Pintura Feminismo

Contesting Femininity: Vuillard's Family Pictures
Author(s): Susan Sidlauskas

Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 85-111
Published by: College Art Association
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Contesting Femininity: Vuillard's Family Pictures
Susan Sidlauskas
Edouard Vuillard dwelled in a mundus muliebris, we have been to be far too attached to a wall that seems to surround rather
told, a "saturated feminine world."' It has been assumed that than support her. The younger woman bends to accommo-
the atmosphere of that world is distilled in Vuillard's domestic date the compressed space of her setting. Indeed, she cannot
interiors filled with women-scenes painted with densely expand; if she were released from her awkward contraction,
packed matte strokes that evoke the patterning of tapestry or the trajectory of her head would be arrested by the window
the hominess of wallpaper. For a number of critics, the frame or molding that angles in from the upper left corner.
sympathy between theme and technique is explained by the Bent as she is, Marie seems to bear the weight of the painting
fact that until the age of sixty, Vuillard lived with his mother, on her back; she resembles a caryatid misshapen under the
the woman he called his muse, a corset maker and dressmaker pressure of her burden. A drooping, perhaps even dead
who ran her business from the family dining room.2 Thus, the flower rests on the floor below her feet, but the possibility that
early presence of fabrics, trimmings, and industrious females Marie bends to retrieve it by no means definitively explains a
is cast as a crucial factor in the young man's artistic destiny. posture that verges on the grotesque.4 In fact, the respective
Yet, despite this seeming confluence of biography and paint, bodily configurations of both Mme and Mlle Vuillard suggest
there are striking and unexplained anomalies in Vuillard's that something is awry in this "saturated feminine world.'"5
early representations of his mundus muliebris: disjunctions that Neither Vuillard's mother nor his sister conform to the
remind us that life never translates seamlessly into art. conventions of feminine display for middle class women of
Consider a modestly scaled image that Vuillard painted their time. In fact, in different ways, each can be said to defy
around 1893, Mother and Sister of the Artist (Fig. 1), a double them. Despite her apparently conventional patterned dress
portrait of Mme Vuillard and her only daughter, Marie, the and elongated figure, Marie displays a form wraithlike in its
painter's elder by seven years.3 Despite the familial subject-a reductiveness, while her mother's assertive posture verges on
mother and daughter at home-domestic ease is hardly the the indecorous. In sum, the disturbing power of this work,
theme. Mme Vuillard, a commanding, stalwart figure in black, and of a significant number of others Vuillard painted
dominates both the pictorial space and her daughter through between 1890 and 1895, seems to depend not on an adherence
placement, pose, and the doubling effect of the blocky chest to some notion of the feminine-as the standard commentary
of drawers behind her. While floorboards rise up to frame on the artist's favored themes, techniques, and domestic
Mme Vuillard's figure, reinforcing her visual and psychic habits might cue the viewer to anticipate-but on an explicit,
stability, they tilt beneath the daughter's retracted feet, even aggressive, subversion of its signs.6 As I will argue below,
further undermining what is already a tenuous position in in a group of paintings of these years, this so-called lover of
space. Marie's feet are nearly invisible, and her figure appears the world of women repeatedly suppressed, or inverted, the
My thanks to Sarah Cohen,John McCoubrey, Lucy Oakley,Joanne Olivier, and Mary Gordon made some astute observations about Vuillard's paintings of his
Susan Taylor-Leduc for comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Thanks also to family in "The Silent Drama in Vuillard's Rooms," New York Times, May 13,
Elizabeth Bartman, Ulkti Bates, Teresa Cader, Anne Lowenthal, Michelle 1990, sec. 2, 1, 38.
Marcus, Merrill Mason, Laura Morowitz, Ken Safir, and Lisa Vergara for 4. Anna Chave writes that the "narrative pretext for Marie's stoop is a pitiful
insightful observations throughout the process. Rudolf Arnhelm offered wilted flower at her feet." See Chave, "Vuillard's La Lampe," Yale Universzty Art
helpful criticisms, Nancy Troy, editor-in-chief of Art Bulletzn, made excellent Gallery Bulletzn, xxxviII, no. 1, Fall 1980, 12-15.
suggestions for improvement, and Lory Frankel was a fastidious editor. I'm 5. In addition to the contrast of bodily postures, the composition itself
also grateful to Elizabeth Easton for early comments and for crucial advice on possesses significant tension. The shape of the negative space between the
photographs. For valuable assistance in this last task, I thank my research figures mirrors the crook of Mme Vuillard's arm. Because Vuillard's mother is
assistant, Bett Schumacher. Additional contributions are acknowledged below. central, yet inert, and Marie is marginal, yet dynamic, the spectator's attention
Questions and criticism from audiences at Yale University, the Institute of Fine is divided between the two figures. I thank Joanne Olivier for these observa-
Arts, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania forced me to tions.
reconsider and clarify aspects of my argument. Unless otherwise indicated, 6. Both histoncal and theoretical definitions of the term feminine remain
translations are mine. controversial. Here is how Tamar Garb described the fin de siecle understand-
1. Russell, 12. ing of femininity: " 'Femininity' was one of the terms which was most
2. Russell provides the best overview of the early reception of Vuillard's struggled over in fin-de-siecle Paris. There was a general consensus that it
work. See Russell, 72-140, for a compilation of various remembrances about existed, that women possessed it, and that much of what they did or said could
the artist. On Vuillard's family life and the profession of his mother, see esp. be seen to originate in their 'feminine' natures. Whether people believed that
Easton, 25-101; as well as Groom, 25-34; and Belinda Thomson, Vuillard, New sexual characteristics were the result of centuries of adaptation and evolution
York, 1988, 9-18. For an earlier insistence on the relation between Mme like the followers of Darwin, or the result of 'evolutionary transformism' in a
Vuillard's profession and her son's painting, see Claude Roger-Marx, Vuzllard. neo-Lamarckian sense, or whether they believed that they were inherent and
Hzs Lzfe and Work, London/New York, 1946, 10. preordained characteristics which were biologically determined, for the most
3. On this painting, see esp. Easton, 83. The relation of this painting to part there was agreement about what constituted appropriate 'masculine' and
Vuillard's work in the Symbolist theater is discussed in George Mauner, 'feminine' behavior"; Garb, "L'Art Feminin," in The Expanding Dzscourse:
"Vuillard's Mother and Sister Paintings and the Symbolist Theatre," Artscanada, Femznzsm and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, New York,
x, Dec. 1971-Jan. 1972, 124-26, and in Susan Sidlauskas, "The Expressive 1992, 216. For a contemporary overview of 1890s publications on female
Interior in Nineteenth-Century Painting," Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylva- psychology and biology, see Alfred Fouillee, "La psychologie des sexes," Revue
nia, 1989, chap. 4. That chapter is part of a forthcoming book, The Body zn des Deux Mondes, ser. 3, cxIx, Sept. 15, 1893, 397-429. Also see Silverman,
Place: Imaging Interorzty zn Nzneteenth-Century Culture. The novelist and essayist 186-206, for a discussion of how social and sexual assumptions about the
86 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 1
1 Edouard Vuillard, Mother and Sister of the Artist, ca. 1893. New York, Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Mrs. Saidie A. May (photo:
Museum of Modern Art)
signs of his mother's and his sister's femininity-even, in is presumed to be a transparent expression of that sensibility
some cases, their gender. is regarded as a defining limit of Vuillard's experience rather
Two distinct, but interdependent, questions arise here: than as a theme he chose for representation.7 His early
Why did Vuillard construct such equivocal representations for variations on the theme of familial relations were shaped by
the leading actors in his "world of women"? And why have the the more public forces of fin-de-siecle France. Even the walls
theoretical and historical implications of these early efforts of the modest Vuillard apartment did not escape penetration
been neither fully acknowledged nor contextualized? To by contemporary debates about how femininity was ex-
some extent, Vuillard's reputation, shaped in part by the pressed-or suppressed-in both life and art." Instead of the
historically feminized discourse on decorative painting, has cliches of femininity-both fin de siecle and present-day-I
acted as a screen through which spectators can filter out what want to offer an alternative account of how gender is
they do not expect to see. Certain tensions in Vuillard's many implicated in Vuillard's work, as well as in its interpretation:
representations of the mother-daughter relationship have an account of how anxieties about female sexuality compelled
been acknowledged. Yet the fundamental and, I believe, this painter to negotiate an untested, indeed, as yet unidenti-
systematic deviations from the feminine that are the agents of fied boundary between figuration and what would become
meaning in so many of these images have remained virtually "abstraction. "
unremarked. Instead, not only Vuillard's paintings but also To identify Vuillard's early painted female figures as proto-
his life and his temperament have been identified consistently abstract would be to cast them in the same teleological
with a "feminine" sensibility, and the domestic insularity that relation to abstraction that Alfred Barr envisioned for se-
CONTESTING FEMININITY VUILLARD'S FAMILY PICTURES 87
lected works of late-nineteenth-century painting in Cubism in these worlds all shared a will toward objectification that was
and Abstract Art, his influential 1936 exhibition at the Museum concentrated on the female form. Collectively, they affirm a
of Modern Art.'1 (Vuillard's own equivocal relation to Barr's historical shift in the way the bodies of women were under-
narrative will be addressed below.) A less reductive and more stood to signify-a shift that altered the course of late-
accurately historicized framework must be constructed for nineteenth-century figure painting.
Vuillard's early female figures, one that can illuminate the
larger implications of their objectification, for "objectifica-
tion" was not simply an inevitable step in the evolution of a The Feminine Temperament
pictorial style but a multivalent process with its own complex
The feminization of Vuillard's reputation was advanced
social, sexual, and psychological history. A key moment of through inference and direct statement and consolidated by
its alliance to the gendered discourse surrounding decora-
that history can be told with particular economy and intensity
tion. During the 1890s, many critics of both society and art
through Vuillard's female figures of the 1890s and the critical
virtually equated the feminine with the decorative. As Camille
inconsistencies and evasions that they, and their maker,
Mauclair put it in an 1899 article on portraiture, "A feminine
inspired.
portrait was hence always a decorative work.... a stylized
The contemporary discourse about decoration provides
landscape of which the woman's body, invisible and central,
some structure for understanding Vuillard's figures. Yet the
was the driving force and the prisoner of the whole en-
anomalies within his early representations of women-their
semble."'13 Socially conservative aesthete Octave Uzanne
attenuated proportions and contracted postures, their suscep-
concurred, and promoted his vision of a world peopled by
tibility to both pictorial and structural manipulation-cannot
"decorative females and female decorators."'4 A similar
be fully explained as the result of what Vuillard's friend
construct would be applied later to Vuillard: as women were
Maurice Denis dubbed in 1890 "la deformation objective"
identified simultaneously as decorative objects and decorat-
(objective distortion)-a visual distortion of nature in the
ing subjects, Vuillard's "decorative" work-his tapestrylike,
service of a larger decorative unity." I would argue instead small-scale, women-dominated paintings-were understood
that many of the female figures that Vuillard painted between to be the production of a feminized subject.
1890 and 1895 were generated by a more fundamental In many of the critical writings on the painter produced
transmutation of the "feminine" body. These forms might be between 1931 and 1948, it was common practice to apply
thought of as "body-signs" rather than bodies-visual and gendered adjectives to his temperament, only to extend
conceptual hybrids of figure and object.12 And the narrative them, as if "naturally," to describe the character of his work.
that makes sense of them must be woven together from at Later, such descriptions would be adapted to define Vuillard's
least three domains: fin de siecle myths about femininity, the overall artistic achievement.'5 The critic John Russell col-
actual social and sexual conditions of French women in these
lected excerpts from many of the early writings on the painter
years, and the emerging discourses of the "decorative" and for an exhibition catalogue of 1971, and also provided his own
the "abstract"-discourses that overlapped more often than subtly gendered commentary on the life and work. After
they competed in the early 1890s. mentioning in one of the opening paragraphs that Vuillard
The models for the objectification of the female figure that possessed a "sweet and gentle nature," Russell went on to
I will employ to contextualize Vuillard's imagery will be drawn characterize the artist as primarily a "microdramatist" and
from what seem to be disparate worlds: the avant-garde "miniaturist."16 The writers Russell anthologized-many of
puppet theater, the lecture hall of a hospital for neurological whom had actually known Vuillard-were more blunt. In
and mental disorders, a manual on gestural decorum, art their reminiscences, they repeatedly suggested not only that
criticism about "decorative females and female decorators," Vuillard's themes depended on an exclusively feminine world,
and social criticism on the relation of psyche to soma in the but also that the painter himself possessed a feminine
New Woman. Yet the texts and images generated by the actors temperament. He was thus described as "deeply sensitive,"
feminine were tied to the Third Republic ideology of decoration. The concept Gender, Race and the Origins of Cubism," Art Bulletin, Dec. 1994, LXXVI, no. 4,
of "femininity" continues to pose problems to critics in many fields. For a 597-612.
summary of the debate in psychoanalysis and feminism, see Teresa Brennan, 10. My thanks to Nancy Troy for emphasizing this point. See Troy, Modernism
The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity, London, 1992. For the and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbuszie, New Haven, 1991.
purposes of this essay, I am using "feminine" to refer to the conventional 11. Maurice Denis's phrases onginally appeared in Art et Critzque, Aug. 1890.
signs-physical, sexual, and behavioral-associated with the display of female "La deformation objective" was defined as "purely aesthetic and decorative,
sexuality in late-19th-century France. I am also exploring the instability of the according to the main techniques of color and of composition," while
term as a critical tool. "deformation subjective" allowed for "the play of the personal feelings of the
7. Easton, Chave (as in n. 4), and Thomson (as in n. 2) have all noted the artist." For a discussion of Denis's theories in relation to Matisse and the idea
peculiarities and/or tensions in the early representations of Vuillard's mother of decoration, see Roger Benjamin, Matisse's "Notes of a Painter". Crticism,
and sister, but by and large they have not located them within a larger cultural Theory and Context 1891-1908, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1987.
and social framework about resistance to the "feminine." In general, 12. Here I am adapting a phrase that Griselda Pollock developed for Dante
Vuillard's representations of the feminine world have been understood as Gabriel Rossetti's distorted female faces: "face-signs"; Pollock, "Woman as
constituting a retreatfrom the social ills of his time rather than an expression of Sign: Psychoanalytic Readings," in Vzsion and Difference Femizninty, Femznism
them and the Hzstories ofArt, London/New York, 1988, 132.
8. For the social and political contexts of attitudes toward femininity during 13. Camille Mauclair, "La femme devant les peintres modernes," La
the 1880s and 1890s, see Silverman, esp. 63-74 and 186-228. Nouvelle Revue, n.s., xxI, Nov. 1, 1899, 190-213, quoted in Silverman, 71.
9. For recent provocative analyses of the interraction between female 14. Octave Uzanne, quoted in Silverman, 71.
sexuality and pictorial abstraction, see Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: 15. For a striking example of this slippage, see Thadee Natanson, "Vuillard
Readzngs of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas, Chicago, 1991, esp. chaps. 4 as I Knew Him," in Russell, 109.
and 5, and also Anna Chave, "New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: 16. Russell, 11, 29, 60.
88 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER I
"haunted by anxiety," and "highly strung"-terms generally quency very early in Vuillard's career and several decades
identified with women at the turn of the century.'7 For after his death-are the artist's subversion of the distinction
example, here is how social critic Alfred Fouillee distin- between figure and ground, his repudiation of illusionistic
guished the male from the female temperament in 1892: space, his alleged indifference to the human beings within his
"The sanguine temperament is more generally a masculine compositions, and, perhaps most important, his affiliation
one; the nervous temperament, a feminine one. The woman's with Denis and the other Symbolist painters known as the
nervous system is, moreover, more excitable; her reflex Nabis.25 Julius Meier-Graefe, a prominent enunciator of this
actions are more intense; she is carried away by a livelier view, linked Vuillard directly to Paul Cezanne-and thus to
sensibility."'8 Vuillard's imagination was characterized in the origins of abstraction-through the circle of the Nabis. In
similarly febrile language as "an over-delicate and over-active 1904, he wrote, "[Vuillard] uses human beings in the compo-
mechanism."'19 Finally, the artist's acute financial and emo- sition of his still-life pieces, but the fact that they are human
tional reliance on his mother was asserted by nearly every beings is not the important thing in the composition. All
author who remembered him. His friend Pierre Veber, critic
things seem to serve him merely to enrich his palette. He
and poet, contributed this: "It is thanks to her that Vuillard groups them, and they seem to disappear in the pro-
was able to become the artist that he is today.'"'2 Another
biographer, Claude Roger-Marx, added, "Vuillard never had
cess. ...."26 Here, Meier-Graefe is admiring the apparent
indifference to human form that would later become one of
but one great love-his mother.... She never ceased to share
the defining features of "pure" abstraction, as Barr envi-
his life. Even when she had passed on, she continued to
sioned it. In fact, for Barr, works that possessed "vestiges of
counsel and protect him."21
subject matter" demanded a classification of "quasi- or
Thadee Natanson, the founding editor of La Revue Blanche,
pseudo- or near-abstractions." He added: "Perhaps the last is
was a close friend and frequent companion of Vuillard during
the least objectionable."'7
the 1890s, so his interpretation of the painter's character has
When Barr institutionalized the origins of abstraction in his
been granted a particular authority.22 In the memoirs he
catalogue essay of 1936, he used an explicitly masculinist
penned near the end of his life, Natanson commented that
language of exploration, discovery, and conquest to evoke the
"the fierce ardour of [Vuillard's] heart equalled the subtlety
heroic attainments of Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, and
of his mind." As if to clarify, he added, "The heart's sensitivity
those who had paved their way. Although Barr allowed for a
has a feminine kind of delicacy." After emphasizing Vuillard's
form of abstraction that employed "decorative rather than
strong preference for female, rather than male, company,
structural" forms (the so-called "intuitional and emotional
Natanson lamented his friend's bouts of depression. He
strain"), his preference for the geometric compositions of the
noted regretfully that Vuillard suffered "not from doubt,
"intellectual, structural" strain was clear.8 While not exactly
which is virile, but from self-doubt," which, presumably, is
not.23 In his introductory text, Russell also suggested that a
excised from the narrative, the decorative was implicitly
compromised virility may have made Vuillard susceptible to assigned a lower place in the hierarchy.
certain early critics' disaffection with his modest subjects and Four decades earlier, however, such a hierarchy had not yet
generally small scale: "Vuillard grew up at a time when the been conceived. The critic Octave Mirbeau, a patron of
major work was the test of manhood, and by 1892-93, people Vuillard's, characterized the painter's early decorative panels
thought it was high time he set about one.' '24 as evidence of a "deliberately abstract credo." Denis's critical
writings suggest that the artists he regarded as advanced were
at once abstract and decorative. For this painter and critic, a
The Decorative and the Abstract work's success was achieved through a finely calibrated
The narrative about Vuillard as feminine (or as not quite balance between the cerebral and the sensual, and perceived
masculine enough) has remained dominant since the 1930s. disruptions of that balance merited his extreme displeasure.
Yet a counternarrative has surfaced periodically-one that For instance, in 1906 Denis criticized Vuillard for creating
seeks to insert him into a more conventionally masculinized decorative panels that were "too pretty," and he admonished
realm of achievement: the invention of abstract art. Under- himself to "try to stay away from the pretty." After expressing
scored in such accounts-which emerged with most fre- his "irritation and discomfort" with his friend's panels, Denis
17. "Deeply sensitive": Don Willibrod Verkade, quoted in Russell, 86; very close, but probably not romantic, friendship with Natanson's wife, Misia.
"haunted by anxiety": Romain Coolus, quoted in Russell, 89; "highly strung": For a discussion of the relationship between Vuillard and Misia Natanson, later
Paul Signac, quoted in Russell, 95. Misia Sert, see Easton, 103-31. Later in the decade, Lucie Hessel, a wealthy
18. Fouillee (as in n. 6), 409. patron and the wife of art dealer Jos Hessel, replaced Misia as the artist's
19. These words were spoken by Thad~e Natanson, quoted in Russell, 110. principal "muse." See Groom, 108-9.
20. Pierre Veber, quoted in Russell, 99. Traces of this mythology persist to 24. Russell, 29.
the present day. In a recent homage to the painter called Vuillard's Sleste 25. On the Nabis, see Claire Freches-Thory and Ursula Perucchi-Petri, Nabiv
(1990), Red Grooms shows the napping artist oblivious to, but obviously 1888-1900, exh. cat., Reunion des musees nationaux, Paris, 1993; Patricia
reliant on, the ministrations of his mother, who hovers just beyond a
Eckert Boyer, ed., The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde, exh cat., Jane
protruding folded screen. See Red Grooms. New Works, exh. cat., Marlborough
Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J., 1988; George Mauner,
Gallery, NewYork, 1992, fig. 10.
21. Roger-Marx (as in n. 2), 10. The Nabzs Their History and Their Art 1888-1896, New York, 1978; and Ursula
22. For a discussion of La Revue Blanche and the circle around it, of which Perucchi-Petri, Die Nabis undJapan, Munich, 1976.
Vuillard was an important member, see Groom, 16-17. Groom describes the 26. Julius Meier-Graefe, quoted in Russell, 98.
bimonthly periodical (16) as "dedicated to advanced ideas ranging from art 27. Barr, 12.
and literature to popular science and politics." 28. Barr, 19. This preference would seem to exclude the art of Henri
23. Thadee Natanson, quoted in Russell, 110, 110, 108. Vuillard enjoyed a Matisse, who today may be regarded by some as a "decorative" painter. Barr
concluded, "Pretty colors [but] no expression." 29 The imbal- sky."34 The implication seems to be that had Vuillard pos-
ance could be weighted in the other direction, for Denis sessed a more virile temperament, he might have plunged
would later complain that Henri Matisse's paintings were "too ahead on what would seem to be a clearly marked, albeit
abstract." Too much of Matisse's art was determined by theories, treacherous path toward abstraction. In this account, "abstrac-
Denis insisted, an exclusivity that preempted the richness and tion" preexists its originators-or, to borrow Barr's language,
humanity of the emotions, instinct, and nature.30 its "discoverers"-whose efforts may have been compro-
Denis's description of decoration at its most advanced mised, or delayed, by the intrusion of the feminine.35
prefigures some of Barr's remarks about the transcendent I am not arguing here that the criticism on Vuillard is
qualities of abstract painting, as well as the latter's impatience evenly divided into two polarized camps: one masculine and
with any art that relied on the "pleasures of easy recognition abstract in its orientation, the other feminine and decorative.
and the enjoyment of technical dexterity."3' Here is Denis in Nor am I claiming that either view is more "authentic" and
1892, writing on the potential of decoration to elevate the should supersede the other: that the feminine painter of
modern home:
intimiste scenes should be permanently unseated by the
masculine maker of pattern and form-or vice versa. Rather, I
I would want [the paintings] to have a noble appearance, am contending that there are telling instabilities within the
of rare and extraordinary beauty: they should contribute discourse on Vuillard: passages of equivocation that seem to
to the poetry of man's inner being, to the luxurious color
be at their most confusing and contradictory when their
scheme and arabesques without soul; and one should find
authors attempt to locate the artist precisely on the historical
in them a whole world of aesthetic emotions, free of
continuum that conventionally "progresses" from figuration
literary allusions and all the more exalting for that.32
to abstraction-a transformation whose originary moments
What was for Denis a fluid interpenetration of styles and often have been described in gendered terms.36 The narra-
ideologies-the decorative overlapping, even continuous with, tives that have shaped Vuillard's reputation have encom-
the abstract-would later be rigidly codified into a narrative passed both the "decorative" and the "abstract," yet neither
about stylistic "evolution," not only in Barr's writings but also label-or some fusion of the two-satisfyingly explains the
in many of the standard histories of modernism. What I want formal constitution or the psychological affect of his early
to register here is that the role-however modest-of Denis's female figures. This is in part because neither discourse allows
friend Vuillard in those histories periodically has confounded for the historical, sexual body. Late-nineteenth-century com-
the distinctions on which that evolutionary model depends. mentaries on decoration typically domesticated and con-
The refusal of clear-cut boundaries that is encapsulated in strained female sexuality, muting and diffusing its expression,
Vuillard's early paintings, and in his reputation, suggests that subordinating it to the harmony of the family interior. Later,
the historic as well as the aesthetic interconnections among the seminal criticism on early abstraction-like Barr's-often
decoration, figuration, and abstraction need to be reconcep- judged an artist's stylistic rigor by the degree to which signs of
tualized. the corporeal were excluded. Vuillard's female bodies fall
Vuillard himself was not admitted into Barr's pantheon of between the cracks of the art historical structure.
abstraction's founding fathers (although he and Pierre Bon- These early female figures of Vuillard's incarnate a conver-
nard earned Barr's approbation as "brilliant youngsters"); gence of instabilities that find their analogue in the contradic-
Denis was, however, as one of the founders of that "intuitional tory phrases that have been invoked to describe them. Those
and emotional strain."33 Occasionally, critics have insisted on instabilities were generated not simply through pictorial
placing Vuillard there alongside Denis, believing that Vuil- distortions (as in Denis's "deformation objective"), but also
lard's radical pictorial experiments of the 1890s stand as through a wholesale objectification of the female body, as well as
evidence that, had he truly desired, he could have invented through the spectator's ambivalent response to that objectifi-
abstraction. Here is how Russell mused about what might cation. Denis's phrase implies the existence of a normative
have been: "art history would have taken a different course if (that is, a "realistic" or "natural") figure that could be
Vuillard had invented abstract painting ten years before Kandin- adjusted according to a Symbolist aesthetic. But Vuillard's
wrote a catalogue essay for the Museum of Modern Art's 1931 exhibition of contest Denis's opinion about Matisse in his 1951 text on the painter. Barr
Matisse's work (Henri Matzsse: Retrospectzve Exhibztzon, Museum of Modern Art, writes, "Matisse's 'abstraction' sprang not from a rational dialectic but from
New York, 1931), and developed his ideas further in his more comprehensive what might be called an empirical dialectic or, simply, trial and error guided by
Matzsse" Hzs Art and Hzs Publzc, New York, 1951. In the earlier essay (13), Barr sensibility and great experience"; Barr, 1951 (as in n. 28), 81.
distinguished between a "merely decorative design" and the powerful 31. Barr, 13.
"structural design" of Matisse's forms. In addition, throughout his text, Barr 32. Maurice Denis, quoted in Groom, 14.
used a vocabulary that emphasized the geometry and rigor of Matisse's forms. 33 "Brilliant youngsters" is from Barr's 1931 essay (as in n. 28), 10.
For instance, Barr writes about Matisse's Decorative Composztzon of 1926 (21), "It 34. Russell, 70; emphasis added.
is an angular figure constructed architecturally with precise vertical and 35. Russell, 71, concedes the difficult nature of the mission, noting that not
horizontal lines." For a discussion of the reception of Matisse's art and the even Denis was able to realize his program fully.
issues of decoration and "luxury," seeJohn Elderfield, "Describing Matisse," 36. Witness Barr's emphasis on the "pictorial conquest" of abstraction and
in Henn Matzsse: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, his contention (11), "The more adventurous and original artists had grown
1992, 13-78.
bored with painting facts." For a very different view of the implication of
29. Both Octave Mirbeau and Maurice Denis are quoted in Groom, 145 and gender in the origins of abstraction, see Carol Duncan, "Virility and
161.
Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting," Artforum, xII, no
30. Maurice Denis, quoted in Benjamin (as in n. 11), 94-95. Barr would 4, Dec. 1973, 30-39.
90 ART BUIIETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER I
picture making, an acknowledgment that there is no such

thing as a "seamless" transition from the figure in the world
to the figure on the canvas.
While allied to the flat patterning and allover surface
integration of his Nabis colleagues, Vuillard's female figures
are distinct from the dematerialized figures of Paul Serusier,
Ker-Xavier Roussel, the Swiss-born painter who would be-
come Vuillard's brother-in-law, as well as Denis himself, whose
desexualized females are commonly referred to as "child-
women.'"37 Instead, many of Vuillard's female subjects possess
an almost visceral, bodily strain-a perceptible resistance to
transformation-that is at odds with their pictorial reductive-
ness.38 Vuillard neverjettisoned the figure entirely, of course.
Neither did Denis, Serusier, Paul Ranson, Roussel, Bonnard,
or Paul Gauguin, an artist they all admired. Nonetheless, the
1890s figuration of all these artists was contingent on a
fundamental rethinking of the conventional bounds of corpo-
reality in paint.
When Barr wrote his essay on abstraction, he conceded that
there were problems with the very word abstract. He regretted
that his choice of label for the art he was describing was
2 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Study for the Portrait of neither precise nor fully descriptive. In explaining why he
Louis-Francois Bertin, 1832. New York, Metropolitan Museum of chose to use the word regardless, he reverted to the standard
Art, Bequest of Grace Rainey Rogers, 1943 (photo: Metropolitan definition of the verb: "to abstract," Barr wrote, "means to
Museum of Art)
draw out of or away from."39 The Oxford English Dictionary
elaborates in a way that seems appropriate to Vuillard's figural
transformations: to abstract is "to suppress or withdraw from
female figures, while certainly allied to a Symbolist ideology, the corporeal."40 Through the figures of his sister and his
stake out a territory of their own, for they raise basic questions
about corporeality itself as an agent of meaning in representa-
tion-a preoccupation that was surfacing at the same time in
a number of fields concerned with the expressivity of the
body: theater, dance, puppetry, and the evolving study of
neurology, as we shall see below.
Resisting Femininity
While Vuillard's art is by most accounts firmly planted in the
world of figuration, his principal female subjects nonetheless
resist some fundamental assumptions about how the feminine
body should be represented. In many of his paintings of the
1890s, Vuillard appears to have denied the femininity of his
subjects in the service of an objectification that was not only
visual but also psychological and sexual. Despite his famously
mild affect and reportedly innocuous subject matter, Vuillard
was actually a ruthless manipulator of the female subjects he
painted-the figure of his sister, in particular. He repeatedly
cast his sister, Marie, not as an object of desire-the conven-
tional outcome of allying the aesthetic to the erotic-but,
more literally, as an object in and of itself, an object severed
from desire, and very nearly severed from humanity.
Vuillard appropriated a number of surrogate forms for the
human body-the marionette and the mannequin, for in-
stance-to enable his pictorial transformations. The female
figures he produced are hybrids: at once living subjects and
manipulated objects. For Vuillard, this appropriation signaled
a conceptual change in how the body was perceived, a change
that had to take place before he could manipulate his figures
in paint as vigorously as he wished. The use of an intermedi- 3 Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906. New York,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946
ary symbol for the body, an object like the body but emptied of
(photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art). Copyright 1997 Estate of
animation, is a represented interruption in the process of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York
CONTESTING FEMININITY: VUILLARD'S FAMILY PICTURES 91
mother, Vuillard addressed the question of how much the

body could be reduced or objectified before it disappeared
altogether as a legible sign for the human. Vuillard's favorite
subjects offered their own particular resistance to objectifica-
tion and merited a distinct process of transformation: the
mother was masculinized, the daughter dehumanized. Each
process undoubtedly related to the differences between the
two women: their respective ages, social stature, and emo-
tional authority, as perceived by the man who painted them-
the third member of what became a family triangle after the
early death of the father and the rare presence of a much
older brother, Alexandre.4'
Performing Gender 4 Achille Fould, Bonheur in Her Studio, exhibited at the Salon of
In Mother and Sister of the Artist (Fig. 1), Mme Vuillard sits with 1893. Location unknown (photo: from Norma Broude and
legs planted apart, encased in a black dress whose mono- Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art
History, New York, 1992, 219)
chrome is relieved only by the near-invisible lines that signal
seams and folds. She is erect, indeed, almost regal, and, in
fact, she sits in a posture traditionally reserved for men or for
yet commanding, masculine posture was appropriate for a
women of authority: queens, warriors, sibyls. Her left hand
woman of such personal, intellectual, and economic force.45
rests on her knee, and her right clasps her thigh; the arm is
In the very year Vuillard painted Mother and Sister of the
flexed in what is called an "arm akimbo" pose. In traditional
Artist, critical discussion erupted around the indecorousness
forms of portraiture, this was "not an appropriate gesture for
of the painter Rosa Bonheur, whose portrait by Achille Fould
middle-class women of good standing, though there were (now lost) was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1893 (Fig. 4).
some exceptions for women from powerful or novel fami- Bonheur is shown seated before a large painting of a lion
lies. .. ."42 Mme Vuillard's posture is also reminiscent of the family. Her gaze is commanding, despite a slight squint, and
informality of men and women of the peasant class. But this her mouth is pursed in an expression of grim contentment.
woman was, by all accounts, very much a Parisian bourgeoise in She sits in a posture of what could be described as "mascu-
her habits and decorum.4 Ingres's haughty Louis-Francois line" ease: her shoulders are drawn back, her legs apart, with
Bertin (Fig. 2) has been cited as a precedent for Mme feet planted squarely. Her hair is cut short, and she wears a
Vuillard's posture on several occasions, but the fact that the smock and pants: masculine working attire, for which she had
subjects' genders are different has hardly been remarked.44 to secure a medically sanctioned police "permit for transves-
While Vuillard does not paint his mother as a man, he tism."46 This is the presentational style that provoked critics to
configures her body in a posture conventionally identified as accuse Bonheur of having "laid claim to gestures and modes
masculine. The decision to do so may have been based in part of behavior which were beyond her sphere."47
on the painter's acknowledgment of his mother's role as the During the 1890s, a powerful woman was a deviant woman,
family breadwinner. But his vision also participates in a more and anxiety about female authority colored even the prose of
general debate about the imagery of female authority. sympathetic writers. For example, in a memorial to the
Mme Vuillard's posture anticipates in an interesting way painter, Bonheur's protegee Virginie Demont-Breton empha-
Pablo Picasso's 1906 Portrait of Gertrude Stein (Fig. 3), a woman sized the former's "maternal" qualities, conceding that while
who lived openly as a lesbian. While the literature on this the painter had not married and borne children, she loved
painting is filled with stories of how many times Picasso wiped her animals like a mother and took a maternal interest in the
away and repainted Stein's face during eighty sittings, the younger women artists who sought her counsel.48 In the
pose seems much less remarked upon, as if only this informal figure of Bonheur, two ostensibly competing visions-the
37. Groom uses the phrase (77) "the child-woman ideal" for Denis's 45. For a recent discussion of this portrait, see Richard Brilliant, Portraiture,
decorative frieze for a bedroom suite. The author also discusses (71-81) the Cambridge, Mass., 1991, 149-52, and Robert S. Lubar's discussion in this issue.
larger context for "woman and flowers as decoration." While Picasso seems to look slightly down on his subject, Vuillard appears to
38. The Nabis' portraits of male subjects tend to be both more idiosyncratic look up at his mother, because of the way she is positioned perpendicular to
and individualistic. For instance, Vuillard's treatment of Thadee Natanson's the rising floorboards. My thanks toJoanne Olivier for this observation.
rather rotund form is almost always recognizable, even when it is nearly 46. James Saslow, "Disagreeably Hidden: Construction and Constriction of
subsumed into a highly decorative setting. the Lesbian Body in Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair," in Broude and Garrard, 1992
39. Barr, 11. (as in n. 6), 193. See esp. Saslow's discussion of a photograph of Bonheur's
40. The Oxford English Dictionary, abridged ed., 1971, s.v. "abstract, vb." friends dressed in masculine clothing and affecting masculine gestures,
41. On Vuillard's family background, see esp. Easton, 7-21; and also Patricia 195-96.
Ciaffa, "The Portraits of Vuillard," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1985. 47. See Garb (as in n. 6), 218. See also Linda Nochlin's parody of Courbet's
42. See Joaneath Spicer, "The Renaissance Elbow," in A Cultural History of The Painter's Studio, in which she substitutes Rosa Bonheur for Courbet;
Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, Ithaca, N.Y., 1991, Nochlin, "Courbet's Real Allegory: Rereading The Painter's Studio," in Courbet
84-128. Spicer concentrates on Renaissance portraiture, but the convention Reconsidered, ed. Linda Nochlin and Sarah Faunce, exh. cat., Brooklyn
she describes still prevailed in late-19th-century representation. Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1988.
43. See Easton, 26-29, on the social class of the Vuillard family. 48. Garb (as in n. 6), 219.
44. See, for example, Easton, 140 n. 31.
posture. In 1892, a Parisian writer named Charles Hacks

published Le geste, a "semiology of gesture" that anticipates
recent theories of identity construction to a remarkable
degree-Hacks's conservative social agenda notwithstand-
ing.49 The author hailed gesture as a once cherished feature
of France's patrimony and contrasted its glorious history to
the moribund present: "Today, actions have diminished in
their corporeal vigor and courage; the play of the spirit has
replaced the play of the body."'50 Hacks's indictment of
contemporary gesture provided the foundation for a much
broader social critique-a critique directed with particular
ferocity toward the sexually active bourgeois woman.
Hacks began by insisting that every gesture-with the
exception of the infant's or young child's-was socially
constructed. A baby's bodily movements were either wholly
spontaneous or determined by others: "[the baby] is a little
puppet, a doll, the marionette of the house, animated and
amusing, a happiness for all eyes.""51 On the other hand,
bourgeois women were mistresses of duplicity and disingenu-
ousness. Hacks contended that the instability inherent in the
female temperament was acted out through women's erratic,
even irrational, gestures. "Deception and complication, un-
der a simple and natural appearance, such is the female
constitution today.""'52 And he continued, "The woman's
gesture is false, and everything contributes to this falseness"
(Figs. 5, 6). Hacks insisted that the gestures of women were
nothing less than "hysterical."53
Hacks attributed this inherent female disingenuousness to
years of damaging social training, as well as to the restrictions
of the tightly laced corset, which was, for this critic, the
quintessential sign of female sexuality. In his allusions to this
offending article of feminine costume, references to hysteria
5 Illustration in the chapter "Le geste cultiv'" (The cultivated surface again. The corset made the woman's body into
gesture), from Charles Hacks, Le geste, Paris, 1892
something "anti-natural," bestowing on her "enormous
breasts and arms fixed at right angles," a gesture of the
"hysteric."54 his condemnation of the corset's constraints,
nurturing, feminine mother and the masculine authority-- Hacks was emphatically not promoting the liberation of
were thereby fused, albeit uneasily. Vuillard's analogous
fusion in paint also betrays signs of unease. While his mother
is shown with her daughter, in her own home, the son
suppresses any conventional signs of nurturing; there is a
singular absence of engagement between the two, even within
these cramped quarters. And on close inspection, the near-
opaque severity of Mme Vuillard's form is tempered by a more
nuanced attention to the parts of her body that are exposed to
view. The hands that for years had plied the resistant materials
used for corset making are rendered in a corrugated impasto
that infers decay (or perhaps arthritis, an affliction suffered
by many seamstresses). Consider also Mme Vuillard's face,
which resembles a death mask. A waxy coat of ivory paint
floats eerily over a black underdrawing of her features, as if we
are glimpsing skin and bone at the same time. But even the
scratchy black lines that appear to penetrate the "surface" are
indistinct. The acuity that might have been expected in Mme
Vuillard's eyes-given the aggressiveness of her posture-is
absent.
A "Hermaphrodite of Gesture"
Mme Vuillard's age, alluded to in her son's treatment of the 6 Illustration in the chapter "Le geste cultive" (The cultivated
face and hands, may also be implicated in her "masculine" gesture), from Charles Hacks, Le geste, Paris, 1892
women's "natural" sexuality-quite the contrary. Instead, he empire with an iron hand. But this image is entirely at odds
was insisting that authentic gestural expression was simply with descriptions of her by Vuillard's intimates, who, almost to
unattainable for the woman who attempted to lead an a person, characterized her as self-effacing and mild. The
unrestricted sexual life. relation between mother and son is invariably described as
Motherhood and old age offered women the only opportu- one of great tenderness. Claude Roger-Marx, who knew both
nity to reclaim the authenticity that presumably had been lost the painter and his mother, wrote about their relationship in a
to them since childhood. Hacks argued that when pregnancy prose style that resembles that of a romance novel: "He knows
occurred, and women set aside their corsets (and thus, their her face by heart, but his eyes are insatiable. Every look
sexual appeal), women could at last realize the capacity for exchanged between them expresses a communion which not
true gestural expression.55 In Old age offered an even greater even death will dissolve."59 How then can we account for
advantage: a chance to renounce once and for all the Mme Vuillard's posture in Mother and Sister of the Artist? Are the
gendered conventions of decorum. As women aged, Hacks indistinct face and decaying hands simply evidence of the
reasoned, their gestures became a hybrid of the masculine dark underside of filial devotion? Indeed, Simone de Beau-
and the feminine. The older woman could therefore choose voir and other, more contemporary French feminists, includ-
from a much wider repertoire of gestures than could her ing Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, insist on the terror and
sexually active, younger counterpart. By adjusting her presen- rage that accompany the love a child has for the mother-the
tational style, she could virtually become a man, if she wished. figure who gives birth but cannot give eternal life.60 The
As Hacks put it, "The old woman is at the same time man and rigidity of Mme Vuillard's posture, along with the effacement
woman ... a hermaphrodite of gesture."56 In spite of Hacks's of her features, imparts to her figure a statuelike remoteness,
evident misogyny, the assumption that underlies many of his as if her son had to imagine her as an inert sculpture before
assertions has startling implications-not only for Vuillard's he could render her in paint. While Vuillard's possible
painting but also for any representation that uses bodily signs. ambivalence toward his mother's authority may have inflected
Hacks assumed that gender, age, authority, or sexuality could his portrayal of her, her posture in Mother and Sister of the Artist
all be enacted through gesture. It is a short leap from the must also be assessed in light of the person who seems, to this
conclusions-if not the reasoning-of this fin de siecle viewer's eye, most directly affected by it: her daughter, Marie.
"semiologist" to the present-day view that gender and sexual- In many of the images that Vuillard painted of his mother
ity are fluid rather than fixed, socially constructed rather than alone-sewing, reading, sipping coffee (Figs. 7, 8)-she
biologically ordained.57 conforms to the woman of his friends' descriptions. She
The relativity of bodily display in representation was an idea seems a benign, contemplative presence, filling, but not
whose ascendancy had begun at midcentury, with Realism's commanding, space. The image of masculine authority she
critique of the rhetorical, narrative-generating gestures of enacts in a painting such as Mother and Sister of the Artist is
Charles Lebrun and his followers. Edmond Duranty's "La repeated in many other images, but only under one condi-
nouvelle peinture" (1876) had offered an inventory of tion. If, as Judith Butler would have it, gender is a performa-
"natural" gestures-many of them appropriated from the tive act, a series of stylized gestures repeated over time, then
paintings of Edgar Degas-that could be incorporated by Mme Vuillard performs masculinity only when she cohabits
artists to capture a person's temperament, social class, and the pictorial stage with her daughter.6'
profession.58 By the end of the century, however, artists and
writers had moved even further away from the narrative
legibility of gesture. Less concerned with the externalized Marie Vuillard
signs of class or individual psychology, many artists of the last At times, the interaction between mother and daughter is
two decades of the century experimented with bodily configu- rendered with great subtlety. In The Chat of about 1892 (Fig.
rations that conveyed a more general, and internalized, 9), Marie's form is distilled to a curve, or bend, which
content.
confronts an upright form-her mother. Other images dis-
My discussion of Mme Vuillard up to this point may have play a more overt asymmetry. In some instances, Marie's body
left an impression of a commanding figure sitting regally in contracts as if she were ministering to or embracing another,
the dining room of her apartment, ruling the corset-making only to meet an emptiness. In The Dressmakers of about 1892
49. See Hacks, passim. My thanks to Elizabeth Easton for a suggestion that to representation, see Dorothy Johnson, Jacques-Louis David, Princeton, N.J.,
led me to this text.
1993, 11-69. Duranty's influential essay "La nouvelle peinture" is reprinted in
50. Hacks, 9. Charles Moffett, The New Pazntzng: Impressionzsm 1874-1886, exh. cat., Fine Arts
51. Hacks, 52-53. Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, 1986, 477-84.
52. Hacks, 60. 59. Roger-Marx (as in n. 2), 84.
53. Hacks, 68 60. See, for example, Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxztme sexe, Paris, 1949; Luce
54. Hacks, 62 Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n 'en est pas un, Paris, 1977; and Julia Kristeva, Pouvozrs de
55. Hacks, 70 l'horreur: Essat sur l'abection, Paris, 1980. For a lucid analysis of the feminist
56. Hacks, 71; emphasis added. The issue of gesture and gender is touched critique of psychoanalysis, see Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis,
on briefly in recent studies of cross-dressing. See, for instance, Marjorie Femznism and Postmodernzsm in the Contemporary West, Berkeley/Los Angeles,
Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dresszng and Cultural Anxzety, New York, 1993. 1990. For a recent application of these ideas to contemporary feminist art, see
57 See, for example, Andrew Perchuk and Helene Posner, eds., The Mignon Nixon, "Bad Enough Mother," October no. 71, Winter 1995, 71-92.
Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representatzon, exh. cat., MIT List Visual 61. Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Arts Center, Cambridge, Mass., 1995. Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," in PerJormingFeminzsms, ed. Sue-Ellen
58. For an overview of 17th- and 18th-century applications of gestural codes Case, Baltimore, 1990, 270.
94 ART BUILLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXVIII NUMBER 1
7 Vuillard, The Yellow Curtain, ca. 1893.

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of
Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
(photo: National Gallery of Art)
8 Vuillard, Woman Sweeping, ca. 1892.

Washington, D.C., The Phillips
Collection (photo: Phillips Collection)
9 Vuillard, The Chat, ca.

1892. Edinburgh, Scottish
National Gallery of
Modern Art (photo:
Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art)
(Fig. 10), her body is flattened and bent as if she had been sits at their margins.63 Nonetheless, there is a striking and
folded at the waist. The head is awkwardly, almost painfully disturbing exception to Marie's apparent marginality: a work
turned. Marie's contracted form confronts her mother's erect called Self-Portrait with Sister (Fig. 12), which Vuillard painted
figure across a latticed plane that suggests an equivocal about 1892. The painting shows the red-haired Vuillard
separation from the outside world. The irregular diamond of clutching the shoulders of a female figure, whom scholars
gray-green on Marie's torso conveys the impression that there have identified as Marie. Pentimenti indicate that the original
is a void at her center. In other instances, her bodily presence proportions of the female subject have been significantly
is markedly reduced when she is in her mother's company. In reduced; the consequence is a younger appearing, or more
the 1893 Interior with Chiffonier (Fig. 11), for example, she compliant, figure. There is some doubt about the accuracy of
looks like a specter about to be subsumed into the furniture the title. Neither the painting's provenance nor its original
that looms behind her. Her mother leans forward slightly, as if title can be verified. But that this title has come down to us at
to engage the viewer, but Marie appears trapped within the all is a fact striking in itself, even if apocryphal, for this is the
shadow cast by the oversize dresser behind her, thrust into closest thing to an erotic painting that Vuillard ever made.64
darkness as her mother, further back in space, is projected It is tempting to characterize Marie's posture in the
into light. paintings I have described as a distorted or exaggerated vision
Seven years older than Edouard, Marie was shortly, at the of femininity, developed to counter her mother's masculine
rather advanced age of thirty-two, to marry Roussel, her pose: a caricature of female subservience to authority. But
brother's best friend.62 We know very little about Marie, for while Vuillard may have alluded to some of the visual
the commentary that privileges the mother virtually excludes conventions of feminine decorum favored during the 1890s-
the sister. She is largely absent from the biographical narra- Marie's figure is elongated, her frame appears delicate, and
tives and is either missing from most family photographs or her dress is patterned in the prevailing style-he subverted
62. On Roussel, see Fr&ches-Thory and Perucchi-Petri (as in n. 25);Jacques out of danger. I've gone through a terrifying crisis of devastation and revolt
Salomon, K.-X. Roussel, Paris, 1967; and Edouard Vuillard-K.-X. Roussel, exh. against people and things"; quoted in Groom, 67.
cat., Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris, 1968. Laura Morowitz has completed a new 64. On this painting, see Easton, 14-16, who comments on the inappropri-
interpretation of Roussel's paintings, "Closed Off: Women in the Painting of ately intimate nature of the work. In this context, it is worth noting that
Ker-Xavier Roussel." Romain Coolus dedicated to Vuillard his short story "Le Prince Herbert,"
63. Such a photograph is published in Easton, 74, fig. 48. A passage of about which is about a medieval prince who possesses a "vehemente passion" for his
1894 from Vuillard's journals includes a rare and disturbing reference to younger sister. The story was published in La Revue Blanche, viil, 1895, 21-34.
Marie: "My poor sister has suffered a serious [health] crisis, and we have been We have virtually no information about the actual relationship between
on the brink of thinking her lost. She's a little better now, but not completely Vuillard and his sister.
10 Vuillard, The Dressmakers, ca. 1892. New

York, collection ofJane Forbes Clark
(photo: from Easton, fig. 64)
11 Vuillard, Interior with Chiffonier, 1893.

Switzerland, Kunstmuseum Winterthur
(photo: Kunstmuseum Winterthur)
them almost beyond recognition by inflecting them with

metaphors of a different, even a deviant order.65
If Mme Vuillard was masculinized and de-faced into object-
hood by her son, her daughter was not so much feminized as
both dehumanized and desexualized. In the era of the
wasp-waisted, full-breasted Gibson Girl, Vuillard continually

suppressed any evidence of his sister's sexuality.66 In Mother
and Sister of the Artist (Fig. 1), Marie is a near-skeletal figure, an
unlikely candidate for the corsets made in her mother's
workshop. She is not only hipless but waistless as well. Where
is her neck, and how does her left arm meet her shoulder?
Marie's corporeality is so reduced that it challenges the very
notion of presence, as well as sexual difference.
The New Woman
Marie's compromised corporeality cannot be separated from

the volatile history of women in 1890s France. These years
were characterized by an almost histrionic anxiety about all
things female: sexuality, biology, psychology, decorum, and
artistry. As women's visibility within the public sphere in-
creased, essays issued forth from the literary, scientific, and
academic establishments prescribing greater social and sexual
control.67 The relation between these various texts and the
artistic practice that produced the dematerialized woman
needs to be more fully examined.
It is by now a cliche of modernism's origins that at the age
of twenty, Denis became famous for insisting that "a painting-
before being a battle horse, or a nude woman, or some
anecdote-was essentially a flat surface covered with colors
arranged in a certain order.""'6 Barr would take up Denis's
12 Vuillard, Self-Portrait with Sister, ca. 1892. Philadelphia
phrases as an early battle cry for that strain of abstraction that Museum of Art, Louis E. Stern Collection (photo: Philadelphia
originated in Gauguin and Denis, ran through Van Gogh and Museum of Art)
Matisse, and finally culminated in the "abstract expression-
ism" of Kandinsky.69 Largely because of Denis's privileged
position in this story of formal origins, it is the reductiveness bodies flattened into pattern, dematerialized, and fused to
of his pronouncement that has long been emphasized. Yet his their surroundings. The signs of female sexuality certainly are
writings from the outset possessed overt sexual and social suppressed in Denis's own ethereal "child-women," long
dimensions. In his definition of "neo-traditionnisme" of considered to be harbingers of abstraction. Denis's preoccupa-
1890, Denis explicitly linked the suppression of female tions resonate with the writings of Charles Hacks: an authen-
sexuality to advanced pictorial expression. He told the story tic expression cannot be achieved through the body--or the
of a young painter trying to represent a very pale young represented body--of a sexually vital woman.
woman, whose body reflected light like a quivering rainbow. In these same years, the New Woman was emerging as a
The aspiring artist struggled to capture this effect for a whole social force and popular image. In the press, she was "alterna-
week, until his teacher told him: "This isn't real life. You are tively envisioned as a gargantuan amazone or an emaciated,
not going to sleep with that woman."70 The renunciation of frock-coated 'hommesse.' "71 In either instance, her desire for
sexuality for the sake of artistic, as well as social, control can sexual and economic independence presented a dire threat
be imagined in contemporary representations of female to the bourgeois family. Literary and scientific journals found
65. By using "deviant" in this context, I mean to invoke specific associations Painting," in Architecture in Fashion, ed. Deborah Fausch, Paulette Singley, et
with 1890s conceptions of the aberrant, in female sexuality and psychology, in al., NewYork, 1994, 270-313.
particular. I will address this theme at greater length below in my discussion of 67. For an overview of this literature, see esp. Silverman, 186-206; and
the work of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot. My aim here is to connect this discourse Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle, New
not only to the reception but also to the actual construction of a pictorial style. York, 1990. Also see Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the
For elaborations on female deviance in these years, see esp. Jann Matlock, Impressionist Era, New Haven, 1991.
"Doubling Out of the Crazy House: Gender, Autobiography, and the Insane 68. This statement originally appeared in Maurice Denis, "Definition du
Asylum in Nineteenth-Century France," Representations, xxxiv, Spring 1991, neo-traditionnisme," Art et critique, Paris, 1890, reprinted in Denis, ThYories 1890-
167-95; and idem, "Masquerading Women, Pathologized Men: Cross- 1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, Paris, 1911, 1.
Dressing, Fetishism and the Theory of Perversion 1882-1935," in Fetishism as 69. Barr, 19.
Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz, Ithaca, N.Y./London, 70. Maurice Denis, Nouvelles thiories sur l'art moderne, Paris, 1922, 96. Denis
1993, 31-61. In this same collection, see also Robert Nye, "The Medical claimed that these words were first uttered in 1888. I thank Laura Morowitz for
Origins of Sexual Fetishism," 13-30. pointing out the importance of this passage.
66. For a discussion of bodily "comportment" and consumption at the turn 71. Silverman, 63,
of the century, see Leila Kinney, "Fashion and Figuration in Modern Life
a variety of erudite ways to deliver the same message: a first, much publicized, Women's Art Exposition was held in
woman's place was in the home. Indeed, Marie Vuillard's 1892. While articles published for the occasion extolled
relation to her home-as encapsulated in the encroaching women's achievements in tapestry, embroidery, jewelry mak-
wall in Mother and Sister of the Artist-is one of the most ing, and even painting and sculpture, authors were careful to
haunting aspects of the painting. The surface around her underscore the proper domestic frame of womanly achieve-
teems with life, while she appears enervated, transfixed, as if ment. What appeared to be a celebration of women's talents
her vitality were being sapped and dispersed into the gyrating was actually an ideological program to contain them.75
strokes around her. These seemingly erratic but deliberate With this in mind, then, could Vuillard's pictorial fusion of
strokes of paint impart a sense that the displacement of his sister to the patterned surfaces around her be construed
life-from the animate figure to the inanimate wall covering- as a visualization of how fluidly a feminine presence might be
takes place before our eyes. The illusion is heightened by the integrated into its surroundings, the artificer inseparable
fact that Marie's left hand is rendered in the same light ocher from the artifice? Or, given her apparent discomfort-her
as the surrounding pattern. In this confusion between the strained posture and tentative expression-is Marie an artisan
painting of flesh and the painting of pattern is concentrated too attached to her surroundings, closely tied to, but not in
the acute, irresolvable tension between female bodily au- harmony with her home? Does Vuillard offer the viewer a
tonomy and decorative unity in fin de siecle representation. commentary on the psychic cost of aesthetic integration?
In purely formal terms, one might imagine Marie's picto- Certainly, there are close affinities to the 1892 short story
rial merging with the wall surface to be an expression of the "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in
integrated surface and object design of the Art Nouveau style, which a woman in enforced confinement after childbirth-
whose practitioners advocated an imaginative fusion of a the notorious "rest cure" that deepened, rather than dis-
person with his or her surroundings. For literary figures such
pelled, the depressions of many nineteenth-century women-
as Edmond de Goncourt, Baron Huysmans, and, later, Marcel
imagines that she sees another woman trapped behind the
Proust, this fusion was both aesthetic and psychological: an
tracery of her wallpaper pattern; eventually, it is clear, to the
ensemble predicated on a fluid interdependence between a
reader at any rate, that the effigy is none other than a
person and all details of his or her surroundings.72 Yet this
projected self-portrait.76 Marie's visual and psychic symbiosis
aestheticized fusion of self and setting could also be invoked
with the wall she presses against in Mother and Sister of the Artist
to substantiate a larger social agenda. Conservative social
offers a nightmarish realization of the cherished dictum that a
critics adapted the notion to legitimize their conviction that a
woman's place is in the home.
woman should be wholly integrated with her domestic environ-
Vuillard may have felt empathy, and perhaps some guilt,
ment, one house-bound element in a larger design scheme.
Writers of the late 1880s and 1890s exhorted women to
toward the sister who, with her mother, supported him
financially in these early years of his career. (By the age of
become "artificers of the interior," adding that they should
thirty-two Marie likely had been working as a seamstress or
design themselves with the same nuanced attention they
apprentice for nearly twenty years.) And we know that the
bestowed on their upholstery.73 One of the problems posed by
painter had a striking predilection for female subjects.77 Yet it
the New Woman was her resistance to being incorporated
is unlikely that Vuillard would have been motivated by a
easily into the decorative interior. As one annoyed critic put it,
coherent feminism. In fact, his representations of his sister to
"These are no longer women of pleasure and leisure, but
some degree exploit an assumption that many contemporary
women who study, of very sober comportment. And nothing
feminists deplored: the belief that the female was inherently
suits them better than heavy and somber colors."74 Presum-
passive. For years that alleged passivity had rendered women
ably, the ethereal child-woman offered less resistance to a
the "natural" objects for both social control and visual study.
total integration with her environment.
Vuillard's figurations were not derived from the deterministic
misogyny of the 1890s. Yet his objectified bodies emerged
The Feminization of the Decorative Arts from the same culture that produced Charles Hacks's denun-
By 1890, the formerly robust decorative arts industry in ciation of the bourgeois woman's gestural treachery, August
France was flagging, and women were tapped as the agents of Strindberg's insistence on the moral, intellectual, and physi-
its revitalization-as long as their artistry could be practiced cal inferiority of all women, and Alfred Fouillee's summaries
safely at home. Thus, the stability of the family, the key to of "scientific" claims about the biological origins of female
France's glorious future, would not be compromised. The passivity. These last two essays will be discussed below.
72. For suggestive comments on Vuillard's relation to Marcel Proust, see 76. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), in mThe Yellow
Ann Dumas and Guy Cogeval, Vudlard, exh. cat., Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyons, Wallpaper and Other Wntings, ed and intro. Lynn Sharon Schwartz, New York,
1990, 43, 46, 53, 59, and esp. 166-67. Also see Sidlauskas (as in n. 3), chap. 4, 1989 A recent poem byJulia Alvarez includes a pointed reference to Vuillard's
for a discussion of how the idea of the interdependence of figure and setting representation of his sister; Alvarez, "Wallpaper," Amenrcan Poetry Review,
was expressed in both the theater design and home decoration of the 1890s. Nov.-Dec. 1995, 7. My thanks to John McCoubrey for pointing this out to me.
73. See Silverman, 193-206. For further commentary, see Octave Uzanne, 77. Vuillard wrote in his journal of 1893-94, "I ought to have had a varied
L'art et zdie: Revue contemporazne du dzlittantisme hlttirare et de la cunositi, 2 vols., multitude of objects represented in my paintings, but I never put men into
Paris, 1891-92, esp. 1, 1-3 them, I realize ... when my purpose tends to men, I always see terrible
74. Marius-Ary Leblond, "Les pelntres de la femme nouvelle," La Revue, caricatures.... Never [so] in front of women, where I always find a wax to
xxxix, 1901, 275-76, 289-90, quoted in Silverman, 70. isolate a few elements that satisfy the painter in me"; quoted in Groom, 57
75. See Garb (as in n. 6), 218-24, for a discussion of the Union des Femmes 78. Mauclair, 1899 (as in n. 13), 194: "Son corps est secret ... elle est sans
Peintres et Sculpteurs mvstere moral, elle attend, comme une page blanche, que la sensibilite de-
The Tabula Rasa trouble it imposes on the woman, widespread seduction

In the article on female portraiture quoted earlier, Camille and prostitution, with their usual accompaniments of
Mauclair, a complicated and controversial figure in his own abortions, infanticides and abandoned children.81
right, announced that for most portrait painters, the female
In short, nothing less than complete social anarchy was
subject was a tabula rasa. "Her body is a secret," he elabo-
predicted as the inevitable outcome of female independence.
rated. "She waits, like a blank page, so that the sensibility of
Less than a decade after Thadee Natanson mused on the
the man can inscribe its dreams there upon her."78 Mauclair
feminine delicacy of his friend Vuillard, Simone de Beauvoir
himself claimed to reject such formulations, and called for a
wrote Le deuxieme sexe (1949), where she offered a critique of
newly invigorated portrait style to accommodate the intellec-
the historical and biological legacies that had rationalized the
tual acuity and emotional intensity of the New Woman. But
misogyny of Strindberg, Hacks, and Fouill&e. Applying the
the critic's ostensibly enlightened tolerance of the active new
theories of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Beau-
woman did not represent a dominant approach-either
voir famously observed that the body was not a biologically
within the theory or practice of portraiture or within the
determined mechanism but a site constantly in flux. She
literary, historical, or medical discourse of the time, where the
wrote that "if the body is not a thing, it is a situation."82 Her
notion of female passivity as biologically and socially deter-
characterization provides a useful model for understanding
mined prevailed. In an especially bitter essay in La Revue
Marie Vuillard's fluctuating representation in her brother's
Blanche called "On the Inferiority of Woman," Strindberg
hands. While the details of Marie's bodily "situation" change,
echoed the beliefs of many contemporary scientists when he
a certain attitude toward her body prevails. Her body becomes
located the proper origins of a woman's passive temperament
an object for manipulations so vigorous as to verge on the
in her inactive female ovum, which he opposed to the striving,
dehumanizing. Lewis Carroll's Alice, by way ofJohn Tenniell's
energetic sperm of the male. According to Strindberg, the
illustrations, comes to mind; but Alice's transformations-
deficiency of every female biological function, as well as the
whether she becomes monumental or miniature-are always
inadequacy of women's ability to think or create, followed
some exaggeration of her "normal," recognizable self.83
from that fundamental opposition. As Hacks had done a year
Other than her slender frame and bent posture, the only
earlier, Strindberg applied the language of deviance, in
thing that is predictable about Marie's bodily form in her
particular, of hysteria, to characterize women's temperamen-
brother's early representations is its susceptibility to transfor-
tal and physical deficiencies: "The exaggerated temperament mation.
is a vice, and the hysterical outburst that is produced in the
The most radical interventions seem to occur to Marie's
woman, in reaction to a simple contradiction, or under the
body when Mme Vuillard is present. In another work entitled
pressure of a willful opposition, is often the equivalent of an
Mother and Sister of the Artist, of 1892 (Fig. 13), Marie's upper
infant's cry when he has been denied the satisfaction of his
body collapses diagonally across a table, while her shoulders
whim.'79
are pressed tautly toward her neck. In contrast, her mother
Fouill&e, the social critic who actually possessed a more
sits erect and unflappable beside her. In yet a third painting of
nuanced understanding of the "psychologie nouvelle," none-
the same title of about 1892 (Fig. 14), Marie's head is angled
theless used similar arguments to "illuminate" the inequali-
abruptly toward her shoulder, her neck wrenched back at an
ties between the sexes: "The egg, large, well-nourished and
impossible angle. Her body is siphoned into a yielding curve,
passive, is the cellular expression of the temperament charac-
while her mother's is again straight, almost rigid.
teristic of the mother; the smaller size, the initially less
While Mme Vuillard's presence appears to be a prerequisite
nourished appearance, and the decisive activity of the father
for most of Marie's radical bodily permutations, these also
are summed up in the masculine element."80 He concluded
surface in images of the sister alone and, occasionally, when
his essay "La psychologie des sexes" by enumerating the dire
she is shown within a larger family grouping. In The Window
consequences that would ensue if women abandoned their
(ca. 1893; Fig. 15), for instance, Marie's figure seems to be
customary domestic responsibilities:
twisted in two different directions at once; she looks to the
Were women, as far as the basic needs of life allowed them, left, with her hand clasped awkwardly to her cheek, while her
to stop devoting themselves to their husband, their chil- torso swivels to the right. In Girl by the Door recently titled
dren, their house, you would see before long generations Marie by the Door (1891, private collection), the figure's right
without morality, love descended to the state of a brutal arm appears flaccid and lifeless, while the back, neck, and
satisfaction of the senses, marriage disparaged for the head are fused into a stiffened arc.84 In a painting of the
l'homme y inscrive son rave." On Mauclair, see Michael Marlais, Conservative pour les soins qu'il impose a la femme, la s6duction et la prostitution
Echoes in Fin-de-Secle Parstaan Art Cntwicsm, University Park, Pa., 1992, 149-83. gen6ralisee, avec leur cortege ordinaire d'avortements, d'infanticides, d'enfants
abandonnes."
79. August Strindberg, "De l'inferiorite de la femme," La Revue Blanche, vII,
Jan. 1895, 1-20. Strindberg (9) cites Mme de Stael and Rosa Bonheur as two 82. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Paris, 1949), transl. H. M. Parshley,
rare examples of women who possessed the intellectual acuity of men. New York, 1953, 30. For a discussion relating Simone de Beauvoir's feminism
80. Fouillee (as in n. 6), 401: "'L'oeuf, volumineux, bien nourri et passif, est to phenomenological theory, see Judith Butler, "Sex and Gender in Simone
l'expression cellulaire du temperament caracteristique de la mere; le volume de Beauvoir's Second Sex," Yale French Studies, no. 72, Winter 1986, 35-50.
moindre, l'aspect originairement moins nourri et l'activit6 preponderante du 83. Nina Auerbach calls Alice of Alice zn Wonderland "a figure of simulta-
pere sont resumes dans l'element masculin." neous majesty and abasement in a world seemingly created by the catastrophe
81. Foullle (as in n. 6), 427: "Que les femmes cessent de se donner, autant of her fall," in Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victornan Myth, Cambridge,
que les necessites de la vie le leur permettent, A leur mari, A leurs enfants, ?A Mass., 1982, 166.
leur maison, vous verrez bient6t des generations sans moralite, I'amour 84. Permission could not be obtained to publish this image, which is
redescendu A1 l'etat d'une satisfaction brutale des sens, le manage d6precie reproduced in Easton, fig. 12.
family called the An Outspoken Dinner Party (ca. 1891; Fig. 16),
o?~ a ?i. ?.:~?? which includes Vuillard's rarely seen elder brother, Alexan-
% r:s r dre, Marie's ingratiation is exaggerated to the point of
.i?
~
?i,
?fiEi
tl abasement, a grotesque variation on the mildly flirtatious
ureh;,
.r? pose Vuillard had drawn in an earlier sketch. In sum, Marie's
??)?
body is contorted and distorted, bent, pressed, twisted, and

"' r
I?
i
i;" r
~jrr~ ~
folded in on itself.85 While her sexuality is suppressed, her

?ic'~
form assumes the malleability of a raw material that has been
j ~??:., ~ ,.:?
P: 'Be
shaped by the interventions of another.
Janet Bergstrom, a film historian and critic, has identified a
similar treatment of the female body in the films of the
Weimar era, particularly those of director Fritz Murnau. In
Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926), for instance, "The wom-
an's body is at a loss literally in that it has a reduced physical
presence, lacking the sexual dimension; metaphorically, the
symbolic function of the woman's body in establishing sexual
difference is greatly diminished.'"86 Ultimately, Bergstrom
believes, for Murnau and for Weimar film in general, the
suppression of the sexuality of a woman's body was the
13 Vuillard, Mother and Sister of the Artist, 1892. Collection S. precondition for making it an abstraction. I believe that
(photo: from Easton, fig. 56)
Vuillard was attempting something analogous in his figura-
tions of Marie. While Murnau's strategy was to etherealize, to
"disembody" cinematically his female subjects, Vuillard's
solution was to appropriate a series of surrogates-body-
metaphors, we might call them-for the female form.
Vuillard's choice of metaphors for the female body was
forged out of his own milieu.87 As surrogates for the female
body, the mannequin, the marionette, and the doll provided
Vuillard with the most suggestive metaphors for transforma-
tion. All are simulacra for the womanly form, references to
the sexual body, but emptied of the vitality that enables that
sexuality to be a potent presence. These simulacra were
readily available to Vuillard. During the same years he was
manipulating the figure of his sister in paint, the artist was an
active participant in the world of avant-garde puppetry. With
Bonnard, Ranson, Roussel, and Serusier, Vuillard collabo-
rated in a puppet theater staged at Ranson's studio. The art of
puppetry was appealing to artists and writers associated with
the Symbolist circle not only because of puppetry's identifica-
tion with the naive and the childlike but also because the
puppet offered a generalized, universal type of figure unfet-
tered by the idiosyncrasies of individual psychology. While the
Nabis enjoyed shadow puppets at the Cafe Le Chat Noir, at
Ranson's studio the marionette was the chosen vehicle of
expression; its multiple articulated joints offered the most
suggestive surrogate for the human figure. The Nabi sculptor
Georges Lacombe carved the marionettes' wooden heads;
Denis made their costumes; Ranson wrote the plays; and
85. The drawing related to An Outspoken Dinner Party (Le diner vert) is
reproduced in Easton, fig. 40.
14 Vuillard, Mother and Sister of the Artist, ca. 1892. Private 86. Janet Bergstrom, "Sexuality at a Loss: The Films of F. W. Murnau," in
collection (photo: from Easton, fig. 35) The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Suleiman,
Cambridge, Mass./London, 1985, 242-61; the quote is on p. 247. Bergstrom
also points out, "In Murnau's films, the woman's body becomes an abstrac-
tion .... Compared to its conventional representation in commercial narra-
tive films, the woman's body is at a loss, both metaphorically and literally." For
another perspective on women and performance, see Juliet Blair, "Private
Parts in Public Places: The Case of Actresses," in Women and Space: Ground
Rules and Social Maps, ed. Shirley Ardener, New York, 1981, 205-27.
87. On ancient metaphors for the female body, see Page duBois, Sowing the
Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women, Chicago, 1988.
15 Vuillard, The Window, ca. 1893. New York, Museum of Modern Art, The William S. Paley Collection
(photo: Museum of Modern Art)
16 Vuilllard, An Outspoken Dinner Party (Le dz^ner vert), ca. 1891. Private collection (photo: from Easton, fig. 38)
onettes to their human counterparts. As Bettina Knapp has

explained, "Maeterlinck felt that human actors, because they
were restricted by their physical characteristics, were not
appropriate vehicles to portray the archetypal figures with
which he peopled his stage. Since wooden dolls were complex
and ambiguous forces, they infused a super- or extrahuman
dimension into the stage happenings."'90
Interior, staged solely with marionettes, was less a narrative
than an evocation of the atmosphere of death-as were many
of Maeterlinck's plays of these years. The schematic plot
revolves around a family that has just lost one of its daughters
by drowning. Members of the family do not yet know this,
however; as the play begins, the girl's body is being carried
toward the family's house by the townspeople who found her.
The bearers stop on a rise to look down on the mother, father,
and the remaining daughter inside the enclosed, illuminated
interior of the title. These stilled figures, the bearers of the
young body, utter the play's rudimentary dialogue, while the
mother, father, and sister they gazed on are the only figures
who move-albeit nearly imperceptibly. As Knapp described
the effect, these characters "do not speak, they merely rise,
walk and gesticulate in grave, slow, sparse" ways, as though
they had been "spiritualized by distance.""91
The disassociation between speech and action raised a
troubling dilemma for the play's spectators: To whom-or,
more precisely, to what-did one direct one's empathy? The
question was a novel one for theater audiences accustomed
for decades to responding empathically to the apparently
natural gestures of actors, gestures that were, in fact, calcu-
lated to inspire an identification with the character's state of
mind. Duranty had articulated an analogous goal for the
17 Edgar Degas, Portrait of Michel-Levy (The Man and the subtle but revelatory gestures of advanced Realist painting,
Mannequin), 1879. Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and its beholders were also accustomed to responding in
(photo: Gulbenkian Collection) kind. That the fin de siecle performers of Interior were
marionettes inspires speculation about the nature of the
empathy aroused by a puppet. Steve Tillis, a scholar and
Serusier and Vuillard made the sets. This relatively informal theorist of puppetry, claims that the distinction between
enterprise would later develop into the more ambitious puppet and human is often more unstable than one might
"The'tre de Pantins," for which puppet plays were staged at expect. He contends that "the puppet is perceived to be an
the apartment of poet Claude Terrasse. This improvised object, while imagined to have life. The puppet as metaphor
"theater," with space for only a handful of spectators, was of humanity, however, is predicated on an inversion of this
decorated by Vuillard himself.88 formulation. In the metaphorical sense, people are perceived
In addition, Vuillard worked during the 1890s as a metteur-en- by other people to have life, while, at the same time, they are
scene (akin to a production designer) and sometimes as imagined to be but objects."'92
producer for his friend Aurelien Lugne-Poe's Theitre de
If the Thcitre de l'Oeuvre's marionettes inspired a divided
l'Oeuvre.89 The painter designed the sets for Symbolist empathy in their spectators, so, too, did its human actors.
playwright Maurice Maeterlinck's marionette play Interior, Contemporary drama critics repeatedly used the metaphors
performed in 1895, and was also charged with incorporating of puppets and dolls to describe the stilted actions of the
puppet shows into the earlier dramatic productions that theater's actors. In fact, Lugn&-Poe's performers became so
employed human actors. Maeterlinck often preferred mari- identified with patterns of ritualized, artificially slow move-
88. On the Nabis' interest in puppetry, see esp. Genevi&ve Aitken, "Les London, 1993./
Nabis, dans un foyer au theitre," in Freches-Thory and Perucchi-Petri (as in n. 90. Bettina Knapp, Maurice Maeterlinck, Boston, 1975, 77-78. In general, the
25), 399-406. themes of death and the supernatural ran through many of the Theitre de
89. See Sidlauskas (as in n. 3), chap. 4, for a discussion of Vuillard's l'Oeuvre's productions. For example, Maurice Beaubourg's L'image, for which
theatrical work. Also see Thomson (as in n. 2), 77-103, and Guy Cogeval, "Le Vuillard designed the playbill, concerned a new husband who kills his wife
Celibataire, mis a nu par son theitre, mime," in Dumas and Cogeval (as in n. because he has fallen in love with her "double," who happens to be a ghost.
72), 105-36. For a more anecdotal account of these years, see Aurelian 91. Knapp (as in n. 90), 83.
Lugn&-Poe's two-volume autobiography, La parade: Acrobaties, I, Paris, 1931, 92. Steve Tillis, Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art,
and Sous les &toiles, II, Paris, 1933. On the Symbolist theater in general, see Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, no. 47, New York/Westport,
Frantisek Deak, Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avant-Garde, Baltimore Conn./London, 1992, 83.
ments that the venue was dubbed "le theitre des poupees."93
Knapp described the atmosphere of Maeterlinck's play The
Intruder an 1891 production in which Vuillard played a
significant role: " [Maeterlinck] sought to create a mood and
to make man's soul manifest through a silent stage language
and through rituals devoid of nearly all motion, each re-
strained gesture being a sign or symbol suggesting some
profound and mysterious reality." The characters are "arche-
types, primordial images arising from the profoundest layers
of man's unconscious."94 Within Symbolist performance,
then, gestures-whether performed by puppets or actors who
were perceived as such-did not narrativize particular psycho-
logical states, as they had for years in domestic dramas and
narrative painting. Rather, this newly conceived mode of
bodily expression was imagined as the externalization of the
unconscious.
Vuillard's subject of 1893 is his sister, of course, and not a

puppet, a marionette, or a mannequin. But his treatment of
her form tends to provoke some degree of sympathetic
discomfort in the viewer-especially, I would venture, the
female viewer-because Marie's recognizably human body
has been manipulated as if it were a mannequin or mari-
onette.95 While very few images survive of either the Theitre
de l'Oeuvre's human or mechanical "poupees," Edgar Degas,
one of the artists Vuillard most admired, provides an earlier,
instructive analogy in paint. We know that studio mannequins
routinely stood in for human models. Yet that knowledge does
little to prepare the viewer for Degas's unsettling Portrait of 18 Vuillard, Marie by the Mirror, formerly known as Figure at a
Michel-Levy of 1879 (Fig. 17). Here, the painter reverses the Window, ca. 1892. New York, private collection (photo:
usual practice of disguising the "otherness" of the manne- Sotheby's, New York)
quin. The mannequin lies in a heap beneath the sullen,
cornered painter, who for many years was thought to be if not
Degas himself, then Paul Cezanne.96 The mannequin is too any moment, were it not for the molding that presses down
fake to be mistaken as real; yet it is too uncomfortably upon her. In Marie by the Door (1891, private collection), and
evocative of its human counterpart to be dismissed as fake. Marie by the Mirror (ca. 1892; Fig. 18), Marie is displayed,
Perhaps it is because of the rude angle of its falling head and respectively, in profile and from the rear. In the first image,
the slash of red ribbon that cuts across the neck, traces of an the rigid curve of her head, neck, and shoulders and the
incipient violence that is sustained by the brutish expression pliant droop of her arms make her appear like a puppet
on Henri Michel-Levy's face, his adamantly withdrawn pos- whose strings have slackened abruptly and are about to drop.
ture, and the barricade created by the conspicuous paintbox The arc of her back is both anatomically impossible and
and thrusting brushes. graceless, an affront to the long pictorial tradition of the S
The "otherness" of Vuillard's sister is more subtle, and curve of beauty.97 Also, Marie's head is thrust awkwardly
more equivocal; her representations retain their humanity, forward, her chin is retracted, and her eyes and nose are
even as they are dehumanized by the disruptive postures and rendered with an economy that verges on caricature. In Marie
proportions of her body. In Mother and Sister of the Artist (Fig. by the Mirror the mild sensuality of the figure's slightly curved
1), Marie resembles an ever-adjustable marionette whose rigid hips is undermined by the splayed, oversize hands incongru-
parts have been strung together to compose an unstable ously suspended in midair. There is no reflective surface to
"whole." Her feet are almost entirely retracted; she appears support the "mirror" of the title, an absence that concen-
to skim the surface of the floor. It is as if her body inhabits trates further attention on the figure's uneasily arrested
space only provisionally; she could be yanked up and away at posture. The arms are suspended as if they have been halted
93. For comments on the postures and movements of the actors, see a review 96. For a discussion of Degas's painting and the history of the identification
of the Theatre de l'Oeuvre's production of Henri Regnier's La gardienne, for of the subject, see Theodore Reff, Degas: The Artist's Mind, New York, 1976,
which Vuillard did the stage design; G. V. [G. Visinet], "The~itre de Paris," 125-26. For a brief but suggestive interpretation of the painting, see T.J. Clark,
Journal de Rouen, June 22, 1894, in Paris, Biblioth&que de l'Arsenal, Collection The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, New York,
Rondel, Rt. 3695, vol. 1. Also see Thomson (as in n. 2), 84. 1985, 257-58.
94. Knapp (as in n. 90), 42-43. 97. For a recent study on the ideals of beauty and the figura serpentina, see
95. On the share of the female beholder in Surrealism, see Mary Ann Caws, Carol Ockman, Ingres's Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line, New
"'Ladies Shot and Painted': Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art," in Haven, 1995, esp. 1-9, and accompanying notes, 147-48, and the last section
Suleiman (as in n. 86), 262-87. on the "backbone" in contemporary art, 127-45.
abruptly in their upward trajectory by the whim of the

puppeteer.98
Staging Aberrance
Exactly these kinds of aberrant bodily movements-as well as
the divided empathy they inspired-were features of another
series of performances that were taking place near Paris at the
very same time: the public lectures delivered at the Sal-
petriere Hospital by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, the "father of
modern neurology." Charcot was one of the first to popular-
ize-some say to invent-the disorder of hysteria, a term
whose clinical specificity within the nascent field of neurology
bore an ambiguous relation to its liberal usage in the social
and historical discourse of the time.99 As noted earlier, the
19 "Attitude anormale simulant un torticolis dans la maladie de
Parkinson" (Abnormal posture simulating stiffness in commentaries by Strindberg, Hacks, and Fouillee all invoked
Parkinson's disease), from Nouvelle Iconographie Photographique de hysteria to characterize some nonspecific deviant female
la Salpitriere, v, 1892, pls. xxvi, xxvii, xxvIII behavior or biological limitation. Jann Matlock has argued
that the omnipresence of the metaphor should not be
surprising, for "mid-nineteenth-century debates about hyste-
ria provided the foundation for understandings of women's
sexuality." 100
According to Charcot, most victims of hysteria (or "hystero-
epilepsy") were women, and the deviant bodily positions that
were one of its salient features were understood by him to be
caused by a combination of physical abnormality (for in-
stance, the "compression of the ovary") and an aberrant
sexual and/or family history. Here is a brief excerpt from one
of Charcot's case studies, which describes a patient called
simply "C-":
hysteria began at the age of fifteen. The ill-treatment she

had suffered from her father, who was addicted to alco-
holic excesses, and her subsequent career as a prostitute,
have doubtless exerted a certain etiological influence....
The attack is heralded by a distinct aura, proceeding from
the right ovary and terminating in very evident cephalic
symptoms. The convulsions, which are chiefly tonic, are
complicated by epileptiform phenomena: "C-" bites her
tongue, foams at the mouth, etc. The period of contortions
follows, and is very intense.101
Charcot's lectures addressed a range of neurological disor-

ders, most of which the doctor believed were caused by lesions
on the spine. He presented case studies demonstrating the
varieties of hysteria, Parkinson's disease, catalepsia (or catato-
nia), and "agitated paralysis." The presentations at the
Salpatriere were widely attended not only by doctors and
scientists but also by contemporary artists and writers. In fact,
Edmond de Goncourt, who knew Dr. and Mme Charcot
socially, kept files on the various neurological disorders he
observed. This self-described "clinical writer of the nerves
extracted empirical data as needed for his fiction.1'02
Sigmund Freud, who studied briefly with Charcot at the
Salpatriere, dubbed his mentor a "visuel, one who sees," a
testament both to Charcot's faith in empirical evidence and to
his acute eye for the corporeal signs of disorder.'03 Indeed,
the Frenchman's reliance on a variety of visual aids was a
20 "Attitude anormale dans la paralysie agitante" (Abnormal distinguishing feature of his presentations. While these aids
posture in agitated paralysis), from Nouvelle Iconographie included such imagery as illustrations of the diseased from
Photographique de la Salpitriere, 11, 1889, pl. xxIx the history of art, sketches of convulsing patients, and cross
sections of diseased brains, the most compelling images of all photographs as a direct model (although it is likely that he
were a select number of patients who, sometimes under knew of the lectures), in both cases there is a shared
hypnosis, "performed" the postures of their particular neuro- assumption about the woman's body as tabula rasa: an object
logical disorders.104 Charcot offered live commentary accom- that could be manipulated according to another's author-
panied by the performance of such "corporeal anomalies" as ity-a marionette or automaton that moved only when
"the asymmetry of the features in facial paralysis; the differ- activated by another's will.
ent walks of the patients with bodily paralysis; the contraction In Vuillard's The Dressmakers of about 1892 (Fig. 10), Marie
and frozen stiffness of Parkinson's patients; the grimaces of leans toward her mother in a bodily contraction that is both
chorea, the gesticulations of those with uncontrollable tics, asymmetric and unstable: a posture that Charcot had associ-
and all the varieties of trembling."'05 This description by ated with both hysteria and Parkinson's disease (Fig. 19).
Henri Miege, one of Charcot's colleagues, suggests that patients Even more startling, perhaps, is a comparison between Mme
were consigned to an identity suspended somewhere between Vuillard's figure in this painting and the Salp&triere photo-
human individual in distress and performing automaton.106 graph of a woman with agitated paralysis (Fig. 20). Mme
One of Charcot's innovations was his insistence that bodily Vuillard's stolid, contained silhouette demonstrates exactly
configuration offered the best evidence for diagnosis, as each the same rigid immobility and drawn-back head of the
disorder possessed its own characteristic posture of aber- patient. "Paralysis agitans," as Charcot described it, was "at
rance. He believed that curvature of the spine was the master present, a neurosis, in the sense that it possesses no proper
trope for neurological pathology. Here is Charcot on the [spinal] lesion." He wrote that it affects those "advanced in
bodily stance characteristic of Parkinson's disease: "the head age," and may be caused either by "1st. damp cold, such as
... is greatly bent forward, and, as one might say, fixed in that arising from a prolonged sojourn in a badly-ventilated apart-
position; for the patient cannot, without much effort, raise it ment, or 2nd, acute moral emotions.""11 The commentary
up or turn it to the right or left. The body also is almost always affirms Charcot's belief in the fluid boundaries between soma
slightly inclined forward, when the patient is standing.'"107 and psyche.

This description conjures up not only the bodily contraction The postures Vuillard constructed for The Dressmakers are
of a Parkinson's patient but also the stiffly curving back and elemental and restrained; yet they are also subtly distorted
neck of Marie Vuillard in the painting Marie by the Door (1891, and disturbing. Marie's figure bends at an impossibly crooked
private collection). In fact, Marie's contracted shoulders and angle, and her mother's body is pulled back too severely.
curved back recur with such persistence that the posture has Marie's marionettelike posture in Marie by the Mirror (Fig. 18)
been used repeatedly by art historians, curators, and art is analogous to the characteristic bodily configuration of
dealers to identify a previously anonymous figure in Vuillard's Charcot's hysterics and cataleptics (Figs. 21, 22). That Marie is
paintings as Marie.108 seen from behind, with no visual evidence of either the
A number of Charcot's patients were photographed for a reflection or the mirror itself, intensifies the sensation of a
journal he founded in 1887, the Nouvelle Iconographie Pho- body objectified. In both paintings and photographs, the
tographique de la Salpetri're.109 Patients demonstrated the rigid women are presented as puppets whose controlling strings
affect of agitated paralysis, the slack, floating limbs and have come to a sudden standstill, leaving their arms sus-
disoriented gaze identified with hysteria, and the uncomfort- pended in midair. The limbs appear free-floating, as if they
ably bent spine of Parkinson's disease, as described above. It is have evaded the control of the figure to whom they belong:
startling to realize how closely some of the positions of the the very disassociation among bodily parts that Charcot
Salpetriere patients in these photographs resemble the pos- identified as a clear indicator of neurological disorder.
tures Vuillard contrived for his sister, and also his mother. I want to emphasize that the gestures performed, photo-
While I am not claiming that Vuillard used Charcot's patients' graphed, and lectured and written about were not envisioned
98. There is another pastel by Vuillard of ca. 1890, entitled Enfant devant une truly hypnotized. An American physician included a defense of Charcot's
fenitre (collection of the University of Pennsylvania, gift of Richard Thune), in method and character in his own tract on hypnosis: George Beard, The Study of
which a female figure's arms seem to be raised inexplicably. On close Trance, Muscle Reading and Allied Nervous Phenomena In Europe and America, New
examination, however, this figure appears to hold a ball of thread or yarn in York, 1882, 36-40. See n. 111 below for Charcot's own defense of the
her left hand.
authenticity of his patients' mental states.
99. The leading proponent of the idea that Charcot invented, rather than 105. Henri Miege, "Charcot artiste," Nouvelle Iconographte Photographique de
discovered, hysteria is Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'hystirze: Charcot et la Salptrznre, xI, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 1898.
l'iconographie photographique de la Salpitrzere, Paris, 1982. On the significance of 106. As Joan Copjec has written, one effect of these enactments was the
gesture in assessing hysteria, see esp. 127-54 and 173-252. Silverman (75-107) "effacing of the individuality of the hysteric"; Copjec, "Flavit et Dissipati
offers a different analysis of Charcot's importance for the dissemination of the Sunt," in October The Fzrst Decade 1976-1986, ed. Annette Michelson et al.,
Art Nouveau style. Recent applications of the Charcot material to representa- Cambridge, Mass., 1987, 302.
tion are found in Armstrong (as in n. 9), 186-87; and in Anthea Callen, The 107. Charcot (as in n. 101), 114
Spectacular Body. Science, Method and Meaning zn the Work of Degas, New 108. This was evident in the spring 1995 exhibition of works from the
Haven/London, 1995, 50-59. Stralem Collection at Sotheby's, where works previously entitled Fzgure by the
100. Matlock, 1993 (as in n. 65), 33. Door and Gzrl by the Window were entitled Mane by the Door and Mane at the
101. Jean-Martin Charcot, Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System (Paris, Mzrror respectively; Sotheby 's Impresszontst and Modern Paintings from the Collection
1879-89), trans. George Sigerson, Philadelphia, 1879-89, 229. ofDonald and Jean Stralem, sale cat., Sotheby's, New York, Apr. 1995.
102. Sllverman, 37, 321 n. 74. Later, there was a rupture between Goncourt 109. Didi-Huberman (as in n. 99) provides a history of thejournal, as well as
and Charcot, for unknown reasons.
appendices on the work of individual photographers at Salp&trlre; see
103. Sigmund Freud, quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life of Our Tzme, New 113-206 for discussion of the photographic imagery in Nouvelle Iconographie
York, 1988, 51. For Freud's comments on his six-week stay in Paris and his and 275-88 for the appendices.
perceptions of Charcot, see Gay, 48-53. 110. Charcot (as in n. 101), 109-10.
104. There was some controversy about whether Charcot's patients were
21 "Etat cataleptique" (Cataleptic state), from Charcot, 22 "Mdlancolie cataleptique" (Cataleptic melancholia), from
Oeuvres completes, Paris, 1895, pl. xII Nouvelle Iconographie Photographique de la Salpitriere, II, 1889, pl. Ix
by either Charcot, his colleagues, or even the artists and inspired a divided empathy in the spectator, so, too, did
writers who eagerly observed his patients as offering a "true" Charcot's performing patients. That their individuality-even
revelation of psychic activity-any more than Maeterlinck's their humanity-was effaced has already been suggested. Yet
ritualized gestures were intended to offer insights into the the patients also aroused the audience's sympathy, and
individual psychologies of his characters. Although plying elicited an appreciation for their skills as performers-as did
different trades, the playwright, the neurologist, and the Charcot himself. While most of his patients were reportedly
painter seem to have been trying to identify, or rather, to hypnotized, at least some appeared to have been imitating, or
construct what they perceived to be the most economical and rather, reenacting, the postures associated with their particular
revelatory gestures of the unconscious. Despite their relative pathologies. The performance aspect was recognized even at
opacity for the present-day audience, the gestures enacted on the time. Some of the women patients were said to be
both the stage of the Theitre de l'Oeuvre and the Salpatriere "excellent comedians," a testament that evidently made
Hospital constituted a set of bodily conventions for a respon- Charcot uneasy, for he felt compelled to insist publicly on the
sive segment of the fin de siecle audience. These were authenticity of his patients' reactions.111
mediated signs of despair, deviance, and/or deformity con- The images within Charcot's Nouvelle Iconographie Pho-
veyed through the body: bodies that were, in turn, objectified tographique de la Salpitriere are extremely complicated social,
through performance. psychiatric, and visual artifacts in their own right, and
If Maeterlinck's marionettes and Vuillard's female figures demand much further study. They raise important, and as yet
111. Copjec (as in n. 106), 316. Charcot (as in n. 101) himself responded to order to make them appear extraordinary and wonderful."
the accusation that his patients were not truly under hypnosis (189): "This 112. For relevant precedents in the history of medical photography, see
leads me to say a word on simulation. You will meet with it at every step in the Didi-Huberman (as in n. 99), 10-68. On the history of 19th-century photogra-
history of hysteria, and one finds himself sometimes admiring the amazing phy in France, see Elizabeth Ann McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial
craft, sagacity and perseverance which women, under the influence of this Photography in Paris 1848-1871, New Haven, 1994.
great neurosis, will put in play for the purposes of deception-especially when 113. In addition to Matlock (as in n. 65), recent writings on hysteria include
a physician is to be the victim. As to the case in point, however, it does not seem Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the
to me demonstrated that the erratic paruria of hysteria has ever been wholly Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1987, esp. chap. 9; and Elaine Showalter,
simulated, and, as it were, created by these patients. On the other hand, it is
The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1898, London,
incontestable that, in a multitude of cases, they have taken pleasure in
1980, esp. 155-62.
distorting, by exaggerations, the principal circumstances of their disorder, in
unresolved, questions about the supposed authenticity of in judging the deviant by the standards of the normative-
photography in general, and of medical photography in where the female sex was concerned, at any rate. Instead,
particular.112 Georges Didi-Huberman has argued provoca- each saw gestural evidence of deviance everywhere, at least
tively for their role in the "invention" of hysteria. The everywhere members of the female sex performed: in society,
Salpatriere photographs were as socially, and aesthetically, on the stage, and in the psychiatric hospital.
constructed as Vuillard's paintings-as indeed many have The distinct but interrelated preoccupations of Hacks,
insisted was the disorder of hysteria itself.113 Maeterlinck, Charcot, Goncourt-and Vuillard-suggest that
Edmond de Goncourt likely would have disagreed with this at the turn of the century a new gestural language emerged, a
assessment, because for him, the term hysterical aptly de- language with its own conventions. This repertoire of pos-
scribed the conventional affect of the fin de siecle bourgeoise. tures signaled generalized modes of being rather than indi-
Given his exquisitely honed taste for deviance-especially as vidual states of mind. Asymmetry, awkwardness, fragmentary
embodied in the female sex-it is not surprising that Gon- or arrested movement became components of an ambiguous,
court religiously attended Charcot's lectures. His intention, highly contingent language of the unconscious, one articu-
however, was not to gain an illicit glimpse of something he lated principally through the bodies of women. In fact, by the
identified as entirely "other" but to chart with more precision last decade of the century, the female gesture seems to have
the ways in which the Salp&triere patients were simply become identified simply as a deviant gesture-this in spite of
manifestations of the current human (or at least the female) the fact that Charcot himself came to believe that hysteria was
condition in extremis. Goncourt understood Charcot's psychi- a disorder shared by men as well as women. These new modes
atric theater to represent exaggerated versions of what "nor- of shaping and responding to the body were as different from
mally" transpired in both art and society, and the author did the naturalistic gestures espoused by Duranty and envisioned
not hesitate to make an analogy between the high-strung by Degas as they were from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
society women of his own milieu and the posturing hysterics century rhetorical flourishes that had signified moral eleva-
of the hospital amphitheater.114 Goncourt's equation be- tion and propriety.116 While the gestures represented in
comes even more significant in light of the class differences Realist painting and theater were designed to convey clues to
between the two groups he compared. The Salpatrifre pa- a person's inner life through characteristic, ordinary actions,
tients were largely working-class-a distinction that would not the corporeal style of the fin de siecle was elusive and oblique,
have gone unnoticed by one of the nineteenth-century's most nonspecific about the details of class and character, and
notorious snobs. His pronouncement suggests that only class
fundamentally nonnarrative in conception and presenta-
and context distinguished the "normal" comportment of the tion.117
so-called "society women" from the "aberrant" posturings of
Charcot's patients.
Like Goncourt, Charles Hacks conflated the worlds of
Marie Roussel
physical culture and psychiatry. In the concluding chapter of
his book Le geste, which was entitled "Le geste malade," he Signs of bodily aberrance eventually disappeared from Vuil-
included descriptions of exactly the kinds of postures repre- lard's paintings, a process that can be traced through the
sented in the Nouvelle Iconographie and emphasized the preva- representations of Marie. In The Suitor (1893; Fig. 23), Marie's
lence of the "diseased" gesture in female bourgeois society. courtship with her fiance Roussel initially seemed to promise
Hacks insisted that the characteristic deportment of "society her a new statuesque elegance and a mild sensuality. As
women" had become "sickly, weak, diseased; hysteria has pictured by his future brother-in-law, Roussel only partially
seized control." Such a woman, he contended, "is the pierces the plane of the interior wall, suspended between
characteristic figure of our time. Action, gesticulation, hyste- voyeurism and actual entry into the women's work space. But
ria, this is the entire physical and moral story of humanity in the grace Vuillard bestowed on his sister's figure here was
three words."""115 In contrast to the aberrant gestures of fleeting. In the painting Married Life of about 1894 (Fig. 24),
women, Hacks cited approvingly what would seem to be the Marie, enframed within the door on the left, appears impo-
overwrought rhetorical gestures of "great men" such as tent and withdrawn."11 She is stranded at a great remove from
Napoleon and Gambetta. According to Hacks, these leaders, a husband whose position against the window frame suggests
with their bold-and, one is tempted to say, histrionic-- that he is fixed to a cross. A barely visible, disembodied hand
bodily movements, were icons of gestural, and thus moral, reaches for a coffee cup from the lower right corner, which
health. Neither Hacks nor Goncourt ultimately was interested only makes the couple's isolation from one another more
114. See Silverman, 321 n. 74, for references to Goncourt's equation of on transcendent emotion and the "universal" psyche in an 1889 letter to
"high-strung society women" with Charcot's patients. Maurice Denis: "Personality-I respect it: it is something abstract," quoted in
115. Hacks, 40: "Elle est la caracteristique de notre temps. Acte, gesticula- Impressionism and Post-Impressionism 1874-1904: Sources and Documents in the
tion, hysterie, toute une histoire physique et morale de l'humanite dans ces HzstorV of Art, by Linda Nochlin, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966, 183. On the
trois mots."
problem of narrativity and the unconscious, see Rosalind Krauss's discussion
116. Lebrun's legacy lingered through the nineteenth century in acting of the work of Max Ernst in The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, Mass., 1993,
treatises and manuals on social decorum. Of particular interest and influence 33-93.
then were the ideas of acting teacher Fran.ois Delsarte, whose Cours d'esthitzque
118. Vuillard's journal around this time notes "complications du manage
applhquie, Paris, before 1874, was a volume of class notes compiled by his
students. Roussel," and "difficultes de Ker" (quoted in Groom, 67), a likely reference to
Roussel's extramarital affairs.
117. Vuillard's fellow Nabl Paul Sfrusier articulated the group's emphasis
23 Vuillard, The Suitor, formerly known as Interior at l'Etang-la-Ville, 1893. Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art.
Purchased, Drayton Hillyer Fund (photo: Smith College Museum of Art)
pointed. In The Roussel Family at Dinner of 1894-95 (Fig. 25),

Marie seems once again to vie for dominance with the
surrounding furniture, as she did in the earlier work Interior
with Chiffonier (Fig. 11).
When Marie Roussel became a mother five years after her
marriage, her brother began to alter her bodily form in paint.
In the earliest representations of her maternity, Marie seems
marginal. She appears subject to her mother's controlling
symmetry and diminished by her husband's apparent detach-
ment in the The Roussel Family at Table (1899, private collec-
tion). Yet her curving form is no longer empty; now it is filled
with the vulnerable, receptive one of an infant. In a later
work, Mother and Child (Fig. 26), she stands with her daughter
Annette, full with her second pregnancy, at last granted the
authority of motherhood. Finally, in a photograph that
Vuillard himself took with his Kodak around the same time, it
is Marie, and not her mother, who poses with her "arm
akimbo."'19 She seems relaxed yet distinct from the family
that throngs around her. The fluid lines of her ample dress
suggest that she may be pregnant here as well. Maternity-
and, in particular, the bodily transformation of pregnancy-- 24 Vuillard, Married Life, ca. 1894. Private collection (photo:
seems to have secured for Marie some of the presentational from Russell, fig. 29)
authority Vuillard earlier had granted only to their mother.

Her arm akimbo pose in the photograph inadvertently serves
as confirmation of Hacks's argument: while pregnancy and mation alter, even destroy, the human presence? Writing
motherhood did not provide unfettered gestural liberty for recently on the life and work of Mark Rothko, James Breslin
women, it was the first step along the path to the total reflected on precisely this question, conjecturing that in even
corporeal freedom of old age: the time when Marie, like her the most rigorously abstract painting, traces of the human
mother before her, could assume her rightful role as a true figure remain, if only as a memory of what has been
"hermaphrodite of gesture." renounced. Breslin reported that Rothko was acutely uncom-
By the time Vuillard took this family snapshot, he was no fortable with his own bodily presence and asserts that his
longer making paintings that evinced the psychological dis- so-called "pure abstractions" emerged in an attempt to
equilibrium of Mother and Sister of the Artist. His production in transcend that presence. At a certain point, Rothko appar-
midlife would be dominated by large panel paintings, pictori- ently believed that it was no longer possible to paint the
ally ambitious yet psychologically muted, and portrait commis- human figure without destroying it. "It was with the utmost
sions of his widening social circle.120 Vuillard's own words reluctance," he wrote, "that I found the figure could not
suggest that he deliberately abandoned the spatial and serve my purposes.... But a time came when none of us
corporeal tensions of his earlier paintings for a kind of picture could use the figure without mutilating it."122 While Vuillard
making that, he hoped, would bring him greater psychic ease: did not exactly mutilate the figure, he tested the limits of its
"There are two occupations in me: the study of exterior corporeal presence in paint.
perception, filled with painful experiences, dangerous for my Vuillard's equivocal female forms were not precisely the
humour and my nerves. And the study of pictorial decoration, pictorial counterparts to Strindberg's "inferior women,"
rarely possible, besides being much more limited, but which Charcot's self-effacing hysterics, or the desexed puppet fig-
ought to give me the tranquility of a worker-think back often ures of Maeterlinck. The painter's suppressions of the femi-
to the Cluny tapestries."121 nine were likely less programmatic and more unconscious: an
Yet for about five years, as a very young man still living activation of widely held anxieties about female sexuality as
within the tight circle of his woman-dominated family, Vuil- experienced through the complex intimacies of a female-
lard had made paintings that were anything but tranquil; and dominated family. Yet a conspicuous will toward objectifica-
in so doing he had addressed one of the most formidable tion-even dehumanization-informs each of these expres-
problems a painter can confront: how does pictorial transfor- sions: the pictorial, the literary, the dramatic, and the
119. This image is published in one of the few collections of Vuillard's own 121. Vuillard, quoted in Groom, 57.
photographs, "Vuillard et son Kodak," L'Oeil, exh. cat., Galerie d'Art, Paris, 122. James Breslin, "Out of the Body: Mark Rothko's Paintings," in The Body
1963. Imaged, ed. Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon, Cambridge, 1993, 43-51, 47;
120. The most extensive discussion of Vuillard's decorative panels is found and idem, Mark Rothko: A Biography, Chicago, 1993. Vuillard's suppression of
in Groom, passim. On the painter's knowledge of tapestry, see esp. 91-97. On corporeality is especially interesting because his notebooks demonstrate a
Vuillard's later portrait commissions, see Thomson (as in n. 2), 126-50. deep interest in and knowledge of the workings of the human skeleton,
Vuillard's subversion of the female-gendered arts of tapestry and embroidery including its musculature and ligaments. Vuillard's notebooks are in the
is another subject worth pursuing, especially given the pictorial and literary archives of the Institut de France; Paris, Institut de France, VuillardJournals,
traditions of using these as metaphors for art making and artifice. For a brief MS 5396, 2 vols., 1890-1905. One of the lengthiest explorations of the skeleton
discussion on the topic, see Susan Sidlauskas, "Resisting Narrative: The is found in thejournal of 1890, 35, recto and verso.
Problem of Edgar Degas's Interior," Art Bulletin, LXXV, no. 4, Dec. 1993, 671-96.
25 Vuillard, The Roussel Family at

Dinner, 1894-95. Josefowitz
Collection (photo: from Easton,
fig. 69)
26 Vuillard, Mother and Child, ca.

1900. Canada, collection of Herbert
Black (photo: from Easton, fig. 72)
neurological. Maeterlinck's marionette theater, Charcot's "il- tion and imagination, sets up a conflict between the
lustrated" lectures, and the social critiques of Strindberg, puppet as object and as life. What may be called the
Goncourt, Hacks, and Fouillee, in different ways all denied ontological status of the puppet is always within the margin
the individuality of members of the female sex; each, in his of doubt; its place in that margin is its most distinctive
own way, emphasized female aberrance; some virtually equated characteristic.123
female sexuality with aberrance.

It may appear incongruous, even perverse, to associate the Something very like this "double vision" is activated by
apparently innocent, self-absorbed females of a Vuillard Vuillard's female figurations of the 1890s. The spectator
interior with the gesticulating "madwomen" of the Sal- remains intensely aware of the human presence of his
petriere Hospital, or Goncourt's hysterical society women, or subjects-and projects human emotions onto them-even as
Hacks's histrionic bourgeoise. Even more subversive is to he or she perceives them as objectified visual structures. The
imagine that Hacks's "hermaphrodite of gesture" is relevant spectator responds to the ghostly face and aged hands of Mme
to the virtuous, stalwart figure of Mme Vuillard. How can the Vuillard, even as he or she is distanced by the impenetrability
extremes of female pathology, as it was conceptualized during of her silhouette and her statuelike inertness. It is the figure
these years, be legitimately attached to the production of a of Marie, however, who most pointedly, and poignantly,
embodies forces that seem irreconcilable. In Mother and Sister
painter legendary for his mildness, his devotion to his mother,
and his delight in female company? The difficulty disappears of the Artist, Marie appears to be actively engaged in a tense
if the conventional assumptions about personal and pictorial bodily confrontation with forces that are at once psychologi-
"femininity" are set aside. While considerations of gender cal and pictorial. She may be objectified, but she is not
have never been absent from accounts of Vuillard's work and complicit. She resists rather than submits to dissolution, and
life, many of the gendered associations attached to his early although clearly reduced, she is by no means extinguished.
paintings have been confusing, contradictory, and finally, Vuillard captured the figure of his sister at the very moment
obfuscatory. Rather than the celebration of fin de siecle of transformation: she is suspended forever in an unstable
femininity with which Vuillard has been most often associ- passage-from human body to object; sexual being to manne-
ated, it was his willful suppression of female sexuality (and, at quin; figure to abstraction.
times, female gender) that was vital to the pictorial and
conceptual objectification that generated the hybrid figures I
have called "body-signs."
I began this essay by offering the comment that the relation Frequently Cited Sources
between art and life is never seamless. I conclude by asserting
Barr, Alfred, Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New
that Vuillard offers a new way to conceptualize the discontinui-
York, 1936.
ties and the interconnections between the two, for in his Easton, Elizabeth Wynne, The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuilard, exh. cat.,
paintings of the early 1890s, he conjoined the aberrant with Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1989.
Groom, Gloria, Edouard Vuillard: Painter-Decorator; New Haven/London, 1993.
the ordinary, the congenial with the uncanny, and the
Hacks, Charles, Le geste: De la signification du mot geste-Definition du geste orgine
intimate with the unfamiliar. As spectators, we are invited to et localzsation cdribrale du geste, Paris, 1892.
do the same. Russell, J., Edouard Vuillard 1868-1940, exh. cat., Art Gallery of Toronto,
Toronto, 1971.
Silverman, Debora L., Art Nouveau in Fzn-de-Sizcle France: Politics, Psychology and
Conclusion: Vuillard's Double Vision
Style, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1989.
Steve Tillis has suggested that the marionette has always
inspired in the viewer a kind of "double vision." The viewer is
well aware that the puppet is "only an object, yet he or she
nonetheless projects human emotions onto it." As Tillis Susan Sidlauskas teaches modern European art at the University of
writes: Pennsylvania. She is currently at work on a book, The Body in
Place: Imaging Interiority in Nineteenth-Century Culture
The puppet is and is not that which it seems to be ... the [Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, Jaffe
audiences' acknowledgment of the puppet, through percep- History of Art Building, Philadelphia, Pa., 19104-6208].
123. Tillis (as in n. 92), 64-65.

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Pintura Feminismo

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Contesting Femininity: Vuillard's Family Pictures

Author(s): Susan Sidlauskas

picture making, an acknowledgment that there is no such

mother, Vuillard addressed the question of how much the

posture. In 1892, a Parisian writer named Charles Hacks

7 Vuillard, The Yellow Curtain, ca. 1893.

8 Vuillard, Woman Sweeping, ca. 1892.

9 Vuillard, The Chat, ca.

10 Vuillard, The Dressmakers, ca. 1892. New

11 Vuillard, Interior with Chiffonier, 1893.

them almost beyond recognition by inflecting them with

wasp-waisted, full-breasted Gibson Girl, Vuillard continually

The New Woman

Marie's compromised corporeality cannot be separated from

The Tabula Rasa trouble it imposes on the woman, widespread seduction

body is contorted and distorted, bent, pressed, twisted, and

folded in on itself.85 While her sexuality is suppressed, her

form assumes the malleability of a raw material that has been

onettes to their human counterparts. As Bettina Knapp has

Vuillard's subject of 1893 is his sister, of course, and not a

abruptly in their upward trajectory by the whim of the

hysteria began at the age of fifteen. The ill-treatment she

Charcot's lectures addressed a range of neurological disor-

slightly inclined forward, when the patient is standing.'"107 and psyche.

pointed. In The Roussel Family at Dinner of 1894-95 (Fig. 25),

authority Vuillard earlier had granted only to their mother.

25 Vuillard, The Roussel Family at

26 Vuillard, Mother and Child, ca.

female sexuality with aberrance.

123. Tillis (as in n. 92), 64-65.

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