This work by Edouard Vuillard reminds me of the old Magic Eye images that ran in the Sunday comics back in the ’90s. You’d be presented with a dense, colorful pattern and have to figure out what the hidden image was. I could never do it.
In today’s episode we’ll find out how he and a group of young artists called the Nabis threw out the rules of traditional painting to create something more personal that made the viewer have to do some of the work of figuring out what’s going on.
If you want to follow along, you can find it here on the Gallery’s site.
This self-portrait shows Vuillard’s experience with the traditional, more realistic style.
SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)
“A Long Look” opening and closing themes are by Ron Gelinas
“Ascension” https://youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo and “Easy” https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs
Episode theme is “Gnossienne” composed by Erik Satie. Performed by Edward Rosser. Courtesy of musopen.org
Artwork information
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.52238.html
Vuillard self-portrait
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.93000.html
Vuillard info
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/vuillard-edouard/
https://artuk.org/discover/stories/douard-vuillard-nabi-and-intimist
“Bonnard to Vuillard: Intimate Poetry: The Nabi Collection of Vicki and Roger Sant” by Elsa Smithgall, et al. New York, New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2019.
“Vuillard, the Inexhaustible Glance : Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels.” Salomon, Antoine., Guy. Cogeval, and Mathias. Chivot. Vol. 1, Milano: Skira, 2003.
Nabis info
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dcpt/hd_dcpt.htm
Negative space trick
https://mymodernmet.com/negative-space-definition/
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson
Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Join me while I take you thru the experience of what I see and discover while looking at an artwork for minutes instead of seconds. Then I’ll share the very human story behind it.
Ready? Then let’s head to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC!
Today I’m looking at Two Women Drinking Coffee by Edouard Vuillard [VWEE-AR]
If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/coffee. When you get there, just click on the image to zoom in and pan around!
So what do you first notice?
Gotta be honest, what drew me to this oil painting is…it’s not pretty. As a matter of fact, it’s kind of ugly. That’s what made me want to look closer. It’s small, only about 11 inches wide by 9 inches high and shows two women created with murky shades of brown sitting in a room on the left side of a round table with large white cups and saucers before them.
We’re looking at them from slightly above and their bodies and the chairs they sit on are blobby indistinct masses of camel brown that look like they’re fused together into one shape. The woman closest to us faces our right with a pudgy face suggested by light tan blotches layered over the brown background, almost like a caricature. Angled peanut-brown strokes create the dress covering her plump form. Her eyes are lowered and her near hand lies on the table next to the cup, which is filled with a dark brown liquid.
The second woman seems to emerge from the right side of the first and sits slightly above and to the right of her. She also faces our right but turns away so all we see is the profile of her nose and chin under what appears to be a bonnet. More tan daubs cluster on her hat and a wavy swipe of black runs along her neck and under her chin suggesting a scarf or collar. A light-brown smear on the table next to her suggests her hand resting near another cup filled with a dark grey liquid.
The curved backs of their chairs kind of sprout from their shoulders.
The table before them is draped with a dirt-brown cloth with a black and tomato-red floral and vine pattern filling the right half and there’s a white plate filled with brown strips that look like bacon sitting between the two cups. The tabletop tilts sharply downwards so those cups and plate look like they could slide off any minute.
The women and table are set against a wall painted in a mosaic of dark blue, and forest, pine, and olive green strokes that reveal glimpses of the brown background. A light grey door on the right is cut off by the table and the top edge of the composition.
This is painted on cardboard and the more I looked, I realized that camel brown color in the background seems to be the actual unpainted cardboard. It looks like Vuillard created the women and chairs by kind of coloring in around them with the greens and blues to let the blank cardboard form those shapes. He’s using the old negative space trick!
So, why would an artist create such an odd painting?
MUSIC
Edouard Vuillard knew perfectly well how to paint realistically. He’d been trained in all the traditional techniques young artists learned in Paris in the late 1800s. There’s even a self-portrait in the same room that shows this. I’ll include a link in the show notes.
But he met a group of artists who were really influenced by Paul Gaugin who taught that art didn’t have to just imitate or reproduce nature but could be about how the artist felt about what he was painting. He taught that artists could do this by using non-natural colors, like making someone’s face green or the sky yellow for example, and turning things into simplified, flat, abstract forms.
They called themselves The Nabis, a Hebrew word meaning prophet and saw themselves as prophets of a new art. One of their founders named Maurice Denis’ summed it up like this: “A painting — before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote — is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.”
They wanted to paint from memory and emotion or imagination, not faithfully reproduce what was in front of them. They threw out all the traditional techniques they learned at the official academies. No more 3d shading! No more perspective!
Another big change was they embraced that idea that their viewpoint and emotional response to what they were painting was more important than the viewer understanding what was being depicted. Color and pattern became a big way for them to communicate that response.
Aside from Gauguin, they pulled from other inspirations too.
They loved the flat colors and shapes and unusual birds-eye views they saw in Japanese prints which were incredibly popular. These prints gave them the idea of distorting space, not always needing to make things recede into the distance realistically.
A lot of them continued the idea from artists like Degas and Monet to paint everyday people in everyday situations.
But for the Nabis, art became all about symbolism and hidden meaning–obscuring, hiding, uncertainty, ambiguity, and making us do the work of figuring out what’s going on. Vuillard chose to use pattern as a way to create this uncertainty and ambiguity. This came from his home life. He lived with his mother and sister who ran a corset-making business along with a few employees. So he was surrounded by color, pattern, and women every day.
And he really pushed the idea of mystery and uncertainty by sometimes using caricature, like here, and this technique of blending people and objects into the space around them. Caricature came from his experience working on theater design, painting scenery and programs for some of the new experimental plays happening at the time. Part of the ambiguity is also the relationship between these two women. I mean, they’re one unit but they’re turned away from each other.
It makes for a strange viewing experience. I mean the title tells you what’s happening and the longer you look, you do finally get that you’re seeing two women sitting at a table. But our floating point of view, the sharp tilt of the table, the deliberate breaking up of the women’s face into blotches, the overall dark tones and the way they’re kind of smushed against the wall behind them, plus the implied tension between them all create a kind of uneasy feeling.
Vuillard specialized in intimate domestic scenes like this featuring his family and friends. He even set up his studio in his bedroom to observe them more easily. Most aren’t as murky and odd looking as Women Drinking Coffee, they’re more colorful and decorative with figures in patterned clothing emerging or disappearing into the densely patterned walls around them. And apparently he generally got along fine with his family but liked staging them in tense scenes like this.
I was really curious about whether or not I was right about the cardboard and why he used such muddy colors so I emailed Dr. Kimberly Jones, Curator of 19th-Century French Paintings and just in the nick of time, a day before I recorded, she responded and explained that what we’re seeing is not what Vuillard painted! I was right about him using negative space but she said the cardboard itself got darker over time because of light exposure. It originally was a light tan or beige which would have made the paint colors look a lot different. Just imagine how different those dark greens and blues and earth tones would look against a much lighter background.
The second thing is this work was varnished at some point to protect the paint but that darkened the cardboard even more. And that ended up changing the appearance a lot. She says it made the overall composition very hard to read, which was not his intention. He wanted nuance, she said. So this dim, murky scene is not what he created.
This is good to know: What we see in a museum may NOT be what the artist painted. A lot happens to paintings over time–colors fade, there’s wear and tear and some well-intentioned steps to protect them can really change them!
That decorative style made Vuilalrd very successful and he did well, getting private and public commissions. And yet, he continued to live with his mother until her death when he was 60. His focus on overall pattern and the emphasis on the artist’s self-expression helped set the tone for a lot of the modern art that followed.
OUTRO:
I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.
You can find links to today’s images and information in the show notes and at alonglookpodcast.com. A big thanks to Dr. Kimberly Jones at the National Gallery of Art for her help with today’s episode!
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