Volume 50, Number 6 · April 10, 2003
The Genius of the Family
By Sanford Schwartz
Édouard Vuillard
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Guy Cogeval
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., January 19–April 20, 2003; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, May 15–August 24, 2003;the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, September 23, 2003–January 4, 2004; and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, January 31–April 18, 2004.
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 501 pp., $65.00
Vuillard's place as one of the genuinely lovable painters of the past century or more is vigorously tested by his current retrospective, the most comprehensive he has ever been given. The pretext for this large exhibition is, it appears, the imminent publication of the Vuillard catalogue raisonné, a project which has been underway for some fifty years, and is largely the work of Guy Cogeval, the director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, who happens to have organized the current show and is the principal author of its catalog. The National Gallery exhibition brings together, along with Vuillard's small Parisian interiors and portraits of friends of the 1890s, his best-known work, an unusually large number of the generally bigger pictures dating from 1900 on—the artist died in 1940, at seventy-one—along with a greater number of the suites of decorative panels that he did throughout his career and that are rarely seen in force.
Review, 4606 words
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