In Which Bonnard and Vuillard Create Unfamiliar Masterpieces

Vuillard & Bonnard

by HILTON KRAMER

The career of Edouard Vuillard evokes for us today a world almost as remote from the tensions and pressures of contemporary life as the world of Fragonard. It is a world in which the cultivated bourgeoisie is still secure in its privileges and taste — a world in which art, money, comfort, talent, and new ideas exist in an untroubled harmony, a world insulated from catastrophe.

the library

It is not, to be sure, a world devoid of conflict. Far from it. Even if there were not ample evidence in Vuillard's own work of a certain (albeit muffled) malaise, his close association with the first Paris productions of Ibsen would be enough to remind us of what the real life of the middle class was in this period of surface placidity. But it is a world to which Proust and Gide are better guides than either Marx or Freud. It is, above all, a world in which art remains supremely confident of its value and destiny.

the stevedores

In this world Vuillard himself cuts an attractive figure — a man lucky in his friendships, loyal in his family attachments, secure in his talent, and altogether benign in his personal and social relations. Those who knew him invariably wrote about him with affection and respect. No artist of the modern era stands a greater distance from the legendary suffering of the peintre maudit.

Yet there was, after all, something not quite right — something definitely wrong, in fact, in what happened to his art. His masterpieces came early and, for the most part, remained small. Their power is undiminished, and their complexity, perhaps, is now more apparent than ever — the sheer compression of Vuillard's paintings of the nineties has the effect of a new revelation to eyes that have become habituated to pictures than are nothing more than vast expanses of uninflected color.

two seamstresses in the workroom, 1893

Vuillard's paintings are, in every respect but one, a virtual catalogue of what we no longer expect painting to be. Small though they are, they are nonetheless abundant in visual incident. They are at once exquisite and toughminded in their minuscule accretions of observation — observation acutely transmuted into its chromatic constituents. They also boast an extraordinary charm — an almost literary charm, rich in the atmosphere of familiar life observed firsthand, rich in the humor of common experience, yet everywhere touched with a gravity that is never solemn. They are indeed a remarkable combination of pictorial probity and autobiographical evocation.

The one respect in which Vuillard's small paintings of the nineties are linked to what painting — abstract painting, anyway — has now become is in their radical reduction of every form to a "flat" field of color that articulates a continuous decorative surface. In Vuillard's painting of this period - indeed, in the best of his painting of any period — we are still made to feel the tension that inheres in this synthesis of affectionate observation and a strong decorative impulse.

The peculiar power of Vuillard's art is, I should say, to be found precisely in this tension, which confers on subjects an almost humdrum modesty — domestic interiors, relaxed portraits of family and friends, cafe and theater scenes, etc. — an eloquence out of all proportion to their intrinsic interest or to the actual size of the pictures themselves.

the yellow curtain, 1893

The complaint about the small size of Vuilllard's pictures — in effect, a complaint about the small size of his ambition — came early, and unfortunately, Vuillard himself shared in it. What he most wished to produce were large decorative panels for architectural settings — and, alas, he succeeded, over and over again. He was well connected, first with private patrons and then with the agencies that presided over public commissions. A good deal of Vuillard's professional life was given over to these decorative tasks in which, curiously enough, he gradually abandoned the strengths of his early "flat" style in favor of a more conventional depiction of objects and figures in space. It was left to his friend Bonnard — and even more, to Matisse — to produce the kind of aesthetically effective large-scale decorative work that one had reason to expect of Vuillard on the basis of his early painting.

If one looks for reasons for this evident decline, they will be found, I think, in Vuillard's steadfast attachment to the world that first nourished him — that world of cultivated bourgeois taste which reached a kind of crescendo in the aestheticism of the belle epoque and which was never afterward to regain its confidence or its elan. Lacking the large emotional resources that sustained Bonnard and Matisse, Vuillard's sensibility remained totally enclosed within the ethos of that world, which, in the last decades of his career, had become a world of bloodless phantoms.

The Vuillard exhibition that Mario Amaya has now organized at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto has the great virtue of concentrating on the artist's small easel paintings — which is to say, on Vuillard at his best. There are some later, larger works among the ninety paintings, but they are, with few exceptions, of distinctly secondary interest. The big decorative panels that survive could not be removed from their architectural settings, and so our view of Vuillard the painter is certainly not complete in this exhibition, but not everyone will regard this as a misfortune.

Included also are fifty-seven lithographs (Vuillard's complete output in this medium), nineteen drawings, and — a welcome surprise — twenty-three of the artist's own photographs. At least one of the latter — Vuillard's photograph of Thadee Natanson and his wife, Misia, taken at their home in the rue St. Florentine, Paris around 1898, can certainly claim an aesthetic interest equal to the marvelous paintings he was producing at the time.

The Toronto show has been selected by John Russell, who also wrote the valuable text for the catalogue and has, in addition, placed us all in his debt by including in this publication an extensive selection of commentaries on Vuillard written by his contemporaries. Mr. Russell's own essay gives us a vivid account of Vuillard's career and is especially good on the Revue Blanche milieu and on the artist's connections with the avant-garde theater in the nineties. Mr. Russell seems to be of two minds about Vuillard's decorative commissions, but in general he is a most reliable and delightful guide to the vicissitudes of the artist's life and work.

He has also ferreted out some unfamiliar masterpieces. The landscape called "The Saltings" is surely one of the greatest of Vuillard's paintings, a miracle of chromatic subtlety. But the exhbition abound in excellent pictures both familiar and unfamiliar — the wonderful domestic scenes and family portraits of the nineties especially, in which Vuillard seemed (as an artist as well as a man) most completely at home.

In the work of Pierre Bonnard we encounter pictorial world so enchanting in its delicacy of observation, so pleasurable in its careful evocation of time, place, atmosphere, and the feelings they engender, that we are sometimes in danger of overlooking one of the essential constituents of his art — its extraordinary rigor. Visual felicities abound in such profusion, gratifying the eye's appetite with such a surfeit of retinal delectation, that we hardly feel called upon to search out the source of our pleasure. There is a temptation to succumb to the paradise of sensation that is so abundant in Bonnard without ever bothering to consider what it is that makes his art at once so appealing and so strong.

the bedroom

For it is, after all, an amazingly tough-minded art that Bonnard has left us. Out of what once seemed to be the last promising remnants of the Impressionist tradition, Bonnard fashioned a pictorial style that looks more original and more daring now than it did in his lifetime. (He died in 1947 at the age of seventy-nine.) Picasso was not alone in his harsh judgment of Bonnard works. "Don't talk to me about Bonnard," Francoise Gilot reports Picasso as saying. "That's not painting, what he does." And indeed, for many tastes less distinguished than Picasso's Bonnard did not measure up to what a "big" painter was expected to be doing.

Picasso's mistaken judgment is worth pursuing, however, because it contains — not surprisingly — some real clues to Bonnard's genius. "He never goes beyond his own sensibility," Picasso declared, "He doesn't know how to choose." The result, Picasso insisted, was "a potpourri of indecision."

"Painting," according to Picasso, "isn't a question of sensibility; it's a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice." Bonnard is condemned as "just another neo-Impressionist, a decadent; the end of an old idea, not the beginning of a new one." And then, in summing up his aversion to everything Bonnard represents. Picasso isolates very precisely the special strength and originality to be found in this artist.

"Another thing I hold against Bonnard," the quotation in Life With Picasso continues, "is the way he fills up the whole picture surface, to form a continuous field, with a kind of imperceptible quivering, touch by touch, centimeter by centimeter, but with a total absence of contrast. There's never a juxtaposition of black and white, of square and circle, sharp point and curve. It's an extremely orchestrated surface developed like an organic whole, but you never once get the big clash of the cymbals which that kind of strong contrast provides."

beside the sea, underneath the trees

All in all, not a bad account of what makes Bonnard's art, in addition to being so pleasurable to the eye, such a rich source of pictorial ideas. Picasso was wrong, of course, about the artist not knowing how to choose. Bonnard was flawless in his control of the selection as well as the accretion of detail in his work. He was a master at placing not only those beguiling touches of color Picasso so abominated by also the forms that contain them — forms that were completely his own, a pictorial invention of a high order, derived with great subtlety from the very wish to create a picture surface that would form "a continuous field." And this "extremely orchestrated surface developed like an organic whole" turned out to be the very opposite of "the end of an old idea." It turned out, indeed, to be "the beginning of a new one," as the enormous quantity of color-field painting is there to attest.

That this accomplishment was not merely a matter of slavishly looking to nature for "information and good advice " is evident enough in the paintings, I should think, but if we needed any further evidence of Bonnard's inventive genius — of his exceptional gift for turning every observation into an arresting pictorial idea — we now have it in the superlative exhibition of his drawings organized by the American Federation of Arts and currently on view at the Finch College Museum of Art.

This is a wonderful show, and all the more welcome because Bonnard's drawings are so rarely exhibited. Here we have 114 works from the collection of Mrs. Kyra Gerard and Alfred Ayrton. They cover the entire range of his career from 1893 to 1946. They are all very modest in size, and yet extremely rich in the way they race the vicissitudes of Bonnard's pictorial development. Many of the tiny pencil drawings, particularly of landscape subjects, are, in effect, large pictorial statements in miniature. It is breathtaking to see how many tones, how many kinds of marks and touches, how many nuances of light and space Bonnard was able again and again to create in a few square inches of the paper surface with his inspired pencil. Here, too, only without recourse to color, we find the artist creating those incredibly sensuous "continuous fields" of pictorial invention out of an affectionate observation of familiar landscapes and interiors.

the french windowThe method employed in most of these drawings is extremely informal, relaxed, and low-keyed. Nothing is highly polished, nothing "finished" in the grand manner. They are filled with squiggles and scrawls of an artist who is more interested in setting down an immediate impression than in working up an elaborate account of what he sees. And yet they are in the end very elaborate indeed — elaborate in the completeness with which so many subtle details are depicted and organized without being literally rendered. These are, after all, the drawings of a great colorist determined to make us feel the visual effect of color in all its delicate nuances through another medium. They certainly give the lie to any notion of "indecision" in Bonnard. They are, if anything, extremely single-minded, ruthlessly omitting everything that does not contribute something essential to the idea — the pictorial idea — they are intended to serve.

And yet, with no loss of that rigor that was an essential part of Bonnard's seriousness, with what good humor these drawings were done! There is a good deal of comedy in them, and much affection — as indeed there are in the paintings. If there is no "big clash of the cymbals," there is something more appealing and more durable — the chamber music of the French aesthetic sensibility at its finest. In Bonnard, as in much of the greatest French art, the hedonist lives on easy terms with the analytical intelligence. It is a synthesis of mind and emotion no other art has yet equaled — or displaced.

1971-72

bonnard's house

"Thriller Escapade" - Mini Mansions (mp3)

"The Room Outside" - Mini Mansions (mp3)

"Majik Marker" - Mini Mansions (mp3)

In Which We Suffer As Egon Schiele Suffered

Egon Schiele

by HILTON KRAMER

The life and work of the Austrian painter Egon Schiele form a chapter in the history of modern art which, though brief, is unforgettable in its combination of irrepressible talent, tortured vision, and personal agony.

Schiele was the very embodiment of the artist maudit, and the course traced by his short, electric career in the Vienna of the turn of the century has an almost allegorical quality in its unequal mingling of suffering and accomplishment. That the accomplishment was possible in the face of so much suffering is a testimony to Schiele's profound commitment to his artistic vocation, yet this commitment cannot disguise the fact that the accomplishment itself bears the scars of the artist's suffering at every turn.

For Schiele's oeuvre is one in which we feel the presence of the artist's agony first as a stimulus and finally as a limiting and nearly disabling affliction.

Man and Woman I (Lovers I), 1914

Recent exhibitions of Schiele's paintings and drawings — particularly the double exhibition of "Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele" at the Guggenheim Museum — have afforded some tantalizing glimpses of what, exactly, Schiele achieved. Now our understanding of the artist's total work has been much enhanced by the publication of Egon Schiele, an oeuvre catalogue of the paintings compiled by Galerie St. Etienne in New York and Schiele's most persistent champion.

This is not a book for anyone with a casual interest in the artist's work. A stout volume of over five hundred pages, handsomely printed, with texts in English and German, the book contains a reproduction (mainly black and white) of every known surviving painting by Schiele, complete with details of provenance, plus an additional list of paintings known to have existed but now lost.

There is also a selection of documentary photographs. The texts — by Dr. Kallir, the late Otto Benesch, and Mr. Messer — are too brief, but they are useful as far as they go. The book does not bring us Schiele's total work, of course, for it is not designed to include his large and brilliant production of watercolors and drawings — in some respects, a production even more important than the paintings — but the volume is nonetheless indispensable for a true comprehension of the artist's character and achievement, and thus for a comprehension of the art of Central Europe at a crucial historical juncture.

Less than half a century separates us from Schiele's death in 1918 at the age of twenty-eight, yet the circumstances of his life already read like some fable of a dark and remote age. It was a life entirely enclosed within the claustral and hypocritical atmosphere of the Austro-Hungarian imperium in the last stages of its decadence.

Lower Austria - 1906

A prosperous and pronvincial public morality existed side-by-side with an extraordinary flowering of intellectual and artistic genius. A narrow and suffocating world contained within it a virtual renaissance of talents whose creative fulfillment was inseparable from the task of laying bare the values that prevailed as a cover for a foolish and bankrupt style of life.

We know this world from the work of Klimt and Kokoschka, from Mahler and Schoenberg and Adolf Loos, and from the writings of Schnitzler — a world whose motives formed the materials of Freud's first researches and whose pretensions are forever apotheosized in the operatic art of Richard Strauss.

The Family, 1918

Schiele proved to be at once the victim and beneficiary of all the contradictions of this amazing era. His entire development, from a precocious boyhood to an early grave, was dominated by the narrow, life-denying restrictions of this period; the insensitive guardian who opposed the youth's artistic aspirations gave way to the even more ignorant Philistine public that condemned the young artist's vehement creations. And in Schiele's case, it is no idle metaphor to speak of condemnation, for he was once jailed for twenty-four days for having executed "immoral" drawings.

Edge of the City III 1917-18Yet Schiele enjoyed the encouragement of a succession of teachers, artists and sympathetic spirits, and from the time he entered the Vienna Academy of Art at the age of sixteen, he lived the free, if desperately poverty-stricken, life of an artist. Nor can one attribute the suffering that marks his work entirely to outrageous circumstance, for there was clearly an element of neurasthenic compulsion in Schiele's sensibility which circumstance abetted and inflamed, but which it could not of itself have created. Schiele's rebellion was in the end a rebellion against life itself and not only the life of his time.

The visual form which this rebellion took was first the imitation and then the subversion of the style of Schiele's great — and greatly admired — senior contemporary in Vienna, Gustav Klimt. What one sees in Schiele's most powerful work is the highly decorative and ornamental vision of Klimt, who managed to both flatter and ever so gently to expose the pretensions of his bourgeois patrons, invested with a more adamant and uncompromising concern for psychological truth.

House with Drying Laundry

The exoticism that in Klimt is always enveloped in a hedonist's dream of pleasure is, in Schiele, turned into an unyielding exposure of anguish and pain. Even Klimt's glorious and luminous color is turned dark, muddy, and grim in Schiele's more lacerating version of the same thematic materials. In a sense, Schiele's entire work was bounded by the attempt to do Klimt over again from his own afflicted nature.

True, in Schiele's final pictures one detects an element of benign feeling that points to a more felicitous accommodation to things as they are. But it was too late. In the last days of the First World War, after enjoying his first public success in the annual exhibition of the Vienna Secession, both Schiele and his wife were overcome by the flu epidemic that swept over Europe, and his death on October 31, 1918, followed by hers only three days later. Fortune ensured that the tortured countenance of his outraged sensibilities would remain his indelible legacy.

January 8, 1967 

"The Face" - Kings of Leon (mp3)

"Back Down South" - Kings of Leon (mp3)

"The Immortals"  - Kings of Leon (mp3)

from here

In Which Salvador Dali Experiences Something of a Beatdown

Dali

by HILTON KRAMER

Certain forms of art are less important for what they are than for what they signify. Though they traffic in aesthetic goods, the place they occupy in our culture has little to do with aesthetic illumination. To the language of art, they contribute nothing but a parody of established conventions. To the definition of feeling, which is the real glory of the artistic enterprise, they add only a corrupted simulacrum of familiar gestures.

Their sole function is to perform a visual charade in which the public — a public terrified at experiencing any emotion it has never experienced before — will recognize its own most cherished yearnings.

Art of this kind does not appeal to our curiosity but to our prejudices. Its mission is not to question or to complicate our emotions but to confirm them. And such art can only succeed in its meretricious task if it effectively disguises its rehearsal of the familiar in the kind of technical display which, for minds of a certain disposition, is always a satisfactory substitute for real vision.

Two artists in our time have brought this charade to a kind of bogus perfection — the American Andrew Wyeth and the Spaniard Salvador Dali. Both have been duly rewarded with a surpassing popularity and success.

One offers us an image of American life — pastoral, innocent and homespun — which bears about as much relation to reality as a Neiman-Marcus boutique bears to the life of the old frontier. The other offers us a fantasy of the psyche in which the real fissures of modern life are cosmetized in the very process of being evoked, and which thus exploits the anxieties of modernism while effectively subverting their critical and spiritual function. Together these two artists, with their respective daydreams of innocence and apocalypse, define — if indeed they do not exhaust — the artistic horizons of that vast, silent, uncritical majority which knows nothing about art but knows what it likes.

Of the two, Dali is unquestionably the more interesting and accomplished. He understands very well the modern appetite for violence and scandal, and has made a career of catering to this appetite, spicing each successive dish with sufficient outrage and surprise to keep the public a little baffled, a little angry, a little appalled, but always delighted, impressed, and — above all else — interested. He is a master showman who lavishes his real genius on the instruments of public relations. Only his talent goes into his art, which is less the focus of his deftly organized publicity campaigns than one of his means of achieving them.

For Dali, painting is always an applied art — an art applied to advancing his own personality.

His latest exhibition — now on view at M. Knoedler & Co. — is devoted to paintings and drawings from the years 1965-1970, and contains a larger selection of new work than Dali has shown in many years. There are twenty-two items, several of them vast "machines" of the type that so delighted the knuckle-headed spectators in the official salons of the last century and that, to judge by the size and spirit of the crowds pouring into Knoedler's every day, have lost none of their power to impress a public content to live without intelligence or taste.

The famous technique has lost none of its luster. Only the power to shock has, perhaps, grown a little dimmer with the passage of time, but this is less a fault of Dali's than a reflection of the degree to which modern culture has now immunized itself against aesthetic shocks of any sort.

Nowadays the real shocks come from life rather than art, and Dali — even Dali, who has made such a specialty of shocking the public — is as helpless as anyone else in the face of this development. The time is past when his fantasies could disturb us. Now it is only his taste that disturbs, and even this is less a disturbance than a mild discomfort. For the first time, one almost feels a little sorry for Dali — all that effort invested in such a petty provocation.

As painting, of course, it is complete rubbish. The ostentatious display of "old master" ambition has degenerated into the purest kitsch. The puerile fantasy, with its aggressive self-importance and operatic rhetoric, is no longer even amusing. The feeble attempt at satire ends only in satirizing the satirist's own quite silly machinations. Everything about this work reminds us that we are dealing with a "case," a social phenomenon, an episode in the history of taste and reputations rather than an example of genuine artistic accomplishment.

"The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses," George Orwell once wrote, "are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism." Orwell defined Dali's sensibility as fundamentally that of an Edwardian illustrator. "Take away the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones, and other paraphernalia, and every now and again you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany, and Where the Rainbow Ends." The paraphernalia has changed since Orwell wrote his essay a quarter of a century ago, but everything in the current exhibition confirms this critical judgment.

As for the celebrated "aberrations" that were once so shocking, Orwell remarked: "Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace." Dali's desperation in this respect is now greater than ever, for the distance separating his facile, self-willed eccentricities and the commonplaces of our culture has been drastically reduced. The blatant "camp" that dominates the taste of his latest work is now the property of every two-bit filmmaker and commercial artist on the current scene.

None of this will dim Dali's popularity with the vast public that adores him — the public that still swoons over both his antics and his success — for Dali performs an essential service for this public. He provides a vision of the apocalypse that is at once exquisite and harmless — the apocalypse turned into a parfumerie. In performing that service, Dali brings the retrograde character of his art into perfect alignment with his decadent social ideology.

March 22, 1970

You can find more Hilton Kramer in his book The Age of the Avant-Garde, which you can purchase here.

"Shadows Fall (instrumental)" - The Coral (mp3)

"Monkey to the Moon" - The Coral (mp3)

"Return Her To Me" - The Coral (mp3)