Review: Édouard Vuillard at The Holburne

‘Édouard Vuillard: The Poetry of the Everyday’, The Holburne Museum, Bath (24th May – 15th September 2019): ★★★☆☆

It is no coincidence that this show arrives at the end of Tate Modern’s recent Pierre Bonnard retrospective, after all, Vuillard and Bonnard were contemporaries, friends and colleagues. This show represents the Holburne Museum’s attempt at jumping onto the French post-impressionist bandwagon, and, whilst it doesn’t fall entirely short of the mark, one feels it could have done with a little extra thought.

Vuillard was a member of Les Nabis (The Prophets), a group of young French artists who, from 1888 to 1900, painted works as much to do with pure form and colour as they were depictions of nature and domestic life. Inspired in equal measure by the vibrant canvases of Paul Gauguin and the abstraction of nature found in Paul Cezanne’s landscapes and still-lives, the Nabis played with colour and form to create symbolist metaphor in paint. 

     The movement traced its origins to a painting by Paul Sérusier called ‘Le Bois d’Amour à Pont-Aven’, although it became known, rather theatrically, as the Le Talisman due to the trans-formative effect it had on the Nabis artists. It’s all there in Le Talisman- the abstract forms of pure colour, the natural subject matter, the colourful quietness, its roots in Gauguin and Cezanne whilst it prophetically prefigures Derain and Matisse.
The works that represent Vuillard’s Nabis years in this show are all together more domestic. Quiet subdued scenes of family life like ‘The Green Dinner’ 1891. Small figures chat and gesticulate in a lime tinted wash of lamp light around a table laden with dishes and wine bottles. Other works find abstraction through closely cropped still-lives of bureau tops and bedside tables, in another the bright white rectangle of an opened door dominates the miniature composition.

This is a small show of small works. It is only one room and no work is larger than a broadsheet but all convey a peacefulness – Vuillard is shown to be the quiet Nabis. This is not the whole picture of the artist as there are many more large and vibrant works by him, although almost all are outside of the UK and likely out of the reach of a small, regional museum such as the Holburne.
However, what does appeal throughout this show are the tactile textures both in and of the works. Both Vuillard’s mother and sister worked with textiles and patterned fabrics pervade his paintings. Curtains, tablecloths, dresses, and wallpapers can virtually be felt in his works. Texture is the real theme of this show, not the rather poorly conceived ‘poetry of the everyday’ – for which the only justification seems to be a rather ineffectual quote from Vuillard stuck up on the wall in which he equates poetry and painting.
The textures really reach their high point in the row of the post-Nabis works from around 1910. Painted on cardboard with theatrical set painter’s distemper, ‘Woman Reading in the Reeds, Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer’ 1909, has the same cloying tactility as sand stuck to sweaty skin and the same washed out dryness as beach beyond tidal reach. Totally unlike the bright Bonnard colours of earlier works, the limited pallet of these later works suits their clam domesticity.

However, at the Holburne many of these little, subtle works are lost, swimming in the deep navy of the walls in an already very dark room. To be fully appreciated Vuillard’s paintings need the bright, pure light of the Brittany coast, not the enveloping gloom of a small room at the top of the stairs.

★★★☆☆

‘Édouard Vuillard: The Poetry of the Everyday’ is on at The Holburne Museum, Bath between the 24th May – 15th September 2019