• Books on Edouard Vuillard
    • Edouard Vuillard
    by Guy Cogeval
    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 Amazon.com
    Hardcover: 528 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 2.15 x 12.70 x 9.80
    Publisher: Yale Univ Pr; (January 1, )
    ISBN: 0300097379

    Book Description: The illustrious career of Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) spanned the fin de siècle and the first four decades of the twentieth century. During that time, the French painter, printmaker, and photographer created a large number of extraordinary works. This gorgeous book-the most comprehensive and authoritative study of Vuillard's art to date-presents some hundred works that 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, characterized by complex patterns and vibrant colors. Vuillard was also beginning to paint provocative interiors and works associated with the avant-garde theater. The book 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, many of which have never before been published.

    This book is the catalogue for an exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., from January 19 to April 20, 2003, which then travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (May 15 to August 24, ); the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (September 23, 2003 to January 4, ); and the Royal Academy of Arts, London (January 27 to April 27, ).