Edouard Vuillard

Description

The illustrious career of Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) spanned the fin de siecle and the first four decades of the 20th century. During that time, the French painter, printmaker and photographer created a large number of extraordinary works. This study of Vuillard's art presents some 100 works that should reveal the full range of his renowned artistic abilities. In a series of illustrated essays, the authors explore Vuillard's complex and diverse career, which began with his academic training in Paris in the late 1880s. By the early 1890s, Vuillard was painting the innovative and sensual Nabi paintings for which he is best known, characterised by complex patterns and vibrant colours. Vuillard was also beginning to paint provocative interiors and works associated with the avant-garde theatre. The volume concludes with an examination of Vuillard's sumptuous large-scale decorations, luminous landscapes and elegant portraits from the last decades of his career as well as a substantial selection of his pastels and prints, in addition to his photographs.

---

A quiet man who lived with his beloved mother, the painter Édouard Vuillard applied his inventive talents to re-imagining bourgeois interiors as shifting planes of color and pattern. Admirers of his sensuous interior world will be bowled over by this sumptuous volume with its vivid narrative and 463 exquisite color reproductions. In Édouard Vuillard, Guy Cogeval discusses the artist's life and work with a passionate involvement that is rare in contemporary art writing. He describes how Vuillard's early work as a set designer apparently led him to stage manage family members, placing them in tense or confrontational tableaux that he memorialized in paint. Vuillard was an enthusiastic amateur photographer who favored the new handheld Kodak camera. An entire chapter is dedicated to the artist's charmingly artless snapshots of family and friends. In his later years, Vuillard utilized a more down-to-earth painting style in portraits of the rich and famous. While these paintings are often dismissed as conservative, Cogeval points out Vuillard's use of subtle details to comment on some of his sitters. Four other essayists treat themes ranging from "Vuillard and Ambiguity" to the effect of his annual summer vacations on his treatment of landscape, light and composition. This exceptional book accompanies an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., from Jan. 19 to April 20, 2004, which travels to Montreal, Paris, and London. --Cathy Curtis

---

Edouard Vuillard: Painter-Decorator: Patrons and Projects, 1892-1912

Description

Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), one of the most admired post-impressionist artists, is best-known for his small easel paintings and their charming portrayals of everyday life. However, a major part of his work during his early life was the painting of large decorative panels in the Parisian homes of wealthy private patrons, produced between 1892 and 1912. These panels - some fifty in total - have been little studied, due principally to the inaccessibility of many of them and the impossibility of their being included in exhibitions. In this book, the author offers an overview of these large-scale projects for decorative commissions, describing how they shaped the artist's thinking about his art and methods of working and the influence they had on his later work. She also discusses the state of private patronage, the nature of Vuillard's patrons, and the understanding of decoration in public and private contexts in turn-of-the-century Paris. The book is lavishly illustrated, showing the panels in their original locations and as they appear today, and also includes other works by the artist and by his contemporaries - Bonnard, Monet and Seurat, amongst others, in order to compare and contrast Vuillard's achievements.

---

Vuillard

Description

Edouard is widely recognised as one of the most brilliant and sensuous painters of the twentieth century. He was a quiet and perceptive observer, whose paintings are both tender and intriguing in theie portrayal of human relationships. This monograph follows his development from his early association with the Nabis painters, his small-scale interiors and his sumptuous but refined use of colour, to his theatre decorations and later portraits. Other work by the author includes "The Post Impressionists" and "Gauguin".

---

Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 (Jewish Museum)

Description

In many of Edouard Vuillard's (1868-1940) most famous paintings, figures are nestled in intimate settings among bold patterns and colors. As the viewer's eye adjusts to the complexity of the scene, the artist's world opens up. At a young age, Vuillard was one of a group of avant-garde painters in Paris who favored rich palettes and dreamlike imagery. He was equally a member of the literary and theatrical circles that included writers like Marcel Proust and Stéphane Mallarmé. As his career progressed into the new century, he entered the rarefied society of upper-class French families—many of them Jewish—who collected the new art, published the new poetry, and wrote the new criticism.

This beautifully illustrated book examines the master artist's work in the context of a unique circle of friends and patrons between the turn of the 20th century and World War II. Essays by leading scholars explore the artist's relationship with key members of this glamorous social circle, as well as the connections between Vuillard and Proust, two of the world's great observers of a world now lost.

A fascinating exploration of artistic culture in Paris before the war, Edouard Vuillard establishes the artist as one of the masters of the modern portrait.

---

The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard

Description

---

Edouard Vuillard. Le monde du silence (1868-1940) (PocheCouleur No. 35) (French Edition)

Description

One of the main founders of the Nabi movement, with Bonnard, Ranson and his brother-in-law K.-X. Roussel, Edouard Vuillard slowly developed a very personal style that ignored the avant-garde, even though he had been a herald of it. Between the Primitivism of the Pont-Aven school, and the examples of Gauguin and Fauvism, and even Abstraction, he experimented with a new language of painting and found his intimist style through the most ordinary, banal subjects, which were part of his personal life. He was the painter of domestic intimacy, the warmth of the home, of silent and secret interiors, and his mother, whom he lived with, was his main model. He was closely involved in the adventure of avant-garde theater, through his work with Lugne-Poe and the Theatre de l'Oeuvre, and worked intensely with the Revue Blanche, which had a major influence on the cultural life of the essential turn-of-the-century period. The Revue Blanche opened the doors to the world of Proust to him when he became a well known portrait painter. To better understand this discreet yet essential painter, Jean-Jacques Leveque has chosen to approach his life and work through a series of sequences that examine themes, look closely at the meaning behind his simplest subjects, and sketch a progressive portrait of Vuillard in his plenitude and sumptuous independence.

---