Under the Influence: Edouard Vuillard and Contemporary Art

The Art Show
March 1-5th, 2017 Park Avenue Armory Booth #A28

Inspired by Norman Kleeblatt’s 2012 article Strange Bedfellows (first published on the occasion of the Vuillard exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York) JNG will examine the ways in which the art of Edouard Vuillard set the stage for the art of the 20th -21st centuries.

On view at The Art Show will be 25 oils and works on paper by Vuillard seen in the context of the influence he had on the work of Tina Barney, Lisa Yuskavage, Fairfield Porter, and Richard Artschwager. In pairing the work of an historical artist with current work, we hope to illustrate the ways in which an artist’s aesthetic evolves into that of the next generation’s.

Artists as diverse as Peter Doig and Lisa Yuskavage, Fairfield Porter and David Park, Richard Artschwager, Howard Hodgkin and Tina Barney, have claimed the influence of Edouard Vuillard as seminal to their own work. Porter made his decision to become a painter after seeing a 1938 exhibition of Vuillard paintings and prints at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hodgkin has claimed the Nabi painter as the inspiration for his own Pointillist patterns, his compositions, and the swaths of bright color in his paintings. Tina Barney and Lisa Yuskavage were inspired by Vuillard’s subject matter, his eerily staged interiors, his choice of color, his application of paint, and his use of texture and pattern. Richard Artschwager actually made copies of works by Vuillard, bringing to this homage his own particular blend of Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop.

A fully illustrated digital catalogue will be available with essays by Norman Kleeblatt, formerly Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator of the Jewish Museum, New York and Mathias Chivot, independent curator and author of the catalogue raisonné on Vuillard, as well as other publications.