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Lot Essay
To be included in the forthcoming Vuillard catalogue raisonné being prepared by Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Institute.
La soirée familiale is a masterful example of the intimate and enigmatic interiors that Vuillard painted during the 1890s, the period of his association with the Nabi circle. Widely considered the most challenging and sophisticated works of Vuillard's oeuvre, these elusive and evocative compositions constitute a visual analogue of Stéphane Mallarmé's thesis: "To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment...suggesting - that is the dream" (quoted in C. Frèches-Thory and A. Terrasse, The Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard, and their Circle, New York, 1990, p. 27). Tightly woven and richly charged, Vuillard's interiors emphasize the ambiguous and often troubled relationships among his family members; skillful spatial distortions generate a sense of psychological tension, while intricate tapestries of color and pattern transpose scenes of bourgeois domesticity into intense and airless dramas. As Elizabeth Easton has written:
It was family life, confined within these ever-present walls, that aroused Vuillard's most powerful emotions. His interiors function as theaters within which the family enacted the consuming drama of everyday experience... Because they express more what the rooms felt like than how they appeared...Vuillard's interiors are most effective as metaphors, speaking for the relationships between the people who occupy them, as well as for Vuillard himself and for the feelings he wanted to convey. (E. Easton, op. cit., pp. 4 and 76)
The present work depicts Vuillard's older sister Marie and her husband Ker-Xavier Roussel, a fellow Nabi painter and Vuillard's close friend (fig. 1). The two had married in 1893 (fig. 2) and are shown here at the dinner table with an unidentified male companion. By all accounts, the early years of the couple's marriage were not happy ones. Vuillard's journals from 1894 and 1895 note "complications du mariage Roussel" and "difficultés de Ker", which are probably references to extra-marital affairs, and the scene of their mealtime seems to resonate with these troubles. Isolated on the far side of the table, Marie appears sullen and withdrawn, hemmed in by the armoire behind her and the lamp above; the garish artificial light throws Roussel and his companion into eerie shadow, obscuring more than it illuminates. Marie is depicted on a disproportionately small scale, as though the space of the dining room had receded more quickly than one would expect; she is thus detached from her husband in her own discrete space, producing an effect of disconnection and dislocation that represents the very antithesis of a meal's nourishing implications.
Indeed, the figure of Marie is perhaps the most compelling element of this poignant and melancholy scene. Her slender frame is wraith-like and incorporeal; her shoulders are hunched and her left arm dislocated like that of a marionette. As Susan Sidlauskas has written:
Marie Vuillard's relation to her home...is one of the most haunting aspects of the painting. The surface around her teems with life, while she appears enervated, transfixed, as if her vitality were being sapped and dispersed into the gyrating strokes around her. These seemingly erratic but deliberate strokes of paint impart a sense that the displacement of life - from the animate figure to the inanimate wall covering - takes place before our eyes... It is the figure of Marie...who most pointedly, and poignantly, embodies forces that seem irreconcilable... She may be objectified, but she is not complicit. She resists rather than submits to dissolution, and although clearly reduced, she is by no means extinguished. Vuillard captured the figure of his sister at the very moment of transformation: she is suspended forever in an unstable passage - from human body to object; sexual being to mannequin; figure to abstraction. (S. Sidlauskas, op. cit., pp. 98 and 111).
Sidlauskas' use of the term abstraction is far from insignificant. With their radical pictorial and spatial experiments, their sophisticated play between three-dimensional form and flattened surface, paintings like the present one indeed herald the development of abstract art in the early twentieth century. Following the first exhibition of the Nabis in December of 1891, the reviewer Albert Aurier declared them in Le Mercure de France to be "the true masters of tomorrow"; a century later, critics continue to recognize the significance of their work for the evolution of modernism:
The bold apposition of violent colors announces the Fauves; the juxtaposition of planes, seen from different angles, prefigures the geometric constructions of the Cubists; the forms are sometimes distorted to the point of being virtually Expressionist; details take on the force of emblems and blazons branded onto the surface of the painting...like a sort of collage. Their numerous inventions, discoveries, reflections and premonitions were extraordinary when we evaluate them in the context of the 1890s. (C. Frèches-Thory and A. Terrasse, op. cit., p. 27)
Vuillard's Nabi work also helped to pave the way for the development of Abstract Expressionism in the post-war period. In the present picture, for instance, the all-over patterning of the wallpaper background has the character of a canvas by Jackson Pollock, while the stylized orange doorway at the far right seems to presage the color-field paintings of Mark Rothko. Clement Greenberg, in a seminal article on the New York School, in fact isolated a development linking artists like Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman with the Nabi work of Vuillard and Bonnard and the late water-lily decorations of Monet:
This development involves a more consistent and radical suppression of value contrasts than seen so far in abstract art. We can realize now, from this point of view, how conservative Cubism was in its resumption of Cézanne's effort to save the convention of dark and light... The late Monet, whose suppression of values had been the most consistently radical to be seen in painting until a short while ago, was pointed to as a warning, and the fin-de-siècle muffling of contrasts in much of Bonnard's and Vuillard's art... This expansion of sensibility has coincided with the emergence of Clyfford Still [along with Newman and Rothko]... (C. Greenberg, "'American-Type' Painting," Partisan Review, spring 1955, pp. 189-194; quoted in I. Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, London, 1970, pp. 273-274)
The first owner of the present painting was Jos Hessel, a cousin of the brothers Josse and Gaston Bernheim and the manager of their gallery, Bernheim-Jeune. Vuillard met Hessel and his wife Lucie in 1900, and the three remained intimate friends until the artist's death. Vuillard's journals indicate that he visited the Hessels at their apartment in the rue de Rivoli almost every day by 1908 - so frequently that their butler is said to have dubbed him the "house painter". An enigmatic note inserted into Vuillard's journals for the same year, presumably by his biographer Claude Roger-Marx, is a testament to the inspirational quality of his relationship with Lucie Hessel in particular, "As for Lucie, guiding light that she is - domination - bewitchment...and totally dazzled by her" (quoted in G. Groom, Edouard Vuillard, Painter-Decorator: Patrons and Projects, 1892-1912, New Haven, 1993, p. 148).
(fig. 1) From left, Paul Vallotton, Romain Coolus, Edouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel at Villeneuve-su-Yonne at the home of Misia and Thadée Natanson, 1899.
(fig. 2) Edouard Vuillard, Le soupirant (Ker-Xavier Roussel and Marie Vuillard), 1893.
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts.
La soirée familiale is a masterful example of the intimate and enigmatic interiors that Vuillard painted during the 1890s, the period of his association with the Nabi circle. Widely considered the most challenging and sophisticated works of Vuillard's oeuvre, these elusive and evocative compositions constitute a visual analogue of Stéphane Mallarmé's thesis: "To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment...suggesting - that is the dream" (quoted in C. Frèches-Thory and A. Terrasse, The Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard, and their Circle, New York, 1990, p. 27). Tightly woven and richly charged, Vuillard's interiors emphasize the ambiguous and often troubled relationships among his family members; skillful spatial distortions generate a sense of psychological tension, while intricate tapestries of color and pattern transpose scenes of bourgeois domesticity into intense and airless dramas. As Elizabeth Easton has written:
It was family life, confined within these ever-present walls, that aroused Vuillard's most powerful emotions. His interiors function as theaters within which the family enacted the consuming drama of everyday experience... Because they express more what the rooms felt like than how they appeared...Vuillard's interiors are most effective as metaphors, speaking for the relationships between the people who occupy them, as well as for Vuillard himself and for the feelings he wanted to convey. (E. Easton, op. cit., pp. 4 and 76)
The present work depicts Vuillard's older sister Marie and her husband Ker-Xavier Roussel, a fellow Nabi painter and Vuillard's close friend (fig. 1). The two had married in 1893 (fig. 2) and are shown here at the dinner table with an unidentified male companion. By all accounts, the early years of the couple's marriage were not happy ones. Vuillard's journals from 1894 and 1895 note "complications du mariage Roussel" and "difficultés de Ker", which are probably references to extra-marital affairs, and the scene of their mealtime seems to resonate with these troubles. Isolated on the far side of the table, Marie appears sullen and withdrawn, hemmed in by the armoire behind her and the lamp above; the garish artificial light throws Roussel and his companion into eerie shadow, obscuring more than it illuminates. Marie is depicted on a disproportionately small scale, as though the space of the dining room had receded more quickly than one would expect; she is thus detached from her husband in her own discrete space, producing an effect of disconnection and dislocation that represents the very antithesis of a meal's nourishing implications.
Indeed, the figure of Marie is perhaps the most compelling element of this poignant and melancholy scene. Her slender frame is wraith-like and incorporeal; her shoulders are hunched and her left arm dislocated like that of a marionette. As Susan Sidlauskas has written:
Marie Vuillard's relation to her home...is one of the most haunting aspects of the painting. The surface around her teems with life, while she appears enervated, transfixed, as if her vitality were being sapped and dispersed into the gyrating strokes around her. These seemingly erratic but deliberate strokes of paint impart a sense that the displacement of life - from the animate figure to the inanimate wall covering - takes place before our eyes... It is the figure of Marie...who most pointedly, and poignantly, embodies forces that seem irreconcilable... She may be objectified, but she is not complicit. She resists rather than submits to dissolution, and although clearly reduced, she is by no means extinguished. Vuillard captured the figure of his sister at the very moment of transformation: she is suspended forever in an unstable passage - from human body to object; sexual being to mannequin; figure to abstraction. (S. Sidlauskas, op. cit., pp. 98 and 111).
Sidlauskas' use of the term abstraction is far from insignificant. With their radical pictorial and spatial experiments, their sophisticated play between three-dimensional form and flattened surface, paintings like the present one indeed herald the development of abstract art in the early twentieth century. Following the first exhibition of the Nabis in December of 1891, the reviewer Albert Aurier declared them in Le Mercure de France to be "the true masters of tomorrow"; a century later, critics continue to recognize the significance of their work for the evolution of modernism:
The bold apposition of violent colors announces the Fauves; the juxtaposition of planes, seen from different angles, prefigures the geometric constructions of the Cubists; the forms are sometimes distorted to the point of being virtually Expressionist; details take on the force of emblems and blazons branded onto the surface of the painting...like a sort of collage. Their numerous inventions, discoveries, reflections and premonitions were extraordinary when we evaluate them in the context of the 1890s. (C. Frèches-Thory and A. Terrasse, op. cit., p. 27)
Vuillard's Nabi work also helped to pave the way for the development of Abstract Expressionism in the post-war period. In the present picture, for instance, the all-over patterning of the wallpaper background has the character of a canvas by Jackson Pollock, while the stylized orange doorway at the far right seems to presage the color-field paintings of Mark Rothko. Clement Greenberg, in a seminal article on the New York School, in fact isolated a development linking artists like Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman with the Nabi work of Vuillard and Bonnard and the late water-lily decorations of Monet:
This development involves a more consistent and radical suppression of value contrasts than seen so far in abstract art. We can realize now, from this point of view, how conservative Cubism was in its resumption of Cézanne's effort to save the convention of dark and light... The late Monet, whose suppression of values had been the most consistently radical to be seen in painting until a short while ago, was pointed to as a warning, and the fin-de-siècle muffling of contrasts in much of Bonnard's and Vuillard's art... This expansion of sensibility has coincided with the emergence of Clyfford Still [along with Newman and Rothko]... (C. Greenberg, "'American-Type' Painting," Partisan Review, spring 1955, pp. 189-194; quoted in I. Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, London, 1970, pp. 273-274)
The first owner of the present painting was Jos Hessel, a cousin of the brothers Josse and Gaston Bernheim and the manager of their gallery, Bernheim-Jeune. Vuillard met Hessel and his wife Lucie in 1900, and the three remained intimate friends until the artist's death. Vuillard's journals indicate that he visited the Hessels at their apartment in the rue de Rivoli almost every day by 1908 - so frequently that their butler is said to have dubbed him the "house painter". An enigmatic note inserted into Vuillard's journals for the same year, presumably by his biographer Claude Roger-Marx, is a testament to the inspirational quality of his relationship with Lucie Hessel in particular, "As for Lucie, guiding light that she is - domination - bewitchment...and totally dazzled by her" (quoted in G. Groom, Edouard Vuillard, Painter-Decorator: Patrons and Projects, 1892-1912, New Haven, 1993, p. 148).
(fig. 1) From left, Paul Vallotton, Romain Coolus, Edouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel at Villeneuve-su-Yonne at the home of Misia and Thadée Natanson, 1899.
(fig. 2) Edouard Vuillard, Le soupirant (Ker-Xavier Roussel and Marie Vuillard), 1893.
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts.