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拍品專文
In the early 1890s, when Vuillard was in his twenties, he began to associate with a group of artists known as the Nabis. Taking the name from the Hebrew word for prophet, the group included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Srusier and Flix Vallotton. Influenced by Paul Gauguin, the Nabis proposed to create a new kind of art that would render nature in a more decorative, tapestry-like manner. One of the basic tenets was recalled by Jan Verkade, a Dutch Nabi artist: "No more easel pictures! Away with the useless bits of furniture... There are no such things as pictures, there is only decoration" (quoted in A.C. Ritchie, Edouard Vuillard, New York, 1954, p. 19).
Guided by these new Nabi theories, Vuillard responded by creating a suggestive and sensuous art. The main theme he concentrated on was the quiet intimacy of domestic life. As Elizabeth Easton has written, "The interior was the locus of the family, a place where Vuillard beheld the quiet dignity of labor and its characteristic gestures. Family life, confined within these ever-present walls, aroused Vuillard's most powerful emotions, so that his interiors also function as theaters within which the family enacted the compelling drama of everyday life" (E. Easton, The Intimate Eye of Edouard Vuillard, Katonah, 1989, p. 14).
Soon after beginning to paint in a Nabi manner, Vuillard became close friends with Thade and Misia Natanson, chief patrons and advocates of the movement. Vuillard visited Thade and Misia nearly every day, and painted more than a dozen portraits of them. Wealthy and highly cultivated, the Natansons were at the center of the avant-garde in fin-de-sicle Paris. Misia, a gifted pianist, studied music with Faur and hosted one of the leading salons in the city; Thade founded La Revue blanche, a cutting-edge journal that counted among its contributors Claude Debussy, Flix Fnon and Marcel Proust. Misia was the inspiration for the character of Mme Verdurin in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and Thade's brother, Alexandre, was one of the models for the figure of Swann. Known for being tough and independent as well as chic, the Natansons were the first members of the intelligentsia to come to Dreyfus's defense.
Thade and Misia commissioned a group of five canvases from Vuillard in 1894. Known collectively as L'Album, they were finished by November of 1895 and shown the following month at the exhibition Maison de l'Art Nouveau at Galerie Samuel Bing in Paris. Although conceived and executed as a suite, the five pictures are not uniform in size or format. One panel, La Tapisserie (fig. 1) has a vertical orientation; the other four are horizontal. Of these, only two have the same dimensions, the present picture and La table de toilette (fig. 2); the other two are L'Album (fig. 3), the largest in the suite, and La corsage ray (fig. 4), the smallest.
Vuillard made the Album pictures for the Natansons' pied--terre at 8, rue Saint-Florentin, Paris; their apartment was profusely decorated with Renaissance millefleurs tapestries, oriental rugs, exotic textiles and floral wall paper. The decorative and tapestry-like character of Conversation (Le pot de grs) was intended to harmonize with this setting. (Indeed, Vuillard said that he considered the pictures in the cycle to be "tapisseries"). Another painting by Vuillard shows Conversation (Le pot de grs) hanging in the apartment (fig. 5). Because both the artist and the patrons wanted the suite to blend in with the overall decoration of the apartment, Vuillard originally framed the pictures in simple, flat strips of wood without moldings.
Thade Natanson described the paintings in 1897 as:
A muted symphony, where relationships never seen before harmonize and vibrate deeper and deeper as they are contemplated--melodious outbursts, postures skillfully linked, composed according to those which were caught by [Vuillard's] tenderness, and recalled by the memory that moved him. It is a brilliant profusion of colorful harmonious splendors upon which a tender soul drapes itself (quoted in G. Groom, op. cit., p. 76).
According to Gloria Groom, "Within the series, the three panels that are thematically and compositionally similar, The Album, The Stoneware Vase, and The Vanity Table show profusions of chrysanthemum-like blossoms from which young girls with striped, stippled and checkered blouses emerge. All three share the repoussoir device of an exaggeratedly inclined table laden with objects in the foreground, whose recession into the background space is blocked by the flatness of the all-over patterned surface... In these congested interiors, the women are neither participants in the narrative nor pure staffage figures. Seen in profile perdu or from behind (the least personal of poses) or with their heads bent and shadowed, they make no contact with the viewer. They are equal to the other objects and absorbed into their environment, just as the nineteenth-century woman was, with few exceptions, defined by her environment, which was in turn, often associated with feminine elegance and flowers... The suggestive and near-hallucinatory (dream-like) quality of Vuillard's imagery, and the implied correspondence between the senses--fragrances and perfumes corresponding with the tactile qualities of the flowers and bodies--would have been perfectly compatible with the Natansons' symbolist-based aesthetics. The same qualities that critics outside the Natansons' milieu saw as confused and disturbed' would have been perceived by the inner circle of Vuillard's patronage group to be artistic extensions of their own heightened sensibilities" (ibid., pp. 77-81).
This painting has been requested by The Art Institute of Chicago and The Metropolitan Museum of Art for inclusion in an exhibition entitled Bonnard, Vuillard, Roussel, Denis: The Decorative Paintings, scheduled to open in February of 2001.
(fig. 1) Edouard Vuillard, La Tapisserie, 1895.
John Hay Whitney Collection, The Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
(fig. 2) Edouard Vuillard, La Table de toilette, 1895.
Private Collection.
(fig. 3) Edouard Vuillard, L'Album, 1895.
Private Collection.
(fig. 4) Edouard Vuillard, Le Corsage ray, 1895.
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 5) Edouard Vuillard, Misia and Vallotton in the Dining Area, circa 1899.
Collection of William Kelly Simpson, New York.
Guided by these new Nabi theories, Vuillard responded by creating a suggestive and sensuous art. The main theme he concentrated on was the quiet intimacy of domestic life. As Elizabeth Easton has written, "The interior was the locus of the family, a place where Vuillard beheld the quiet dignity of labor and its characteristic gestures. Family life, confined within these ever-present walls, aroused Vuillard's most powerful emotions, so that his interiors also function as theaters within which the family enacted the compelling drama of everyday life" (E. Easton, The Intimate Eye of Edouard Vuillard, Katonah, 1989, p. 14).
Soon after beginning to paint in a Nabi manner, Vuillard became close friends with Thade and Misia Natanson, chief patrons and advocates of the movement. Vuillard visited Thade and Misia nearly every day, and painted more than a dozen portraits of them. Wealthy and highly cultivated, the Natansons were at the center of the avant-garde in fin-de-sicle Paris. Misia, a gifted pianist, studied music with Faur and hosted one of the leading salons in the city; Thade founded La Revue blanche, a cutting-edge journal that counted among its contributors Claude Debussy, Flix Fnon and Marcel Proust. Misia was the inspiration for the character of Mme Verdurin in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and Thade's brother, Alexandre, was one of the models for the figure of Swann. Known for being tough and independent as well as chic, the Natansons were the first members of the intelligentsia to come to Dreyfus's defense.
Thade and Misia commissioned a group of five canvases from Vuillard in 1894. Known collectively as L'Album, they were finished by November of 1895 and shown the following month at the exhibition Maison de l'Art Nouveau at Galerie Samuel Bing in Paris. Although conceived and executed as a suite, the five pictures are not uniform in size or format. One panel, La Tapisserie (fig. 1) has a vertical orientation; the other four are horizontal. Of these, only two have the same dimensions, the present picture and La table de toilette (fig. 2); the other two are L'Album (fig. 3), the largest in the suite, and La corsage ray (fig. 4), the smallest.
Vuillard made the Album pictures for the Natansons' pied--terre at 8, rue Saint-Florentin, Paris; their apartment was profusely decorated with Renaissance millefleurs tapestries, oriental rugs, exotic textiles and floral wall paper. The decorative and tapestry-like character of Conversation (Le pot de grs) was intended to harmonize with this setting. (Indeed, Vuillard said that he considered the pictures in the cycle to be "tapisseries"). Another painting by Vuillard shows Conversation (Le pot de grs) hanging in the apartment (fig. 5). Because both the artist and the patrons wanted the suite to blend in with the overall decoration of the apartment, Vuillard originally framed the pictures in simple, flat strips of wood without moldings.
Thade Natanson described the paintings in 1897 as:
A muted symphony, where relationships never seen before harmonize and vibrate deeper and deeper as they are contemplated--melodious outbursts, postures skillfully linked, composed according to those which were caught by [Vuillard's] tenderness, and recalled by the memory that moved him. It is a brilliant profusion of colorful harmonious splendors upon which a tender soul drapes itself (quoted in G. Groom, op. cit., p. 76).
According to Gloria Groom, "Within the series, the three panels that are thematically and compositionally similar, The Album, The Stoneware Vase, and The Vanity Table show profusions of chrysanthemum-like blossoms from which young girls with striped, stippled and checkered blouses emerge. All three share the repoussoir device of an exaggeratedly inclined table laden with objects in the foreground, whose recession into the background space is blocked by the flatness of the all-over patterned surface... In these congested interiors, the women are neither participants in the narrative nor pure staffage figures. Seen in profile perdu or from behind (the least personal of poses) or with their heads bent and shadowed, they make no contact with the viewer. They are equal to the other objects and absorbed into their environment, just as the nineteenth-century woman was, with few exceptions, defined by her environment, which was in turn, often associated with feminine elegance and flowers... The suggestive and near-hallucinatory (dream-like) quality of Vuillard's imagery, and the implied correspondence between the senses--fragrances and perfumes corresponding with the tactile qualities of the flowers and bodies--would have been perfectly compatible with the Natansons' symbolist-based aesthetics. The same qualities that critics outside the Natansons' milieu saw as confused and disturbed' would have been perceived by the inner circle of Vuillard's patronage group to be artistic extensions of their own heightened sensibilities" (ibid., pp. 77-81).
This painting has been requested by The Art Institute of Chicago and The Metropolitan Museum of Art for inclusion in an exhibition entitled Bonnard, Vuillard, Roussel, Denis: The Decorative Paintings, scheduled to open in February of 2001.
(fig. 1) Edouard Vuillard, La Tapisserie, 1895.
John Hay Whitney Collection, The Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
(fig. 2) Edouard Vuillard, La Table de toilette, 1895.
Private Collection.
(fig. 3) Edouard Vuillard, L'Album, 1895.
Private Collection.
(fig. 4) Edouard Vuillard, Le Corsage ray, 1895.
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 5) Edouard Vuillard, Misia and Vallotton in the Dining Area, circa 1899.
Collection of William Kelly Simpson, New York.