Jeanne Lanvin
Edouard Vuillard
EDOUARD VUILLARD, 1933. DISTEMPER ON CANVAS.
Vuillard was a Nabi. A member of the semi-secret, semi-mystic group of artists who met at apartments and coffee shops in the late 1800s, plotting a revolution of art by stripping it down to its most base elements. Yet Vuillard’s ambitions and influences could not be contained, and when the group splintered and split up at the turn of the century, he found a new freedom of expression. Integrating a love of Japanese art, theatre and set design and decorative arts, he returned to interior scenes he had painted as a Nabi with a newfound vigour. Vuillard matches his subject with their surroundings, spending more time in the exterior world around them than on the subject themselves. Here, the fashion designer Jeanne Lanvin exists in exquisite harmony with the room, each object, detail, brushstroke of the interiors reveals something of Lanvin’s interior life.