Prof. Elizabeth Marlowe
Masterpieces of Western Art
December 6, 1999
Two Very Different French Portraits
The MoMA’s current exhibit “People” highlights how very different representations of the human figure were just within the paintings of 1880-1920. An excellent example of this disparity can be found in the adjacent paintings Embroidering by the Window by Édouard Vuillard and La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It is remarkable that although these two paintings are both French portraits of women painted in the 1890s, they encourage almost contrary responses from the viewer and employ quite different techniques to achieve their objectives. The Toulouse-Lautrec painting makes a strong statement about the people who are his subject, while the Vuillard painting lacks a definite subject and makes almost no statement at all. Toulouse-Lautrec, reminiscent of Rembrandt, seems primarily interested in the complex characters he is portraying and the uncommon situations they are in, while Vuillard, like the Impressionists before him, seems more interested in the sensation of color and form in an everyday setting. Thus, Vuillard’s style in this painting hearkens back to the Impressionists’ style, which had been novel twenty-five years earlier, but which is arguably better suited to representing settings and landscapes than people. Toulouse-Lautrec’s cartoonized style, on the other hand, truly pushes the envelope of how much emotion can be conveyed in portraiture and thus helps usher in the art-nouveau style of the early 20th century.
Embroidering by the Window is ostensibly a painting of a woman embroidering something while sitting next to a large window. The frame is about seven feet tall and under three feet wide, and the woman occupies the lower third of the picture. Her back is to us and her head turned away, revealing only her ear and a part of her cheek. Her composure seems calm and relaxed, but with her face totally obscured from the viewer she is denied any real identity. Her large red dress, red hair, and the bright red ribbon she holds all add color to the background without making her or anything else the central subject. If anything, the viewer’s attention is primarily drawn to the large leafy bush on the windowsill or the flowery pillows on the couch, which dominate the frame’s central region.
La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge, on the
other hand, has a very specific subject: a middle-aged woman being dragged
through a lobby by two other women. The
central woman takes up most of the picture, which is about two feet wide and
three feet tall. Just the opposite of
Vuillard’s subject, the subject here looks directly at the viewer, meeting his
gaze. Where as the embroidering woman
relaxes in a conservative, billowy Victorian dress, Toulouse-Lautrec’s subject
wears a too tight-fitting, risqué evening dress. The viewer’s eyes are immediately drawn to the center of the
picture, where her dress’s
V-neck plunges down to her belly-button, revealing the low cleavage of her
sagging breasts. Her expression is
tense and she looks like an older woman trying to dress much younger than she
is. Her face is contorted with nearly
crossed eyes and lips snarled up at one side.
The title suggests she is a pig or glutton at the Moulin Rouge, an
infamous erotic club in Paris which the bourgeoisie made popular while
pretending to be sampling the scandalous, bohemian lifestyle. Toulouse-Lautrec thus shows a strong sense
of contempt for his subject and appears to be accusing her of hypocrisy. Yet at the same time, the viewer is invited
to feel sorry for her, as she is so obviously uncomfortable and unhappy at the
nightclub.
Whether Toulouse-Lautrec’s portrayal is misanthropic or not, the subject of his painting is definitely the people. Besides the central women, there are also two other women in profile facing left who appear to be dragging her into the club. They also seem to be cruel caricatures of the bourgeoisie. One is overweight and has thick, sausage-like fingers, while the other has a haughty expression and an upturned nose, pursed lips, and high shoulder pads. The central woman seems to be trapped by the two other women, and she wears a tight ribbon around her neck which further suggests that she is a prisoner. Her hair is tied up in a ridiculous bun while her two “captors” wear hats. Behind them, at a distinctly different level of depth, is a tuxedoed man who is completely oblivious to them. At a third level of depth behind the man are the walls of the nightclub. In the Vuillard painting, there is no sense of depth, but rather just colors and patterns which all sit on the surface. While this may not be characteristic of other Vuillard paintings, in this piece the people seem to be little more than colors and forms. Like a Monet painting, there is no sense of the subject’s feelings or inner psychology, but rather just the person’s body as contributing to part of the composition. There is even another woman behind the embroidering woman who seems to be facing us and playing the violin, but she blends and fades into the background so much that the viewer is only given the hint of a nose and eye to suggest her. Both women are thus denied an identity except for the forms and colors they add to the scene. This is far different from the people in Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings, who have so much identity that they invite multiple layers of interpretation and analysis.
Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec are both exploring interior spaces, though again in radically different ways. Vuillard captures the intimacy of a bright sitting room as the women calmly relax one morning, while Toulouse-Lautrec seems to see the interior space as a trap where the gaudy people are spectacles inside. Vuillard’s painting is passive, soothing, and calm; the only tension, though slight, results from the viewer not being able to see or make-out the subjects’ faces. His bright, red and yellow pastel-colored image is warm and cheerful. Toulouse-Lautrec uses a pastel palette as well, though his predominantly consists of cool greens and browns that are more unsettling and less inviting.
Vuillard also does not appear to be making much of a political or social statement in his painting. While some historians suggest that the there was a political aspect to the Impressionist movement 25 years earlier, the political aspect was arguably not inherent in the paintings themselves but in how the paintings were different from the mainstream art schools. Like an Impressionist landscape, this particular painting by Vuillard also does not seem to make a strong statement at all. The women are dressed in contemporary clothing, engaging in contemporary activities, and there does not seem to be any conflict within the painting itself except that the viewer cannot really see the subjects’ expressions and thus identify or empathize at all. This is very different from Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting, which depicts three upper-middle-class women attending a semi-scandalous female strip club. The complex facial expressions and body language, along with the cool tones, unsettle and challenge the viewer to both feel contempt and pity for his subjects while considering their emotions.
The most important element in achieving these different impressions on the viewer is the painting technique itself. Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec both use oil-based paint applied thinly and smoothly, allowing the underlying surface to show through. The surface of Vuillard’s painting is canvas while Toulouse-Lautrec’s is painted on cardboard, whose unusual texture further enhances the slightly disconcerting effect of the painting. They also both use muted pastel colors, though with different color ranges leading to significantly different moods. But the most striking disparity is how much flatter La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge is than Embroidering by the Window. Toulouse-Lautrec’s characters are outlined with thick, black lines that create distinct regions in the painting separated by strong transitions and edges, similar to a sketch or engraving. The regions are uniformly filled with a single color which further gives them a very flat, two-dimensional look. Although there are three planes of depth within the painting, each plane itself is flat. In contrast, the Vuillard painting only has one plane of depth but within that plane there is some depth created by shadow. While Vuillard’s painting does not have as much depth as the portraits by Titian, it is far more three-dimensional than Manet’s Olympia. But Toulouse-Lautrec’s characters are even flatter than Olympia. This encourages the viewer to see the characters less as actual individuals but as representatives of certain personality or character types. This also makes it easier to empathize with the emotions of the characters and for the viewer to imagine himself in the position of the character. This style is a pre-cursor to the paper-thin characters and cartoonized facial features that define the technique called masking, which is the underlying idea of modern comic theory (as well as the visual style of the art-nouveau computer game The Last Express).