Edouard Vuillard: Painter-Decorator - Patrons and Projects, 1892-1912 - Hardcover

Groom, Gloria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300055552 ISBN 13: 9780300055559

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1994

Synopsis

Edouard Vuillard, one of the great post-impressionists, is especially loved for his small easel paintings that capture the charm and mystery of everyday life. Yet at the same time that he was making his name as an "intimist" artist, he was also creating a number of large-scale canvases, panels, and screens commissioned to decorate the homes of his patrons and friends. Infrequently exhibited, these works were separated from their original settings during Vuillard's lifetime, and they have remained a relatively unknown aspect of his oeuvre.
In this lavishly illustrated study of Vuillard as decorator, Gloria Groom examines the two earliest decades of his career, a period when he produced fifty daring and important large-scale paintings as decoration. Groom discusses these early works and recreates and re-evaluates their original context, providing valuable new information about Vuillard's career, a fresh perspective on his thinking about art, and an entertaining social history of fin-de-siecle Paris.
She describes not only Vuillard's large decorative projects but also the industrialists, bankers, doctors, financiers, journalists, playwrights, and foreign aristocrats who commissioned them, wealthy individuals who came from a social and economic milieu decidedly different from Vuillard's own. Drawing on his patrons' archives and memoirs, and on interviews with their surviving family members, as well as on Vuillard's own private journals, Groom evokes the circumstances and setting of each of these ambitious projects. She situates Vuillard's decorative works within the evolution of his other easel paintings, discusses the notion of "decoration" as a new painting style as well as a complement to the aesthetics of the art nouveau movement, and compares Vuillard's works as a painter-decorator to similar projects undertaken by his contemporaries.

About this title

Reviews

Based on the author's dissertation of the same title (Univ. of Texas at Austin, 1989), this splendid volume deserves the attention of art students and scholars alike. Groom's depth of understanding and appreciation of Vuillard's unique contribution to the decorative arts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is clearly evident in the authoritative, well-documented text, which thoroughly analyzes Vuillard's major interior commissions from 1892 through 1913. The more than 300 high-quality illustrations elucidate Groom's analyses. Because so few of the artist's works remain in situ, reproduced photographs showing the original installations of some works are of particular interest. Extensive scholarly notes and a selective (but thorough) bibliography conclude the work. Highly recommended for all art collections.
- P. Steven Thomas, Sangamon State Univ., Springfield, Ill.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300055552
• ISBN 13: 9780300055559
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 270