The Fondation revisits the work of Nabi master Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), seen through the lens of Japanese art. Centred on the delicate landscape held at the Hermitage, La Maison de Roussel à La Montagne (1900), the exhibition shows the influence of Japanese art on Vuillard’s work.
The artist was a great collector of ukiyo-e prints, in which he found formats hitherto unknown in Europe. Around a hundred paintings and engravings of everyday life and nature scenes, created by Vuillard between the 1890s and the First World War, will be shown here in dialogue with some fifty Japanese masterpieces.
The great exhibition of Japanese art of 1890 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris fostered his interest in Japanese aesthetics. While all the Nabi painters appreciated Japanese art, Vuillard collected the greatest number of prints, acquiring 180.
In 1890-1914 Vuillard’s paintings, drawings and lithographs were deeply imbued with references to Japanese art. He enriched his art by freely adopting Japanese codes, which offered him entirely new formats, viewpoints and asymmetrical compositions.
The exhibition will be organised around the different genres in which Vuillard worked, seen through Japanese aesthetics. A group of paintings by Vuillard’s Nabi friends, including Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Élie Ranson and Félix Vallotton, who were also influenced by Japanese art, are also on display.