The woman in blue also had a pen

The woman in blue was not simply a model. Michelle Vimont-Laronde, whom her husband Ernest Biéler portrays in 1913, teaches drawing and publishes a text supporting his way of painting two years earlier. This information shifts our encounter with the portrait. Our gaze may begin with a dress, flowers and a face; it now knows that someone capable of speaking about art stands in this image. The descriptive title preserves the colour, while the story restores an activity and a voice to the figure.

Biéler marries Michelle in Paris in 1909. The MCBA documents her February 1911 text, entitled Graphic Line in Painting. Knowing this title is not enough to reconstruct their dialogue or measure everything each owes the other. It does, however, establish that she publicly takes a position on the painter's style. The 1913 portrait follows this commitment. It therefore presents no silhouette entirely detached from the artistic world, but someone who also participates in it through teaching and writing.

Looking at the work — In the MCBA reproduction, Michelle stands in a very tall, narrow panel. Her skirt descends in a long blue mass, topped by a garment dotted with small pale marks. Blue stems and flowers rise behind her; other plants gather near her feet. The face and forearms stand out with particular brightness. Hands remain visible on either side of the body, and the eyes lead our gaze towards the top of this almost entirely vertical composition.

The painting measures one metre ninety by seventy-seven centimetres. This scale gives the body a presence close to life size, but the format leaves little space around it. Figure and flowers share the same upward movement. We can read this relationship as a harmony of lines and colours without turning it into a certain symbol. The plant named in the entry is delphinium. Its visible role is to occupy the background with blues extending those of the clothing and highlighting the areas of skin.

The dress also belongs to a concrete history. The museum connects it with fashions freeing the body from the corset through straighter cuts and supple fabrics. The garment therefore does not simply offer the painter a colour. Its shape contributes to how a woman can present herself. In the image, the long skirt constructs a continuous line while the arms retain freer directions. This relationship between clothing and posture makes the portrait interesting even in silhouette, before we dwell on the face's details.

The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland places Biéler among the figures of Art Nouveau in Switzerland and stresses the linear, decorative character of his work. Woman in Blue shows what these terms change in a portrait. Contours do more than separate a person from the background. They participate in an organisation repeated in flowers and folds. The image remains recognisable as Michelle, but it also exists as a surface on which lines must hold together from the bottom of the panel to the face.

The text she signs in 1911 gives this organisation a particular echo. We cannot substitute her precise arguments for the sole mention published by the museum, or make the painting a direct illustration of her manifesto. Yet the association remains fruitful: the woman painted has herself spoken about painting. The portrait thus becomes an encounter between two forms of public presence. Biéler gives an image of Michelle; Michelle contributes through a text to making Biéler's work legible. No invented exchange is needed to perceive this reciprocity.

Entering the MCBA in 1981, the work can today be viewed without knowing this history. The blues, format and face are enough to hold our attention. But the added knowledge changes the duration of looking: the figure ceases to be reduced to the role of muse too hastily assigned to a painted wife. A teacher and an author remains there within the narrow frame. The final surprise is not hidden beneath the paint. It lay in the title we had not heard: before becoming Woman in Blue, Michelle had already defended graphic line with words.