Beyond the Easel:

Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel 1890-1930

by Donald Goddard

Maurice Denis (1870-1943).
Ladder in Foliage, or Poetic Arabesques for the Decoration of a Ceiling,1892. Oil on canvas, mounted on cardboard, 92 1/2" x 67 3/4". Musée Départemental Maurice Denis "Le Prieuré," St.-Germain-en-Laye.

Most of the paintings in this exhibition are landscapes with figures, some interiors also, but mostly landscapes associated with country homes, city parks, people at leisure, children, and scenes from Classical and Christian mythology. They go back, I suppose, to the figure landscapes of Nicolas Poussin, the great founder of the French classical tradition, but even further back than that, specifically at times, to Medieval tapestries. They were made or commissioned for specific places in specific houses, apartments, or public buildings, for overdoors, wall panels, ceilings, and screens.

Their creators meant them to be intrinsic to the décor of the space, to be decorative in the most complete French sense of the word, to revive for well-off patrons the aristocratic tradition of total décor that had existed in the 18^th century. One was meant to live in the decorated space as a total environment, transported beyond the mundane world.

Ironically, or perhaps predictably, none of the "decorative" paintings by the Nabis -- including those in this show, of course -- are still in their original places. They have all been sold, put up elsewhere, and in some cases even cut up so that they might be sold more easily. The world in which they existed is gone, the fortunes and people upon whom they depended are gone, and their rationale is gone along with the excellent hope that the world might be transformed by art. So now they can only be seen in museums, pieced together to give us some idea of the effect they might once have had (for this show several of the individual paintings have been brought together for the first time since their separation). It is a strange fate for an art so insistent on its idealism. In the end it suffers what all surviving art suffers -- lack of context, except that of our own knowledge, intellect, and feelings.

But the effect is remarkable. The décorations tower above us and spread out as though that other world really did exist. In Denis' Ladder in Foliage, or Poetic Arabesques for the Decoration of a Ceiling, 1892, commissioned for the house of his friend, the painter Henry Lerolle, four women in flowing gowns ascend a wide ladder in the treetops seen against the sky. It is a vision, perhaps even an allegory, but a real vision, something that could be, that is. There is an order of abstraction, from the sensually commanding figures of the women (probably all modeled on Denis' wife Marthe) to the sea of shaped leaves to the silhouettes of sky and clouds. The whole is woven together in a curvilinear pattern that also defines the images.

  Bonnard and Vuillard, on the other hand, remain in our normal time frame, in which the present becomes the past immediately and reaches, by its memorialization in art, particularly encompassing, environmental art, another level of consciousness. Some of Bonnard's subjects are mythological, for instance, a decorative ensemble he did in 1906-10 on various Arcadian themes and another series of 1916-20 that includes Earthly Paradise. But more often than not he is concerned with scenes of bourgeois life, early (1890-1900) with women and children in the streets, in parks and gardens around Paris (mildly satirical at times), later (after 1900) in the country settings (in Normandy, then Provence) to which he was gradually retiring. The flat, tapestry-like patterns of his early work, which seem to have influenced Vuillard rather than the other way around, are replaced in later work by kaleidoscopic mosaics of glowing color that make his landscapes and interiors intensely seductive.

But his figures are increasingly lumpen and indolent, downcast and depressive in a way that the paradise in which they find themselves cannot relieve. In fact, all Bonnard's shapes have an awkward presence. But his figures particularly have a repressed, menacing quality, so it is not surprising when there is an eruption of irrational pathology in a painting like The Terrace at Vernon, 1920-39, in which the woman on the right lunges inexplicably toward the obdurate female figure in the center (the juxtaposition has been identified as a reference to Bonnard's own personal entanglements). Unlike Matisse, with whom he became close in his later years, Bonnard could not quite submerge human personality and conflict in the obliterating context of brilliant color and design. He was just not terribly aware of their importance--or maybe he was too terribly aware.

There are distinctions but no gaps, even when there are disruptions. Vuillard painted Place Vintimille, the park he saw from his window in Paris, three times for decorative works. The last time was in 1915-16, when the sidewalk was being torn up and renovated in the middle of World War I. We are confronted directly by the trench that stretches across the foreground (perhaps a reference to the battlefield) where workmen prepare the new sidewalk. Still, children play in the park, people sit on benches, the trees spread out singularly but in abundance, and through them can be seen the line of apartment buildings on the other side of the park. Near the very center of the painting are the tiny figures of a man and a woman seated on a bench on the far side of the park, the man reading a newspaper, the woman wearing a red skirt. It is the only spot of real red in the painting, as though it were saved just for her, and it makes us notice every other detail of this grand tapestry. More than any of his confrères, Vuillard, the citydweller, was a man of nature, echoing the philosophy of the American conservationist John Muir, who wrote in the late 19^th century, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe," and of Muir's contemporary, the English naturalist and novelist W.H. Hudson, who wrote, "We are no longer isolated, standing like starry visitors on a mountain-top, surveying life from the outside; but are on a level with and part and parcel of it."

Donald Goddard © 2001