Word: vuillard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Perhaps no good artist is wholly forgotten, but partial eclipses happen all the time. One shadowed Vuillard, who, between his birth in 1868 and his death in 1940, became one of the most respected names in French art. The respect, however, turned into the kind that tails off into a cough and a pause. No doubt Vuillard's own modesty contributed to the situation; thus between 1912 and 1938, the years when the big reputations were consolidating, he never had a one-man show in Paris. So it happened that Vuillard was tagged as a "minor master" and left...
Pretty Safe. Vuillard's background was Catholic and his upbringing strict. The son of an army officer turned provincial tax collector, Vuillard seems always to have been the soul of probity. He was forever conscious of being one of an elite, thanks partly to his education at the Lycée Concordet, one of the most demanding schools in Paris. "I think I am pretty safe in saying," wrote a friend, "that from his adolescence, every day of Vuillard's life has presented itself to him in the rainbow light of a moral predicament . . . Vuillard takes everything...
Buried Tension. For this reason, theater delighted him. Not the heroics of Shakespeare or Racine, but the work of the new playwrights of the '90s like Ibsen and Maeterlinck, for which Vuillard designed sets at the Théatre de l'Oeuvre in Paris. Russell notes that Vuillard's interiors tend to possess "precisely the elements which Maeterlinck called for: the silence, the half-light, the tensions buried below the point of visibility." He could paint the pauses and solicitous hesitations in polite conversation as neatly as Oscar Wilde could write them...
...academic standards of its time, the figure of Annette on the Beach at Villerville (1910) is a botch-drawn as though made of string and plasticine, the skirt rendered in weird and only semilegible notations of white paint. Yet Vuillard caught with tender and ironic precision the way that people actually stand when they are not observed-along with the scoured blue of the Atlantic sky and the distant, promenading couples. It is like an amateur snapshot. Vuillard was, in fact, one of the first artists to use a Kodak systematically. It was his habit to set up his camera...
Something Personal. There was a lot of impressionism in Vuillard, for he enjoyed what the older painters liked: the panoply of color in a new-minted atmosphere. But pattern was the core of his work, most dramatically in the 1890s, when he produced a run of paintings, including some remarkable self-portrait studies, that anticipated the later Matisse in their schematization of form. But he remained stubbornly unaffiliated; even within the Symbolist group he was somewhat an outsider to the letter of their theory since, among other points of difference, he thought Gauguin's pictures "pedantic." Vuillard never allowed...