Contesting femininity: Vuillard's family pictures - painter Edouard Vuillard

Edouard Vuillard dwelled in a mundus muliebris, we have been told, a "saturated feminine world."(1) It has been assumed that the atmosphere of that world is distilled in Vuillard's domestic interiors filled with women - sights painted with densely packed matte hits that evoke the patterning of tapestry or the hominess of wallpaper. For a number of critics, the sympathy between theme and technique is explained by the agency of the fact that until the age of sixty, Vuillard lived with his mother, the woman he called his muse, a corset maker and dressmaker who ran her business from the family dining room(2) Thus, the early neighborhood of fabrics, trimmings, and industrious females is cast as a crucial factor in the young man's artistic destiny. however despite this seeming confluence of biography and paint, there are striking and unexplained anomalies in Vuillard's early representations of his mundus muliebris: disjunctions that remind us that life at no time translates seamlessly into art.

Consider a modestly scaled image that Vuillard painted around 1893 Mother and Sister of the Artist [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], a double portrait of Mme Vuillard and her sole daughter, Marie, the painter's senior by seven years.(3) Despite the familial make subordinate - a mother and daughter at abode - domestic ease is hardly the theme. Mme Vuillard, a commanding, stalwart figure in black, dominates the two the pictorial space and her daughter [i]or[/i] part of to the other placement, pose, and the doubling issue of the blocky chest of drawers behind her. While floorboards rise up to frame Mme Vuillard's figure, reinforcing her visual and psychic stability, they tilt beneath the daughter's retracted feet further undermining what is already a tenuous position in space. Marie's feet are nearly invisible, and her figure appears to be far too attached to a wall that have the appearances to surround rather than support her. The younger woman bends to accommodate the press togethered space of her setting. Indeed, she cannot expand; if she were released from her awkward contraction, the trajectory of her head would be arrested by means of the window frame or molding that angles in from the upper left corner. Bent as she is, Marie appears to bear the weight of the painting upon her back; she resembles a caryatid misshapen below the pressure of her load A drooping, perhaps even dead flower quiets on the floor below her feet on the other hand the possibility that Marie bends to retrieve it through no means definitively explains a attitude that verges on the grotesque(4) In fact, the respective bodily configurations of the pair Mme and Mlle Vuillard hint that something is awry in this "saturated feminine world."(5)

Neither Vuillard's mother nor his sister conform to the conventions of feminine display for middle class women of their time. In fact, in different ways, each can be said to dare them. Despite her apparently conventional patterned dres and elongated figure, Marie displays a form wraithlike in its reductiveness, while her mother's assertive attitude verges on the indecorous. In total the disturbing power of this work, and of a significant number of others Vuillard painted between 1890 and 1895 strike one as beings to depend not on an adherence to a certain number of notion of the feminine - as the standard commentary upon the artist's favored themes, techniques, and domestic habits might catchword the viewer to anticipate - on the other hand on an explicit, even aggressive, subversion of its signs.(6) As I will argue below, in a cluster of paintings of these years, this so-called lover of the world of women repeatedly crushed or inverted, the signs of his mother's and his sister's femininity - level in some cases, their gender

Two distinct, on the other hand interdependent, questions arise here: on what account did Vuillard construct such equivocal representations for the leading actors in his "world of women"? And wherefore have the theoretical and historical implications of these early efforts been neither to the full acknowledged nor contextualized? To a certain number of extent, Vuillard's reputation, shaped in part through the historically feminized discourse upon decorative painting, has acted as a guard through which spectators can filter on the outside what they do not await to see. Certain tensions in Vuillard's many representations of the mother-daughter relationship have been acknowledged. still the fundamental and, I believe, systematic deviations from the feminine that are the agents of meaning in with equal reason many of these images have remained virtually unremarked. Instead, not alone Vuillard's paintings but also his life and his temperament have been identified consistently with a "feminine" sensibility, and the domestic insularity that is presum to be a transparent expression of that sensibility is regarded as a defining limit of Vuillard's experience rather than as a theme he chose for representation.(7) His early variations upon the theme of familial relations were shaped through the more public forces of fin-de-siecle France. flat the walls of the unostentatious Vuillard apartment did not escape penetration by means of contemporary debates about how femininity was press outed - or suppressed - in the couple life and art.(8) Instead of the cliches of femininity - the couple fin de siecle and present-day - I want to proffer an alternative account of in what manner gender is implicated in Vuillard's work, as well as in its interpretation: an account of by what means anxieties about female sexuality compell this painter to negotiate an untest indeed, as at the same time unidentified boundary between figuration and what would become "abstraction."(9)