Édouard Vuillard, La Salle Clarac

Édouard Vuillard, La Salle Clarac, 1922, oil with distemper on canvas, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo

One of the culturally damaging consequences of the outbreak of the First World War was the shut-down of the Louvre Museum. With enemy artillery situated less than 30km from Paris, its curators took the precautionary measure of closing the doors for the duration of hostilities and its post-war re-opening is an interesting vantage point from which to look at Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), and his relationship to the history of art. The At the Louvre series, particularly La Salle Clarac at the Louvre (1922) took as its subject the abundant stuff of antiquity at the French nation’s foremost cultural institution, and by extension, it also took on what the business of looking at art means. It depicted museum-going as a social activity and used a modern post-impressionist language to speak about contemporary life. Implicitly it also expressed gratitude or at least relief, that the war had not led to the obliteration of a precious cultural inheritance, but it still wanted to re-frame this civilization somehow.

In a series of six decorative panels commissioned by the wealthy Swiss industrialist Camille Bauer for his home in Basel, Vuillard’s personal recconection with France’s artistic heritage was clearly expressed. Modernist writers of the period, particularly James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot had also re-examined their cultural inheritance, but the shock and horror of the war caused them to question old certainties so that they too felt the need to use new ways to look at it or make use or sense of it. Culture was atomised, fragmented and compartmentalised, and notions of what was ‘heroic’ (Leopold Bloom as Ulysees for instance) was re-interpreted for everyday life. I think that Vuillard envisions the act of looking in the museum through a similarly refracted lens.

Like those other modernists, Vuillard shows us the competing impulses to both change and to hold on by portraying modern figures in La Salle Clarac gazing into antiquity as if still ambiguously in hock to it. The figure on the right is portrayed with an expression which could be characterized as either bored or sardonic, her half-smile, heavy eyelids and sidelong gaze remain open to interpretation. Vuillard’s figures are not outliers, or bohemian moderns divorced from the past; nor are they in conflict with it; the woman on the right appears conventionally bourgeois, composed, content, tranquil even.

While La Salle Clarac, ventures into a public sphere rather than into Vuillard’s customary private and domestic (sometimes claustrophobic) settings, it nevertheless conveys a real sense of interiority that is only marginally relieved by the view through the window to the outside. The two figures (male and female) on the far left are layered on top of one another, the affinity of their conventional coupledom underlined by the viewpoint, the proximity between them allows us to better apprehend their muteness, intimacy and the feeling of communion within the space and with the artistry they are gazing on.

The painting was made with oil and distemper on canvas. This use of peinture à la colle had been used by Vuillard earlier on theatre sets, mostly because it was quick drying. So, although the painting is realistic in form, its matte surface never lets us forget that we are looking at a painting, a construct. Its pinks and mauves together with the golds of the cabinets and picture frames are impastoed, which reduces their mimetic capacity but dials up their decorative quality. Yet this a painting, that is all about looking and looking through and beyond the cabinet surfaces to detect what is ‘real’ within them, where cultural value for the viewer-visitor is at once immediate and yet separate from us. It seems to ask us whether a painting should represent the world and its things recognisably, with the highest level of illusionistic finish, or should it acknowledge its own status as decorative artifact, particularly when its subject matter concerns decorative artefacts and the way we perceive them. The painting is very much about light and reflective surfaces and of course illumination in both senses – at one point the glass in front of the guidebook reader is made opaque through reflection and so seems to speak about incomprehension and indecipherability; it implies a kind of smokescreen between museumgoer and the art on display.

The Salle des Cariatides, one of the companion pieces in the series, plays with notions of scale and cultural perspective by depicting the monumental Borghese vase, comically undercut by the depiction of Vuillard’s niece Annette at the foot of the painting wandering past it, as if in a post-modernist photobomb, while the male figure marginalised at the bottom right seems to be as motionless as the statuary he contemplates.

Edouard Vuillard, The Salle des Cariatides, 1921, glue-based distemper on canvas, private collection

His living existence is given form thanks to his dark-hattedness and his colour contrast to the ghostliness of the looming statues. While he has become transfixed by the art of antiquity, the female figure disturbs the quietude of the composition. Her direction of travel, possibly against the recommended museum route flow), but still purposefully onward, together with the contrastingly vivid blue of her contemporary hat fashion and her gaze focussed beyond the painting’s confines, seems to signify her as an agent of modernism, of the impulse to move forward. In the series, Vuillard juxtaposes the august with the prosaic, the unfathomable timelessness of antiquity with the quiddity of things, the sublime with the quotidian.

Attention is also drawn to the ‘thingness’ of the stuff in museums. La Salle Clarac encourages a view of the objets in the round, and the upward viewpoint angle means we can see them not conventionally straight on, but from below, the transparency of the glass shelves suggesting suspension in mid-air. While the painting is clearly perspectival, the technique used in the application of colour together with the medium employed, has a flattening effect; the result is that the figures doing the looking are rendered as equally worthy of study as the things they are looking at. It might be the background guidebook reading figure with her fashionable cloche hat and hairstyle for instance, the vulnerability of her exposed neck, its hint of provocation ambiguously contrasted with her demure modesty. All things (including people among things) the painting suggests, are charged with their own particular force which, however decoratively composed, have a presence and an immediacy which shouldn’t be ignored.

Of the four figures in La Salle Clarac, one is mostly obscured, and in the foreground, we see a man and a woman, depicted almost as accidental obtrusions into the tightly framed space, looking at the exhibits with solemn regard, as if gazing into a reliquary.  None of the figures look back at us – all are preoccupied with things. The figure on the right is less worshipful, her casual curiosity-inclined body, her meditative yet moveable gaze and proximity to the display, reminds us of the impermanence and mundanity of the here-and-now and contrasts it with the amaranthine quality of classical artistry. With her head-tilted straining body and steady gaze imply an aura around the display case – her relationship to it contrasts with the distance to it from the figures on the left and situates both she and it in physical spaces that articulates, despite her muteness, a sense of respect and propriety.

The figures in La Salle Clarac are dressed with hats, signalling their respectability and decorum, as if going to church in their worshipful Sunday-best, sombre, reverential, gazing upwards, while the painting looks up at them and the things they are scrutinising. The modernity of the cloche hats is juxtaposed not just with the antiquity of the exhibits but with the generationally outdated hat fashion of the partially obscured figure. But it is their ordinariness that is new and modernist.  In the background the heavily be-shawled woman stands in contrast to the others; she is not looking at the exhibits but is instead consulting what we take to be a guidebook – maybe as an oblique commentary on how art may, by some at least, need to be ‘validated’ by critique, a necessary gloss on what might be otherwise incomprehensible. The guide also appears like a shopping or auction catalogue – acting as a torment to dilettante collectors denied possession of what is cabinetised away from them.

This emphasis on things in the painting echoes the beautiful displays of goods to be found in the great department stores in Haussmanised Paris. The figurines seem not so much curated, as window-dressed for admiration, justifying the two-franc museum admission price. Is Vuillard noticing an intersecting nexus of culture, commodification and covetousness for which the Louvre becomes the locus?

We are looking through the frame as if it too were a vitrine to see into other vitrines, in a recursive, mise-en-abyme. The viewpoint is low down, as it is in The Salle des Cariatides, so that we too are looking up to classical Greece (and maybe its underbelly) but the viewpoint is refracted through glass – which in turn acts as a commentary on distancing; we are once connected to, but separated from, art. We can see but we can’t touch.

As viewers of the painting, we are invited to study the figures as if they too are exhibits, just as they in turn study the figures on the clay pots in the display cases. The paint is applied loosely, impressionistically.  But the fluidity of the marks that Vuillard’s makes seems to conjure the contingency of modern life. Vuillard’s objects swim slightly unfixedly as if their temporal actuality in our minds and those of the visitors was also somehow unresolved, undetermined, and as if we see this ambiguity through their eyes.

 La Salle Clarac manages to capture the simultaneous and competing crosscurrents of modernism, tradition, cultural reach, civic pride, social commentary, bourgeois avidity, post-war angst and quiet aestheticism – quite an achievement.