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拍品專文
Painted in 1898, during the high point of the Nabis movement, La Grand-mère epitomizes the air of intimacy that characterized Edouard Vuillard’s interior scenes of the late 19th Century. Juxtaposing flat planes of color against fields of rich pattern and texture, Vuillard aptly represents his surroundings in the Parisian apartment he inhabited with his mother, and his skillful layering and intentionally skewed sense of perspective charges interior scenes such as the present work with the layered emotions and interpersonal dynamics abound in the Vuillard household.
The Nabis brotherhood formed towards the end of the 1880s, including, most famously, Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, united by a collective rejection of the traditional modes of painting proliferated by the Académie Julian. The word Nabis originates from the Hebrew and Arabic word for “prophets,” or “the enlightened,” a name chosen to fix the group as a sort of private, secret society of painters with a new set of values rooted in the intention to return to a “purer” form of representation. The group was deeply motivated by the symbolist works of Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School, and heavily inspired by Japanese woodblock prints which, in the height of Japonisme, had made their way to the orbit of the Parisian avant-garde, largely by means of an exhibition at the Japan Pavillion at the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris, and later by an important exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts held in the Spring of 1890. Much like his peer Bonnard, a fellow intimist, Vuillard began to employ these aesthetic principles to portray his close friends and family, utilizing this method of abstraction to evoke the interpersonal dynamics at play in their daily lives, particularly within the domestic sphere.
At the center of the present composition is undoubtably the eponymous grand-mère, Marie Justine Alexandrine Michaud Vuillard, the artist’s mother. While her face is obscured, she is identifiable by her grey hair, tied up in her distinctive chignon. Vuillard and his mother inhabited the same close quarters for the majority of their lives; as a result, Madame Vuillard came to be a primary subject of the painter’s oeuvre, typically depicted in the private spaces they shared until her death in 1928. Madame Vuillard installed her business as a corsetière out of the family home—including in their apartment on Rue des Batignolles in the 17th Arrondissement, where the present picture is set—resulting in a bustling atmosphere brimming with textiles and frequent visitors within the confined space. Nearly five hundred paintings and sketches portray Madame Vuillard conducting her quotidian activities and rituals; she is often pictured sat at the dining table, going about her household chores, and most frequently, pouring over her sewing, utterly immersed in her work. Her face often downturned or fully obscured, Madame Vuillard’s unconcerned disposition illustrates the familiarity and comfortability between mother and son as she pays no mind to her observer, uninterrupted by and perhaps entirely unaware of his presence.
In the present work, Madame Vuillard adopts another domestic duty: that of the grandmother, as attentive to her grandchild as she is to her work. Capturing a private, tender moment between grandmother and child, Vuillard portrays his mother cradling her infant granddaughter Annette with her body turned slightly away from the viewer, giving the baby a bottle, perhaps singing a lullaby. As in so many of his interior scenes, Vuillard facilitates an interplay between flat planes of rich, dense color and zones of intricate pattern and texture. He compresses his mother’s form into a silhouette-like shape in a style evocative of the flat figures found in Japanese woodblock prints. Her stark black garment is devoid of detail as the artist has forgone any indication of depth or shadow. By contrast, the viewer’s eyes dart through a symphony of textures and patterns in the composition’s background; striped sheets and floral pillows are haphazardly strewn about the undone bed; an ornate oriental carpet, slightly askew, can be perceived in the composition’s lower left corner, while patterned textiles decorate the walls and dress the window. The picture is infused with so much ornament and texture that the figure, standing at the upper left at the foot of the bed, is nearly undetectable in the midst of this visual disorder. Aided by Vuillard’s close cropping, the figure is intentionally vague; one can merely discern a dark jacket and a pair of clasped hands.
Despite the ambiguity of his identity, the figure likely represents Kerr-Xavier Roussel, the artist’s brother-in-law, married to his sister Marie, and father of Annette. A fellow member of the Nabis, Roussel and Vuillard met at the Lycée Condorcet in the 1880s and would later develop a close friendship and lasting artistic partnership. In fact, it was Vuillard himself who encouraged Roussel to marry his older sister. Despite the presumable serendipity of their union, the marriage was not always harmonious, and their family life was afflicted with troubles. In 1894, Marie gave birth to a stillborn, a tragedy which altered the atmosphere of the Vuillard family unit entirely. Born in November of 1898, not long before Vuillard painted the present work, Annette thus came to represent somewhat of a symbol of hope following the family's recent hardship; something to be fiercely protected.
“From photographs we can identify various elements of Vuillard’s actual interiors in his work. From this we can conclude that the specific objects themselves do not create the claustrophobic atmosphere of his paintings. Vuillard’s sensibility for the interior, therefore, is twofold,” writes scholar Elizabeth Wynn Easton. “His lush combinations of pigment and pattern vividly evoke late nineteenth-century Parisian life in paintings that depict the crowded rooms of fin de siècle France. Because they express more what the rooms felt like than how they appeared, however, 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 the for the feelings he wanted to convey.” (E.W. Easton, The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, p. 76).
La Grand-mère is laden with palpable dissonance, exemplifying Vuillard’s keen ability to play with imbalances. The perspective tipped slightly downwards onto Madame Vuillard with her closed-off, protective posture, Kerr—and perhaps Vuillard himself, parallel to him at the other side of the room—are rendered mere observers of this private moment, fading into the composition’s background. By contrast, Madame Vuillard is positioned a stable, grounding focal point, emblematic of her role as matriarch in the home, protective of Annette and all the newfound steadiness and hope she symbolized.
The Nabis brotherhood formed towards the end of the 1880s, including, most famously, Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, united by a collective rejection of the traditional modes of painting proliferated by the Académie Julian. The word Nabis originates from the Hebrew and Arabic word for “prophets,” or “the enlightened,” a name chosen to fix the group as a sort of private, secret society of painters with a new set of values rooted in the intention to return to a “purer” form of representation. The group was deeply motivated by the symbolist works of Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School, and heavily inspired by Japanese woodblock prints which, in the height of Japonisme, had made their way to the orbit of the Parisian avant-garde, largely by means of an exhibition at the Japan Pavillion at the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris, and later by an important exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts held in the Spring of 1890. Much like his peer Bonnard, a fellow intimist, Vuillard began to employ these aesthetic principles to portray his close friends and family, utilizing this method of abstraction to evoke the interpersonal dynamics at play in their daily lives, particularly within the domestic sphere.
At the center of the present composition is undoubtably the eponymous grand-mère, Marie Justine Alexandrine Michaud Vuillard, the artist’s mother. While her face is obscured, she is identifiable by her grey hair, tied up in her distinctive chignon. Vuillard and his mother inhabited the same close quarters for the majority of their lives; as a result, Madame Vuillard came to be a primary subject of the painter’s oeuvre, typically depicted in the private spaces they shared until her death in 1928. Madame Vuillard installed her business as a corsetière out of the family home—including in their apartment on Rue des Batignolles in the 17th Arrondissement, where the present picture is set—resulting in a bustling atmosphere brimming with textiles and frequent visitors within the confined space. Nearly five hundred paintings and sketches portray Madame Vuillard conducting her quotidian activities and rituals; she is often pictured sat at the dining table, going about her household chores, and most frequently, pouring over her sewing, utterly immersed in her work. Her face often downturned or fully obscured, Madame Vuillard’s unconcerned disposition illustrates the familiarity and comfortability between mother and son as she pays no mind to her observer, uninterrupted by and perhaps entirely unaware of his presence.
In the present work, Madame Vuillard adopts another domestic duty: that of the grandmother, as attentive to her grandchild as she is to her work. Capturing a private, tender moment between grandmother and child, Vuillard portrays his mother cradling her infant granddaughter Annette with her body turned slightly away from the viewer, giving the baby a bottle, perhaps singing a lullaby. As in so many of his interior scenes, Vuillard facilitates an interplay between flat planes of rich, dense color and zones of intricate pattern and texture. He compresses his mother’s form into a silhouette-like shape in a style evocative of the flat figures found in Japanese woodblock prints. Her stark black garment is devoid of detail as the artist has forgone any indication of depth or shadow. By contrast, the viewer’s eyes dart through a symphony of textures and patterns in the composition’s background; striped sheets and floral pillows are haphazardly strewn about the undone bed; an ornate oriental carpet, slightly askew, can be perceived in the composition’s lower left corner, while patterned textiles decorate the walls and dress the window. The picture is infused with so much ornament and texture that the figure, standing at the upper left at the foot of the bed, is nearly undetectable in the midst of this visual disorder. Aided by Vuillard’s close cropping, the figure is intentionally vague; one can merely discern a dark jacket and a pair of clasped hands.
Despite the ambiguity of his identity, the figure likely represents Kerr-Xavier Roussel, the artist’s brother-in-law, married to his sister Marie, and father of Annette. A fellow member of the Nabis, Roussel and Vuillard met at the Lycée Condorcet in the 1880s and would later develop a close friendship and lasting artistic partnership. In fact, it was Vuillard himself who encouraged Roussel to marry his older sister. Despite the presumable serendipity of their union, the marriage was not always harmonious, and their family life was afflicted with troubles. In 1894, Marie gave birth to a stillborn, a tragedy which altered the atmosphere of the Vuillard family unit entirely. Born in November of 1898, not long before Vuillard painted the present work, Annette thus came to represent somewhat of a symbol of hope following the family's recent hardship; something to be fiercely protected.
“From photographs we can identify various elements of Vuillard’s actual interiors in his work. From this we can conclude that the specific objects themselves do not create the claustrophobic atmosphere of his paintings. Vuillard’s sensibility for the interior, therefore, is twofold,” writes scholar Elizabeth Wynn Easton. “His lush combinations of pigment and pattern vividly evoke late nineteenth-century Parisian life in paintings that depict the crowded rooms of fin de siècle France. Because they express more what the rooms felt like than how they appeared, however, 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 the for the feelings he wanted to convey.” (E.W. Easton, The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, p. 76).
La Grand-mère is laden with palpable dissonance, exemplifying Vuillard’s keen ability to play with imbalances. The perspective tipped slightly downwards onto Madame Vuillard with her closed-off, protective posture, Kerr—and perhaps Vuillard himself, parallel to him at the other side of the room—are rendered mere observers of this private moment, fading into the composition’s background. By contrast, Madame Vuillard is positioned a stable, grounding focal point, emblematic of her role as matriarch in the home, protective of Annette and all the newfound steadiness and hope she symbolized.