While I maintain that Vuillard’s unique approach to surface and pattern was informed by the visual textures of photography, there is also evidence that early photographic ‘faults’ and spatial distortions intrigued him. This can be demonstrated when considering the The Blue Sleeve from 1893 (Figure 32). While no current evidence exists that Vuillard owned a camera when The Blue Sleeve was painted, both Guy Cogeval and Easton assert that it has strong photographic qualities.105 It can be reasonably assumed that when this painting was made,
Vuillard was already very familiar with photography, experiencing it in his daily life through newspapers, magazines, periodicals,106 and via friends and colleagues, even if he did not own a
camera himself until a few years later.
The Blue Sleeve is a portrait of Vuillard’s sister Marie. Small and in portrait format, it shows Marie seated in the foreground at a table, her body twisting around in the seat to look back over this arm and shoulder at the viewer. Marie’s figure fills the front of the picture plane, the blue sleeve of the dress looming large. This is one of the most noticeable features of this work, the magnified size of the figure in the foreground. Marie is disproportionately large compared to the size of the seamstress from the Vuillard family business in the background,107 who is
about half her size. Easton comments that this exaggeration of the figure is typical of the kind of spatial distortions evident in cameras of the time.108
The Kodak camera, unlike other cameras, was held at waist height and this often led to unexpected angles, blurring or distortions to be produced, especially with movement, as the lens viewfinder was not an easy thing to judge.109 In The Blue Sleeve, the size of Marie’s
body would seem to mirror a distorted camera angle, such as Vuillard’s photograph of Marie, Ker-Xavier and Annette taken some years later, where the figures in the foreground look overly large and distorted (Figure 33). Vuillard’s radical exploration of pictorial space in The Blue Sleeve is evident when compared to other paintings of the time such as Portrait of Madame Le Doux by Vlaho Bukovac (Figure 34), which was accepted into the Paris Salon of the same year.
105 Cited by Kimberley Jones, in ibid., 151.
106 Hannavy, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, s.v. “History 7: 1880s,” 698. 107 Cited by Jones, in Cogeval Edouard Vuillard, 151.
108 Ibid.
In Bukovac’s painting there is a sense of a three dimensional space, rendered onto a two dimensional plane. This illusionistic depiction, in a full-length, life-size portrait format, shows Madame Le Doux standing in three-quarter pose in a sunlit garden. While there is a tendency toward more painterly brush marks in this Post-Impressionist period, the figure is rendered as a volume, modelled by light, and clearly delivers an individual likeness.
This high degree of attention to detail could in fact have been aided by the use of photography. It is well documented that from as early as the 1840s many portrait painters adopted
photography and daguerreotypes as tools for visual accuracy. 110, 111 Whether the Portrait of Madame Le Doux was painted with or without the aid of photography is unknown. But where Bukovac’s portrait displays visual acuteness, in contrast, Vuillard broadly generalises
his figuration.
The facial details of the two figures in The Blue Sleeve are indistinct and simplified, described in patches of light and dark, like a mask. The shape of brow, eyes, nose and mouth are alluded to, but they are strangely distorted by shadows. These qualities are evocative of photographic blurring, typical in early photography, when shutter speeds required people to remain still for longer (Figure 35). The light effects in early photographic techniques could also simplify and abstract forms, as demonstrated by Degas’ Dancer Adjusting Her Shoulder Strap (Figure 36). Here, the tonal information has been reduced so that the figure is rendered in flattened shapes of dark and light. Marie’s face is just such an arrangement, and is anonymised as a pattern of shapes.
Marie is placed in an unlikely pose for a long portrait sitting. Rather, she has been captured in the act of turning around, perhaps to enter a conversation going on behind her, or swivelling around to the sound of her name. It is moment observed as an arrested gesture, casual, brief, like an image caught by a camera.
For Vuillard, photography was a way of flattening space and creating spatial ambiguity.112
The newspaper in the bottom left corner of the painting is cut by the edges of the frame, a device likely borrowed from or inspired by photographic cropping. The newspaper thus becomes a flattened shape, a pale triangle at the front of the picture plane which seems to be both advancing forward and sitting on the surface as a flat shape.
110 Scharf, Art and Photography, 49, 52, 55-56.
Figure 33. Édouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier, Annette, and Marie Roussel in Levallois, (1898).
Figure 34. Vlaho Bukovac, Portrait of Madame Le Doux, (1892).
Figure 36. Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, Dancer Adjusting Her Shoulder Strap, (1895). Figure 35. Unknown photographer under the direction
Another example of this spatial ambiguity can be seen when considering the dark lamp at the top of the painting. This rectangular navy/black shape joins with Marie’s head, like a false attachment in photography. False attachments form through the photographic compression of space whereby objects in the foreground and background of an image appear to meet and occupy the same plane. It often occurs when objects of the same tone or colour sit next to each other in the picture space, and meld into a complex form (Figure 37). In the case of the lamp, we are unsure as to its nature or where it sits in space. It could be a ceiling lamp, directly above Marie’s head, or a table lamp with a dark shade sitting on a shelf behind her, with the base camouflaged in the painterly marks of the wall. Visual complexities such as false attachments, radical foreshortening, spatial deformations, blurring or motion in photographs were perhaps what Delacroix was alluding to when he stated, that daguerreotypes displayed “monstrosities.”113 Vuillard however, savoured such anomalies in early photography as
they allowed him to explore imaginative ways of making paintings. Through these spatial distortions, and a combination of patterning, dabbing and tonal interplay, Vuillard invented pictorial spaces where figure and ground relationships become ambiguous, interconnected and interchangeable.
113 Scharf, Art and Photography, 120.