FRIENDS IN ART: VUILLARD AND LUGNE-POE by Joan K Yanni

FRIENDS IN ART: VUILLARD AND LUGNÉ-POE

By Joan K. Yanni

  

LUGNE-POE

The painting is small--only 8 7/8  x 10 1/2 inches. One walks past it, then stops and goes back to look further.  Its colors are muted: grays, browns, pale blue and yellow with black lines that outline the figure of a man leaning intently over some paper at the edge of a table or desk. The painting, oil on paper mounted on panel, with no background to give depth, is flat, though emphatic brush strokes are evident. It is a portrait, but there is no modeling except for the shadowed face.

This is not a portrait of a man, but a picture of intense effort and concentration suggested by sharp angles and lines that focus attention on the cramped hands of the figure. The fingers themselves form a V leading one’s eyes to the nose and face so close to the table top. There must be no interruption in this man’s work.

The man is Aurélion Lugné, actor and art lover (1869-1940), later known as Lugné-Poë. (He added the Poe because of his admiration for the American writer and even claimed to be related to him.) The painter is Edouard Vuillard, (1868-1940), longtime friend of the actor. The two, along with painters Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard, had studied at the Lycée Condorcet, then shared a studio on rue Pigalle. Though the studio space was small, ideas were expansive, as the four friends discussed their often opposing views and listened to visiting artists explain new ideas about art.

Many of their influences came from the brotherhood of the Nabis (the Hebrew word for prophet), a loosely affiliated group of artists who rejected the Renaissance idea of re-creation of nature through linear perspective and modeling, and instead turned to create in pure color with thick lines and bold patterns as in Japanese prints. Their work featured flat, textured surfaces created by a variety of brush strokes and broad areas of color. They produced set designs, playbills and posters using the new color lithography, which introduced their draftsmanship to mass audiences.

These painters avoided the limitations of easel painting by  using the expanse of a wall or floor as their surface for their work.  They looked for decoration, not in the present day negative sense, but which, in the 1890s, referred to an awareness of the interrelationship of two-dimensional forms. These artists embraced flatness and found the arrangement of shapes and colors the compelling basis for their pictures. They abandoned perspective and emphasized surface texture, merging figure and ground into a single plane. They created an all-encompassing environment that surrounds their viewers, as Monet did in his Waterlilies.

Lugné-Poë, whose world was the theatre, prompted his painter friends to use the large expanse provided by a stage for their work. He was living with Denis, Bonnard and Vuillard when he produced his first play, and appointed Vuillard to do the sets. The debut was so successful that Vuillard became Lugné-Poë’s foremost collaborator. He not only named their company--the Theatre de l’Oeuvre--but produced the majority of the programs and sets for the plays that it staged. In turn, Lugné- Poë did much to publicize his friends’ art, writing a review of their first exhibition and allowing them to exhibit in the foyer of the theatre, thus assuring them substantial exposure and, in the case of Vuillard, his first collector, Coquelin Cadet.

The painters had opened up new doors for Lugné-Poë.  He believed completely in them as they taught him to see light and color in new ways and to read new authors. He wrote about his friends in his autobiography: Denis, he said, was quiet, contained, a visionary--a lover of pure line and beauty. He stood for order and lucidity. Bonnard was a humorist, with nonchalant gaiety and wit, which appeared in his paintings.  Vuillard was different in character from either of the other two. In his presence life smiled and was peaceful; nothing could have been more harmonious than his way of life and his behavior in society.

Though the Nabis disbanded in 1899,  Bonnard and Vuillard went on to develop an intimate style of painting with small- scale works depicting family and friends in tight spaces. Vuillard’s domestic lifestyle was quite different from his busy, outgoing days with his friends in their salon. He lived with his mother until he was 60--and often said that she was his muse. Maman was a seamstress who, after her husband’s death, supported her mother, daughter Marie, and two sons with her business of making corsets. During working hours their small living room was cluttered with printed fabric draped over chairs, sofas and ironing boards--patterns that appear in the artist’s work. When the work day was over, the room was cleared and returned to a cozy living room.

Vuillard grew up seeing women earning their own living, engrossed in their work and experts at what they did. Usually they are oblivious of the onlooker, but when interacting each  has her own role. The curve of a shoulder or a neck indicates relationships; usually the mother dominates the scene with a jut of an elbow or a tilt of the head.  Patterning is everywhere; Vuillard was a master at it. Though his spaces are cluttered, the patterns somehow fit together and blend, sometimes obscuring any figure in the picture. He continued to avoid details and, rather, to present symbols and ideas. “I must not try to remember the nose or the ear,” he wrote. “They are of no importance.”

His strongest work was done in the first decade of the new century, but he lived long after that--until 1940. His later paintings concentrate on more fashionable scenes, and he began to abandon claustrophobic subjects, to move outdoors, and to include details in his work. He was always the perfect observer, looking but not seen, always devoted to art and to bringing out the delight inherent in the world around him.

Source: curatorial files, New York Times, May 13, 1990, Journal of the American Medical Association, March 19, 1997