Word: vuillards
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Edouard Vuillard was not a simple painter, and his subtle, qualified vision endeared him to some of the most complex minds in France. "Too fastidious for plain statement, he proceeds by insinuation," André Gide wrote of him in 1905. "There is nothing sentimental or highfalutin about the discreet melancholy which pervades his work. Its dress is that of everyday. It is tender and caressing, and if it were not for the mastery that already marks it, I should call it timid. For all his success, I can sense in Vuillard the charm of anxiety and doubt...
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...
What happens after that is known only to the dealer and his client. But many a famous collector has left Salz's town house poorer by tens of thousands of dollars but richer by a prime Degas, Vuillard, Corot or Monet. As a young man in Paris in the early years of this century, Salz was a painter him self. "Not a great painter like these," he says, waving a hand toward the Segonzacs, Vlamincks and Van Dongens that line his walls. "But I was a friend of all the 20th century artists." The works of these friends were...