Thank you for this beautiful essay, a lesson in Deep Looking. My hunch is that the small blue dot is meant to capture his mother’s attempt to mend a small tear in the fabric by embroidery. My grandmother used to do the same with bed sheets or other fabric. Given that such fabric was much more expensive then, I believe this was a way to salvage it—and also to make it unique.
reminded me a lot of tj clark. after i read him, i was thinking about how hard it is for me to pay as much attention to images as he did, something about the onslaught of images online and how they've made me pay less attention to each one. i really admire your ability here to look so closely/alively. beautiful writing!
This essay is as powerful and intricate as the painting and artist. When I lived on the East Coast I loved to travel to the National Gallery and still have the books from those exhibitions
I love this analysis of one of my favorite paintings. Thank you. If I may, I am almost certain the tiny detail is a mending in the bedcover ! Yes, how wonderful. We might regard textile mends as jewels that evince one's life with that textile; in this case the golden one slept and loved under. Precious.
Oh Garth, quel plaisir! I'm an avid reader of your essays on visual arts and music. The richness of your inner world is a beautiful synthesis of your excellent senses. I'd be delighted to read an essay of yours about perfumes or flower gardens in spring or even fine cooking (all human creations as well). And, being partial to words, I can't be happier that your means of expression is writing. Don't you think that writing both draws from and reflects the one art missing in galleries, fashion, and music halls - the art of touch?
Thank you Garth for this delicious post on the painting of Vuillard which I devoured and will taste again. Loved, loved looking at each stroke, feature and color with you. I’m watching and learning from your thoughtful careful eye. Also—just because I happened to re-read Melissa Febos’ “Kettle Holes” today, how she describes emotions as symptoms of what we may not be allowing ourselves to feel, I’m thinking about how, in the medium of painting, this may allow for the unconscious to surface through gesture and how the artist frames these pinnacle moments.
I was (am) so baffled by this painting spatially! I kept thinking that the floral field was a second curtain behind the yellow curtain—you know how sometimes there is a lighter “liner” behind a curtain, for instance in a hotel room. The reason I thought this is the headrail in the same floral pattern, a headrail that the yellow curtain seems to hang from also. But yes, there seemingly is a table between the floral and yellow fields—and you say that the exhibition catalogue confirms that is is occupying an adjacent room. So I am swimming in this ambiguity. And that mirror! (I also took it as a mirror.) A mirror that is failing to reflect! All rather wonderfully confusing.
I now think that what I saw as the bottom of a headrail is actually a (maybe iron) bar from which the yellow curtain is suspended, crossing our vision of the floral-wallpapered wall of the back room. Whew!
Thank you for this beautiful essay, a lesson in Deep Looking. My hunch is that the small blue dot is meant to capture his mother’s attempt to mend a small tear in the fabric by embroidery. My grandmother used to do the same with bed sheets or other fabric. Given that such fabric was much more expensive then, I believe this was a way to salvage it—and also to make it unique.
A bit like Kintsugi in Japan.
I love this reading. (And thank you for the kind words about the essay!)
yes :)
reminded me a lot of tj clark. after i read him, i was thinking about how hard it is for me to pay as much attention to images as he did, something about the onslaught of images online and how they've made me pay less attention to each one. i really admire your ability here to look so closely/alively. beautiful writing!
Thank you so much, Meghna. Very honored by the comparison!
This essay is as powerful and intricate as the painting and artist. When I lived on the East Coast I loved to travel to the National Gallery and still have the books from those exhibitions
Thank you so much for reading this, Martyn, and for saying such a kind thing.
I love this analysis of one of my favorite paintings. Thank you. If I may, I am almost certain the tiny detail is a mending in the bedcover ! Yes, how wonderful. We might regard textile mends as jewels that evince one's life with that textile; in this case the golden one slept and loved under. Precious.
Oh Garth, quel plaisir! I'm an avid reader of your essays on visual arts and music. The richness of your inner world is a beautiful synthesis of your excellent senses. I'd be delighted to read an essay of yours about perfumes or flower gardens in spring or even fine cooking (all human creations as well). And, being partial to words, I can't be happier that your means of expression is writing. Don't you think that writing both draws from and reflects the one art missing in galleries, fashion, and music halls - the art of touch?
Thank you Garth for this delicious post on the painting of Vuillard which I devoured and will taste again. Loved, loved looking at each stroke, feature and color with you. I’m watching and learning from your thoughtful careful eye. Also—just because I happened to re-read Melissa Febos’ “Kettle Holes” today, how she describes emotions as symptoms of what we may not be allowing ourselves to feel, I’m thinking about how, in the medium of painting, this may allow for the unconscious to surface through gesture and how the artist frames these pinnacle moments.
I was (am) so baffled by this painting spatially! I kept thinking that the floral field was a second curtain behind the yellow curtain—you know how sometimes there is a lighter “liner” behind a curtain, for instance in a hotel room. The reason I thought this is the headrail in the same floral pattern, a headrail that the yellow curtain seems to hang from also. But yes, there seemingly is a table between the floral and yellow fields—and you say that the exhibition catalogue confirms that is is occupying an adjacent room. So I am swimming in this ambiguity. And that mirror! (I also took it as a mirror.) A mirror that is failing to reflect! All rather wonderfully confusing.
I now think that what I saw as the bottom of a headrail is actually a (maybe iron) bar from which the yellow curtain is suspended, crossing our vision of the floral-wallpapered wall of the back room. Whew!
Yes, that’s how I read that as well. It is a very strange painting spatially!
Garth, I simply adore your deep readings of artworks. What are some of your favorite art books or book on art?
Thank you so much—what a kind thing to say. My very favorite book about painting (and deep looking) is probably TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death.