing of first inspiration evaporates. Any white man must go outside his own experience in his art, or else his work is reduced, eventually, to caricature. The Dreyfus affair and the events of the first World War had a tremendous impact on Vuillard's view of his country. Misia Natanson, Leon Blum and others were persecuted as a result of these events, and Vuillard leapt to their defense when he could. A gentile man who mixes with those outside his own experience finds there is another world beneath this one, and a menace beyond the menace he suspects he exists when he is a child.

Vuillard's mean portrait of Popescu

Still, Vuillard's art never approached the political. It is always personal for him, from the first time his work, so different from the others, was presented to his peers at Lycee. When the Romanian actress Elvire Popescu missed various sittings for her portrait, Vuillard avenged this slight by putting wrinkles where there weren't any.

Vuillard's mother remained of utmost importance to him until the day she died in his arms. He lived with her until he was 60. She represents, in his many depictions of her, that world into which he first entered. Her slow deterioriation only enhanced the sinister quality she possessed in some of her son's canvases. Because something he loved was vanishing before his eyes, the joy seems to fade from these images as we view them.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about The Last of Us. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

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Comments

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A very good art