Cézanne at the Hammer Museum

Paul Cézanne's Boy Resting, in the collection of The Hammer Museum at UCLA, is the focus of this edition of "Permanent Collections," my series about paintings in American museums.

The Hammer houses the personal collection of the oil magnate Armand Hammer, which includes paintings by many of the heavy hitters of Western art. The museum also puts on contemporary exhibits throughout the year.

I first went to the Hammer about a twenty years ago, and during many subsequent trips to L.A., I often considered returning. After seeing Paul Cézanne's Boy Resting on the museum's website, I finally returned.

Boy Resting is a bit unusual for Cezanne. He, of course, made many paintings of bathers outdoors and many portraits. However, as far as I know, a single, clothed figure in a landscape is a rarity. I didn't remember having seem this novelty in my previous visit to the Hammer, so I figured it was time to return.

It's a relatively simple work, with slightly tilted horizontal bands interrupted by vertical trees. The cool greens, blues, and violets, applied in thin layers, give the painting a characteristically moist essence, an effect that is underscored by the pond or river right behind the boy.

The relatively warm flesh tones, along with the yellow-ochre and rust-red hues in the background, provide contrast that echoes the opposing vertical and horizontal elements. Within this dichotomy the boy (presumably, according to the museum's wall text, Cézanne's son) provides a lazy, third feature: the diagonal. He quietly animates the painting with his left foot pointed forward.

Resting Boy is thus a portrait of comfortable country life. Is it a monumental work? No. But it is an intriguing one that I am happy to have discovered.

Surface Praise for Vuillard

Many years ago I saw an exhibition called "Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard" at the Brooklyn Museum. This show brought together about 75 paintings of the artist's domestic life in turn-of-the-last-century France. I hadn't previously seen much of Vuillard's work--just an occasional glance at the handful of his paintings at the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum. So the Brooklyn exhibition offered a welcome introduction.

As I examined Vuillard's depictions of family and friends engaged in mundane activities such as sewing, sweeping, and reading, I remember thinking, "How tedious." Their proper, 19th-century clothes and their stuffy rooms, often decorated in browns and grays and other dull hues, seemed stifling. When I left the museum after an hour or two, I was glad to step out into the energetic air of modern-day New York City.

Yet I wanted to go back. Vuillard's playful paint dabs and brushstrokes, along with his clever design and color schemes, had translated his oppressive three-dimensional world into a fascinating two-dimensional realm. I expected that whenever I returned to the exhibition, these marvelous formal feats would distract me from Vuillard's tedious subjects.

I never did make it back to the show in Brooklyn. But in the years since, I have seen Vuillard's work in many other places and have come to regard him (as many others have) as a master of early modern art.

A few museums in the U.S have splendid examples of Vuillard's prowess. MOMA has Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, owns Child at a Window, Woman Sewing before a Garden Window is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan owns Madame Vuillard Sewing by the Window, rue Truffaut.

Any one of these paintings could be the subject of this post, but for this edition of "Permanent Collections" I've decided to discuss the Saint Louis Art Museum's K.X. Roussel Reading (seen above) not only because it, too, illustrates well what I love about Vuillard, but also because I'm fond of the St. Louis Art Museum.

I have visited SLAM (some acronym) just once, in the late 1990s when I lived in Chicago. As with most museums at that time, I could not access SLAM's collection online. So before my visit, all I knew about the museum was what an art history professor had told me (the museum owns many works by Max Beckmann) and what I had seen in one of my Matisse books (SLAM owns his Bathers with a Turtle).

As a result, I spent a discovery-filled afternoon at the Saint Louis Art Museum, impressed by the extent of its collection, which includes--among many other great paintings--Hans Holbein's Mary, Lady Guildford, Georges Braque's The Blue Mandolin, The Transformed Dream by Giorgio De Chirico, and K.X. Roussel Reading.

Like most Vuillard paintings, K.X. Roussel Reading is relatively small (17 1/4 x 21 1/2 in.). Painted in 1904, it shows Roussel* crouched over a table engrossed in something. Although the title suggests that he's reading, he could be sketching--SLAM's website indicates that the work has also been called Kerr-Xavier Roussel Sketching and Roussel in his Studio.

Whatever his activity, Roussel's back seems to blend with the mantlepiece behind him. This merging of figure and background undercuts the illusion of realistic, three-dimensional space achieved elsewhere in the painting, and is a motif seen in other Vuillard paintings from the 1890s to the first few years of the 20th century (see, for example, Interior with Mother and Child at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist at MOMA)

This spatial ambiguity, which Vuillard borrowed from the Impressionists, encourages viewers not only to look at a painting as an illusory opening to a world beyond the surface of the picture, but also to consider its physical presence as paint applied to canvas. Thus, the area of black at the center of the picture can be viewed both as Roussel's jacket and the fireplace behind him, and as an odd shape of black paint.

Ever since the Brooklyn exhibition, I have eagerly accepted Vuillard's literally formal invitation to approach his work in two ways, and I have thereby been able to overlook what I consider his stuffy subject matter. So when I look at K.X. Roussel Reading, I savor the way Vuillard modulates his grays: from a cool gray in the upper part of the canvas (the wall of Roussel's studio) to a warmer tone toward the bottom (in Roussel's floor).

I also appreciate the contrast between depth, most evident in the space around the crisscrossed legs of Roussel's table, and the areas of flatness scattered throughout the painting. I'm particularly impressed with Vuillard's choice to juxtapose that tangibly three-dimensional area with the indecipherable form directly left of the table. I can only read that enigmatic shape as a small assemblage of two-dimensional abstract forms. I also applaud the reddish-brown hue that Vuillard sprinkles in among those abstract forms and on the mantle shelf. They bring additional warmth and vitality to the painting.

I could discuss so much more about this painting--for example, more about Vuillard's deft distribution of values and hues; or about the proliferation of straight lines and right angles vs. the scarcity of curves; or about the centrality of the black shape made by Roussel's back and fireplace, how it acts like a target that immediately attracts the viewer's eyes. If I continue, this post will be much longer, and perhaps tedious itself.

So I will stop here with my praise. Perhaps I will revisit K.X. Roussel Reading and Vuillard with another post after my next visit to St. Louis (whenever that might be). Then I'll be able to write with memories of a personal encounter with the work fresh in my mind.





*Ker Xavier Roussel was Vuillard's friend and a fellow painter. Although his work has never achieved the same recognition as Vuillard's, museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hermitage Museum in Russia own some of his paintings.

Art School à la Chardin

"[We] crouched over our portfolios a long time..."

For this edition of "Permanent Collections," let's contemplate art school circa 1738, brought to us by Jean Siméon Chardin and the Kimbell Museum of Art in Fort Worth, Texas.

Opened to the public in 1972, the Kimbell's small yet impressive collection includes paintings by Fra Angelico, Giovanni Bellini, Michelangelo, Titian, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Goya, Corot, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, and Matisse. All these works by master artists are housed in a building by Louis Kahn that is considered a masterpiece of modern architecture.

One of my favorite works at the Kimbell is the painting above, Young Student Drawing. It is typical of Chardin's pictures of daily life in 18th-century France, which often depict a single person engaged in an activity, usually domestic chores or leisure-time pursuits.

What sets Young Student Drawing apart from Chardin's other genre paintings is not only its academic setting, but also its mystery. Many of the details in this little painting (it's only 8-1/4 x 6-3/4 inches) seem intended to provoke conjecture. First of all, we can't see the student's face. How old is he, I wonder. I know he's young; he's a student after all. But how young? A pre-teen? A young teen?

I also wonder about his emotional state as he draws. If I could see his expression, would it show strain? Would it show confidence? Or would it merely show concentration and not betray the difficulty of his task? If I could see his grip on the chalk holder he uses, would it suggest tentativeness?

It is also unclear what the student is drawing. I guess he is copying the figure study on the wall in front of him, but it's hard to tell for sure. And what about the works inside the portfolio on the student's lap? If I could peruse these drawings, what would I see?

The blank canvas at the right of the picture also adds to the mysterious air. I assume that once the student has mastered rendering with chalk--a task that could take years to accomplish--he will graduate to canvas and take on his subject in oil. But we have no idea how well he will do with a brush and paint, just as we have no idea if the student will succeed as a professional artist. Like the blank canvas, his future is unknown.

Chardin himself had once been a young artist with an uncertain future, struggling to develop his craft. In conversations with Denis Diderot, Chardin described the many-years-long, rigorous education he endured. "The chalk holder is placed in our hands at the age of seven or eight years," he said. "After having crouched over our portfolios for a long time, we're placed in front of....masterpieces by Greek artists." Chardin and his fellow students were then told to draw the ancient works. "[Y]ou've never seen such tears as those shed over the Satyr, the Gladiator, the Medici Venus, and the Antinous," he recalled.*

Young Student Drawing clearly shows that the young Chardin did not struggle in vain. Indeed, the technical skill he displays in the painting is what makes the work truly noteworthy.

I feel a bit uneasy making such a definitive proclamation--I've never seen Young Student Drawing in person. However, the Kimbell's website provides a copy of the painting that seems large enough and sharp enough for us to appreciate Chardin's skills.

Look at the carefully built-up impasto texture that suggests a slow, deliberative process. A process that allows Chardin to give his painting a richly subtle composition of colors. He has distributed reds along with vibrant blues and browns in a harmonious way that makes Young Student Drawing a treat to look at, even online.

For example, consider the blank canvas to the right of the student. Chardin has added dabs of blue among its clay-like gray hue. No real, untouched canvas would be this mix of colors. However, the blue gives Chardin's blank canvas a quiet vibrancy that, coupled with the tactility of the impasto, makes it seem more real than if the canvas were merely a uniform gray.

Also take a look at the bit of sienna-brown shirt peeking out at the left of the student's jacket. It stands out in contrast to the charcoal coat and the relatively dull, red-brown figure study on the wall. Some more of this brown peeks through the slit in the coat's bottom and through a hole that punctuates the back of the coat.

Together these three areas of brown make up the eye-catching points of a triangle, a shape which is echoed in the student's tricorn hat, in the three-sided form defined by the student's head and flared coat, in the triangular part of the stretcher frame behind the blank canvas, and elsewhere in the painting. This proliferation of triangles produces a complexly balanced composition that reinforces the harmonious color of Young Student Drawing.

I'm always impressed by a small painting that provokes the kind of consideration I have given Young Student Drawing. Chardin's remarkable little painting hangs in the Kimbell Art Museum amid a collection that includes works by Francois Boucher and other great contemporaries of Chardin. I wonder if those much larger paintings could also hold my attention so strongly.



*From "The Salon of 1765," as translated by John Goodman in Diderot on Art, Volume 1, p.4, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995.