Beyond the Easel
This large, wide-ranging exhibit showcases decorative painting on screens, in friezes, and on wall, door, and ceiling panels–created primarily for private patrons. (And painting murals for residences certainly beats many current artists’ aesthetic exile in temp work.) Called the Nabis after a Hebrew word for prophet, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Ker Xavier Roussel painted work that ranged from bright, rough-textured pieces (prefiguring the shocking color disjunctions of the fauves) to pieces in the impressionist style to flat, bright art nouveau-style illustration. Though it was just before this period that “art for art’s sake” began, these paintings were conceived and executed with respect to how they would affect and define domestic spaces.
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Perhaps the early decorative work here is appealing because it seems to portray moments of happiness, even arcadian fantasies, rather than producing the pleasure of genres associated with power–portraiture or history painting. True, the “detached observer” of urban life was born early this century out of the same context: one could argue that Vuillard has reproduced street scenes with a surveyor’s distance and sense of privilege. But the surface of his work is so activated by color and gesture that one can’t help but feel the contradiction between being swept up in his chaotic movement and the taming inherent in making a living scene into an object, a screen.
