KAREN WILKIN
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In Brooklyn, the show was supplemented by an exhibition of prints by
Vuillard and his contemporaries from the museum's superb graphics collection.
As
was clear from the few prints within "The Intimate Interiors" (and from
the fine little Vuillard show at the Katonah Museum last summer), he was a
splendid printmaker. Lithography allowed him to explore a transparency of
color new to him and to create surfaces with a new kind of looseness and
airiness. The lithographs, composed of color shapes that reveal themselves as
tangles of line, breathe in ways that the paintings rarely do. They seem
transitory, fragile, not only because of the ephemeral "nonevents" they
record but because they threaten to unravel at any moment.
Some of the pleasure of "The Intimate Interiors" was marred by the
pretentious pseudopsychology of the text panels. I'm not sure what disturbs
the curator most: all that pattern in such small pictures strikes her as an
equivalent for tension; circumscribed subject matter equals claustrophobia;
and dense paint stifles. A typical panel stated the thesis and grudgingly ac–
knowledged the arbitrariness of the reading: "In many paintings of his family,
Vuillard used images ofconfrontation, embarrassment and alienation. Little is
known about the everyday life of Vuillard's family, however, and it is
impossible to say whether his paintings reflect real tensions in the household."
As
usual, the talk of "confrontation, embarrassment and alienation" tells you
more about the writer than the artist, but the result is to trivialize the
paintings, to literalize what may have been purely formal, expressive inven–
tions and turn them into illustrations. (Viewers seemed to go for it; I kept
hearing things like, "Is that his mother? She looks very in control.")
One painting, the Museum ofModern Art's endlessly fascinating double
portrait ofVuillard's mother and sister, painted about 1893, might support
these conjectures. The massive dark figur:e of the seated mother is projected
toward us by the oddly tipped chiffonier behind her, while the sister bends
forward, as though trying to fit into the canvas, apparently extricating herself
by main force from the wallpaper pattern behind her. It is a disturbing,
provocative picture, one ofVuillard's best, but it is worth noting, given the
curator's text, that in the context of the show, it was unique. Is the curious
relationship of the figures to each other and their setting really evidence of
emotional stress, or is it an imitation of the audacious crops and unlikely
viewpoints of the Japanese prints that Vuillard admired?
Anyone bent on psychological interpretation would have found less
equivocal material in the intense images of "Marsden Hartley: The Late
Figure Paintings," at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in June. Hartley painted
figures only in the five or so years preceding his death in 1943. The best
known of these are probably the "imaginary portraits" of his heros, Albert
Pinkham Ryder and Abraham Lincoln, and the tributes to a family of fisher–
men with whom Hartley lodged during a couple of extended stays in the
small community of Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia. (There's also the uncanny
