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Description - Vuillard: Critical Catalogue of Paint by Antoine Salomon

This catalogue raisonne of the paintings and pastels of Edouard Vuillard provides an opportunity to look more carefully at the art of this French master. Hundreds of photographs taken by Vuillard himself, together with an unprecedented collection of preparatory drawings and sketches - arranged in relation to his journal - focus more closely on the artist's creative process than has any previous study. The art of Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) spans two centuries: a leading protagonist of Post-Impressionism, like Gauguin and Seurat, he also took part in the renewal of the decorative arts after 1900 and, later, in the "call to order" after the First World War. From a modest background - his mother was a corset-maker - Vuillard turned quite early to painting with the encouragement of his family and friends. At the renowned Lycee Condorcet, where Bergson and Mallarme were then teaching, he met the fellow students who would mark his life. The future painter Kerr-Xavier Roussel along with Aurelien Lugne-Poe, soon to be a theatre producer, introduced him to the Nabi group, probably in early 1889. Vuillard's style exemplifies a fertile paradox.
A lover of art museums, he studied Chardin's still lifes and Dutch interiors, and held French seventeenth-century painting - Le Sueur especially - in high esteem. At the same time, however, influenced by the Synthetism advocated by his Nabi friends Paul Ranson, Paul Serusier, Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard, he painted a number of challenging compositions in which a few lines enclose symbolic figures depicted in harsh colours. Vuillard was attracted by the glamour of the stage and created many sets for experimental plays. This experience in the theatre had a direct effect on his painting. Between 1892 and 1895, he worked on the subjects for which he would later be famous: lower-middle-class interiors in which his mother, sister and the seamstresses of the corset workshop are busy performing their unvarying domestic tasks, surrounded by mottled wallpaper. Vuillard imbued these everyday scenes with a sense of fatality, played out in a heavy disquieting atmosphere that owed much to his sophisticated literary taste. He made his private experiences into a subject for his painting.
The First World War marked a break: for a time Vuillard served as an official war artist, bearing witness to a reality that had become tragic. Although the last twenty years of Vuillard's life represent the apotheosis of his career, they earned him a sort of ostracism after 1945. Until recently, critics were wont to praise his astounding Nabi paintings but turned their backs on his portraits of industrialists, bankers and actresses - who had become Vuillard's favourite clients - just as they looked down their noses at the antiquated splendour of his decors for the Trocadero and the League of Nations, both government commissions.

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