Please note that limited galleries remain open while we install our upcoming exhibitions. Learn more. When I go to an art gallery or museum, I always hope that I will have the patience and the imagination to let the works speak directly to me.
But I also love listening in on the lively conversations and arguments that happen between and among works of art. An astute curator will place works in an exhibition to encourage such an interchange of emotion and ideas. Such exchanges seem particularly easy to observe in the intimacy of the Hammer galleries, especially since so many of the works here come from France in the last thirty years of the 19 th century.
The intimacy of this portrait is conveyed most directly by its small sizeβjust right for a cozy boudoir or a jumbled dressing table. But its tenderness is reinforced by the easeful diagonal angle with which the handsome subject engages and dominates the space. Lucie Hessel looks directly at the painter and then folds us, the viewers, into her dreamy, playful gaze. Her delicate dress is charmingly negligent and fashionableβand its pink color, so near to flesh, suggests a summer holiday of sensual pleasure.
The sea beyond is a metonymy for leisure and envelopment. And this does not include the many drawings and prints he made of her, or the unidentified nudes for which she may well have posed. A friendship, an inspiration, and an obsession. Vuillard shows her reading, sewing, strolling, shopping, visiting, having a manicureβand in one little pencil sketch of about , talking on the telephone. Meanwhile, I found only one or two portraits of M.
Hessel, but he and Lucie offered Vuillard a near lifetime of hospitality at their luxurious apartment on the Rue de Rivoli and at their Chateau de la Claye near Versailles. When Vuillard was not living with his formidable seamstress mother, which he mainly did until her death when her son was sixty, he was with the Hessels. These records include his ambitious sets of prints and his many Kodak photographs, of which some 2, remain. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows.
