Was it bizarre to have Lisa Yuskavage, the notorious painter of preposterously pulchritudinous young women, discussing the subtle intimist Edouard Vuillard, who is the subject of a retrospective at the Jewish Museum, subtitled "A Painter and His Muses"? To a packed auditorium at the museum recently, Yuskavage, chic in baggy black, acknowledged the perceived frisson of "this hip chick with this old dead artist." She protested, "But I'm not so hip. I have not had sex with the wife of my art dealer." The allusion is to Lucy Hessel, the second most important woman, after his corset-maker mother, in the life of the shy French master. They were close for forty years until Vuillard's death, in 1940, with no reported upset to Lucy's husband, the dealer Joseph.
In fact, Vuillard's hypersensitive paintings of people in domestic interiors, especially those from the eighteen-nineties, have influenced Yuskavage since before her student days at Yale, twenty-some years ago. She is not alone in making him a perennial painter's painter, who wrung poetic drama from unremarkable scenes with excruciating colors, smoldering tonalities, dense patterning, and loamy build-ups of paint. (Her interlocutor, the museum's chief curator, Norman Kleeblatt, flashed slides of somewhat apposite works by Howard Hodgkin, David Park, Alex Katz, Peter Doig, Kai Althoff, and others; he should have added Fairfield Porter, the late superb painter and critic who argued that modern art had taken a wrong turn when it hewed to Cezanne rather than to Vuillard.) Yuskavage's analysis of Vuillard's art, and of her own, amounted to a clinic in painting for painting's sake. "I've spent hundreds of hours looking at Vuillard," she said. It showed in her talk.