Norton Simon exhibits lithography of Édouard Vuillard
Lithography, printing images drawn on a flat stone, was strictly an advertising medium in 19th-century Europe. Parisian artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec were the first to use prints as an art format. But where Lautrec celebrated the rock stars and characters of Paris, Édouard Vuillard depicted cramped interiors and impersonal outdoor images. His work — with its muted color schemes and bright accents — may seem staid, but they reward close scrutiny.
An 1899 suite of Vuillard lithographs, “Landscapes and Interiors,” is now at the Norton Simon Museum (through Feb. 15, 2016). In them, a shy modernist reveals a private vision and wrestles with a new technology.
Lautrec drank in the Paris nightlife, cultivating relationships with denizens of the Moulin Rouge, but Vuillard had no need to put himself on display. “He had a small group of devoted friends,” curator Emily Beeny notes. “He seems to have been intensely shy.”
Beeny sees “Landscapes and Interiors” as one of three art lithographic landmarks of that time and place. “Bonnard and Maurice Denis did the other two,” she says, from her office. “We’re fortunate at the Simon to have a complete set of the Vuillards and the Bonnards.”
The series contains some delicious color choices: strawberry and green markings on cherry walls in “Pink Wallpaper,” and yellow and green over lavender in “Interior With Hanging Lamp.” Beeny notes: “There was an exhibition in Berlin this spring of Vuillard’s lithos. It contained the prints that he marked up with pastel — corrections that went back and forth between him and the printer. It was a real working conversation.”
Japanese goods were first imported to 19th-century Paris wrapped in woodblock prints. Their dissemination among French artists had a profound effect on Vuillard. “It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Japanese print on him,” Beeny explains. “It taught him how to rethink color and form.”
His interiors compress people and objects, and foreshorten distances; busy wallpaper patterns and a restless energy teem in them. A palpable sense of confinement pervades. “His pictures don’t always have a lot of movement but they are intense,” Beeny concedes. “Earlier in the 1890s, he designed stage sets for some Ibsen plays. He made these intense, claustrophobic interiors. There’s something profoundly private and withdrawn about Vuillard; maybe he had a desire to keep us at arm’s length.”
“It’s curious,” she continues, “that the same sense of space we see in his indoor scenes carries over to the outdoor. There’s a real interchange between the indoor and the outdoor.”
That’s evident in Vuillard’s largest painting, “First Fruits,” an outdoor scene, which measures 14 feet across. It’s currently on view in the Simon’s 19th and 20th century gallery. It gives the impression of being a tapestry, with a decorative border and patterned shapes — full of subtle movement due to interior brushstrokes. The matte finish paint has no evidence of a medium to make it easier to handle. A critic of the day looked at the landscape’s muted grays, greens and browns, and pronounced “First Fruits” as “painted in the city for a city apartment.”
The flat and interlocking areas in Vuillard’s lithographs and his paintings give the unmistakable sense of pattern in his work. It’s a quality he shared with his fin-de-siècle Parisian contemporaries.
“Vuillard’s mother was a dressmaker,” Beeny points out. “He grew up around textiles and fabrics. That flatness and interest in pattern, of course, was something we saw in Gauguin — one of the first of the post-Impressionists — and in the second wave artists like Bonnard, Denis and Vuillard. He might not have used bright colors, but Vuillard used color to define form.”
“The closer people look at these lithographs,” she concludes, “I think the more amazed they will be — at his modernism and daring distortions.”
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What: “Indoor/Outdoor: Édouard Vuillard’s Landscapes and Interiors”
Where: Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena
When: Through Feb. 15, 2016. Closed Tuesdays.
More info: (626) 449-6840, www.nortonsimon.org
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KIRK SILSBEE writes about jazz and culture for Marquee.