Karen Wilkin
AT THE GALLERIES
Years ago, New York proclaimed itself a "Summer Festival."
These days, free concerts, outdoor sculpture shows, and Shakespeare in the
Park notwithstanding, the sentiment is more likely to appear in the works of
modish ironic artists than anywhere else, but there may be more truth in it
than we suppose. The coincidence of half a dozen first-rate exhibitions made
this past summer one of the most rewarding in a long time. This constellation
of exciting, stimulating shows was all the more remarkable because summer
is traditionally the art world's slow season. (I am suppressing the thought that
what I consider absolutely outstanding may be what current curators and
museum directors consider good enough for the slow season.)
From mid-May through September, we were treated to surveys of
early Vuillard and late Hartley, to what seemed like half the Matisses in So–
viet collections (and other notable delights) in "Matisse in Morocco" and
"Poussin to Matisse: The Russian Taste in French Painting," and to retro–
spectives of Prendergast and Hofmann. Because there were heady weeks
when all or most of these overlapped, it was possible to make enlightening
comparisons and check the usual wisdom against the reality of the work.
The arrival of "The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard" at the
Brooklyn Museum (May 18th to July 30th) signalled the beginning of this
wonderful season. Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the
show was also seen at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.
C.
(where it
was less sympathetically installed than in Brooklyn). The show is the first to
concentrate on the years between about 1890 and 1900, when Vuillard
painted some of his best and most characteristic scenes of
petit bourgeois
do–
mesticity. These pictures are the works of a young man - Vuillard was born
in 1868 - but one who was already an original, albeit modest, painter, very
much of his time yet with a nicely independent mind. The show consisted
mainly of small-scale pictures, often views of the apartment where Vuillard
lived with his mother and sister, until her marriage to one of his artist friends,
along with the occasional glimpse out the window.
As
the decade progressed,
he ventured into other apartments, painting them and their inhabitants, such
as his friends, Misia and Thadee Natanson, the publishers of the avant-garde
La
Revue Blanche.
(Misia Natanson is supposed to have been Proust's model
for Mme. Verdurin, which gives the less than successful decorative panels
VuiJlard executed for her apartment an interest they might not otherwise
have.) The real subject of the exhibition was, in a sense, the relentless deco–
ratedness of domestic French interiors at the turn of the century. In Vuillard's
world, figured wallpapers all but devour the inhabitants of rooms; windows
