Edouard Vuillard

Their discovery of the Japanese polychrome woodcut and the art of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon provided additional impulses. Around 1890, acting on the basis of these influences, Vuillard succeeded in liberating his pictorial compositions and his use of colour from traditional relationships and to discover their own inherent value – anticipating the developments to follow in French Fauvism. The “post-Impressionism” of a somewhat Symbolist hue practised by the Nabis, who had gathered themselves around the publisher Thadée Natanson and the “Revue Blanche”, clearly went beyond the reproduction of a natural impression and provided the artistic means with a life of their own. In 1896 Ambroise Vollard initiated Vuillard’s first album of lithographs. In 1899 the gallery Bernheim-Jeune exhibited the painter’s work for the first time. Even at the very beginning, Vuillard was already a specialist for still lifes and portraits, a “peintre d’intimités”, whose work developed into a subtle “musique de chambre” (Claude Roger-Marx), with interiors providing a typical motif. Beyond this, the delicate and idiosyncratic manner of reorganising and emphasising the plane had soon already found an appropriate form of expression in commissions for decorative wall designs – first private and then also public. In 1913 he created the decor for the foyer of the Théatre de la Comédie des Champs-Elysées. The artist’s works for the interior of the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva and for the Palais de Chaillot in Paris date as late as 1936/37: shortly before Vuillard’s death in 1940 in La Baule, where he was fleeing from the German troops advancing towards Paris. The Nabis quickly gained recognition and esteem in Germany: from 1900 onwards, Vuillard’s work was present in exhibitions of the Berlin Secession, and Alfred Lichtwark invited Vuillard – together with Bonnard – to Hamburg in 1913.