© Copyright 2005 Paul van Rensburg.
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Eduoard Vuillard 1868-1940
Edouard Vuillard was not as widely known as the Impressionist masters, but he created more than 3,000 paintings between the late 1800s and his death in 1940. Vuillard's work straddles two centuries: he was a major post-impressionist in the 1890s, as well as a participant in the renewal of decorative art before and after 1900. Vuillard was one of the central figures of "Les Nabis", a group of Parisian avant-garde artists whose members included Pierre Bonnard and Félix Vallotton, among others. During the Nabi period Vuillard produced some of his best-known work, provocative paintings of middle-class interiors and contributions to avant-garde theatre.
Edouard Vuillard was born in Cuiseax at the foot of the Jura Mountains and he lived most of his artistic life in Paris on the Square Vintimille, in a small apartment tended by his mother who had been a dressmaker. Vuillard was educated, like Toulouse-Lautrec, at the Lycee Condorcet in Paris, where he met Ker Xavier Roussel, who married his sister, and Maurice Denis. In 1886, Vuillard went on, with Roussel, to study painting at the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts under the academic Jean Leon Gerome. Two years later he was working with Denis, his lifelong friend Pierre Bonnard, and Paul Serusier at the Academie Julian (1888-1890). That year, 1888, Serusier met Gauguin at Pont-Aven in Brittany and later brought back with him a painting, The Talisman, of an entirely new type, the result of taking literally Gauguin's advice to paint in unmodulated, unshaded, unadulterated colours. Out of Serusier's enthusiasm a group called the Nabis, after the Hebrew for "Prophets", was formed. Vuillard, Bonnard, Denis, and Roussel all became members.
The Nabi painters rejected naturalism and, by implication, Impressionism, in favour of pure design and colour. Art, they felt, was more important than nature. Their subject matter and theories were allied to those of the Symbolist writers and poets, such as Stephane Mallarme, an acquaintance of Vuillard. The group held ritual dinners and discussions and referred to Serusier's studio as "The Temple".
At the urging of Sérusier, their link with Gauguin, the group left the Académie. Vuillard shared a studio with Bonnard and Lugné-Poë, whose theatre Vuillard helped decorate. It was as a theatrical designer that he learned to work in distemper (tempera paint mixed with sizing), a manner he applied for a considerable period to his own works, done on gray cardboard. Vuillard's very early works show an affinity with those of Corot and Chardin, but in 1890 he began to work in an almost Fauve-like palette that reveals the influence of Gauguin and Japanese prints.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY:
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/vuillardinfo.shtm
http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pbio?32500
http://www.abcgallery.com/V/vuillard/vuillardbio.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=924278
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edouard_Vuillard
http://wwar.com/masters/v/vuillard-edouard.html
http://www.3d-dali.com/Artist-Biographies/Edouard_Vuillard.html
http://www.wetcanvas.com/Museum/Artists/v/Edouard_Vuillard/index.html
From 1914 until his death, he devoted himself entirely to the subtly harmonious, decorative, and nostalgic domestic scenes of the Intimist style with which his name is most closely associated. His paintings have a special personal quality that stems from his love of order and his feeling for the peace of quiet domesticity, for the play of light within small areas, and for he interplay of patterns, objects, walls, and people who blend together in soft nuances of warm, subdued colour.
He soon abandoned this brilliant colour to work in a quiet, softly coloured style. Between 1893 and 1914, Vuillard painted small interiors, portraits of his friends, decorations for theaters, and a set of paintings (Paris Gardens) for Thadée Natanson, publisher of La Revue Blanche, the publication to which both Vuillard and Bonnard contributed lithographs.
With Bonnard, Vuillard visited Hamburg in 1905, England and Holland in 1913. In 1908 he taught at an academy founded by the widow of Paul Ranson, also a Nabi. After 1900, however, their corporate momentum gone, the Nabis disintegrated. Vuillard himself grew closer to the Impressionism that the Nabis had rejected. His work, less colorful and less inventive, consisted now of domestic scenes. He and Bonnard, whose style underwent a similar change, became known as the Intimistes.
For some years Vuillard was almost completely out of the public eye, but in 1936 he showed with other former Nabis, and in 1938 a Vuillard retrospective exhibition in Paris revived interest in him. The part played by his pre-Intimiste style in the emergence of Art Nouveau was important. He died on June 21, 1940, at La Baule on the Brittany coast.
