- 6 May 16:00 Art historian and biographer Julia Frey will be at Bill & Rosa’s Book Room to discuss her book Venus betrayed : the private world of Edouard Vuillard, a thought-provoking biography of a secretive turn-of-the-century French artist. Many have researched Édouard Vuillard, a prolific painter, for his contributions to the avant-garde. But what sets Venus Betrayed apart is its attention to the figure behind the paintings. Frey uses Vuillard’s body of work and unpublished journals to access the interior state of the artist. Frey subtly reveals this life through his relationships with contemporaries from Toulouse-Lautrec to Mallarmé; the ideas that obsessed him; his often-tortured artistic process. Frey has produced a deeply intimate picture of the artist in life and at work. The result is a refined perspective into both the artist’s masterpieces and unfinished projects, as well as a striking argument for the relationship between artistic atmosphere and production. Venus Betrayed reinvigorates the genre of biography. During the event this beautiful art book will be at a discount price of just 40€ (55€ regularly). Free, please sign up at brbookroom@gmail.com
Born in Cuiseaux, France (Saône-et-Loire department in the region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté), in 1868, Edouard Vuillard was a French painter, decorative artist and printmaker. The son of a retired army officer, his remarkable body of work is central to the history of modern art. Author Julia Frey reveals why she called her new study of Vuillard’s life and art in the book Venus Betrayed.
From early paintings, where women disappear into complex compositions of textiles and wallpaper, through thousands of paintings in many styles, over more than 50 years, Vuillard constantly contrasted symbolic beauty and love to real women and men, even posing models beside a cast of the Venus of Milo. Vuillard’s paintings are full of striking, distractingly gorgeous patterns, colors and objects. One wonders what is hiding behind them. They are full of feeling and mystery, but the ‘story’ is never explained. When Frey began studying the artist, she thought that any man who lives with his mother until he is sixty has something to hide.
She found that Edouard Vuillard was so secretive that he berated himself for betraying his emotions in conversation. He was shy and reclusive, reticent but impassioned, a timid stalker and a social climbing anarchist, caught in conflicting desires. From the 1880s until the advent of World War II, using styles from academic to Pointillist to Nabi to Fauve, he abundantly revealed his love and hatred in his paintings: models pose beside a plaster torso cast from the Venus of Milo, women appear without faces, anxiety radiates from many masterpieces, while other works were left unfinished for months or years.
Drawing on insights and images from Vuillard’s still unpublished diaries, Julia Frey takes the reader into Vuillard’s private world of cabarets, experimental theatres, holiday resorts and intimate boudoirs, showing how his art reflects his fraught personal relations and his artistic struggles. Frey chooses many of his finest works, from the famous intimate interior scenes to book illustrations and poster designs, and examines his complex relationships with friends such as Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Stéphane Mallarmé, Felix Vallotton, and the women he loved: his mother and sister, penniless models and rich men’s wives.
Julia Frey is emeritus professor of French and Art History at University of Colorado, artist, printmaker and writer. Her books include the critically acclaimed biography Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life (1994), which won a PEN literary award, and Balcony View: A 9/11 Diary (published in 2011, this journal of life at Ground Zero during and after the 2001 terrorist attacks was finalist for a 2012 Indie Discovery Award for memoir). She now lives in France.
- Read Beverly Held’s review of Venus Betrayed
- See more of Vuillard’s work
