Translated material
Eduar Vuir: After impressionism
The French artist Eduar Vuir (1868–1941) lived a long and fruitful life. He used, as it seems, all possible picturesque techniques - butter, adhesive paints (most of all - Distempera , paint on a pole from a boiled rabbit skip), drawing, engraving.
Wuir worked in a variety of genres - he wrote interiors, portraits, still lifes, decorative panels; And he was a passionate photographer and left a huge photo archive (more than two thousand units). For many years (almost all his life) he kept diaries, and they have been preserved.
Wuyar was friends with many famous contemporaries and was not by himself glory; He was a secular man, but he was not married and lived with his mother up to her death at a very advanced age.
Eduar Vuyar is attributed to post -impressionists, but such categorization explains little in his work - primarily because she does not say anything about the artistic tasks that this artist set for herself. Why is he not He sought , so it was for the narrative; His world enchants with color, whimsical forms, but to describe that is happening In his picture, a rather meaningless task. For the most part, the quiet life of people and things “occurs” there ...
Wuyar was born in 1868 in Kuiso (Burgundy), in 1877 the family moved to Paris. Wuyar’s mother was, as we would say today, a fashion designer: she worked for large houses of a finished dress.
Wuyar studied at the Julian Academy and at the School of Fine Arts; Together with classmates in the 1890s, he created the Nabi group (literally-“prophets”). "Nabi" gravitors to decorativeness and two -dimensional images.
Vuyara, as well as group members such as Wallon and Bonnar, were called intimists; However, all three are artists with very different manners of the letter. In general, Nabi were not a “tough” group: by 1900, only the common memory united them. And for Wuyar, it was the 1890s that were an extremely important period of creativity: in fact, it was then that he took place as an artist with his vision of the world, his topics and his “handwriting”.
It must be borne in mind that the contemporaries of the young Wuyar and his friends were artists and critics of the Arts and Crafts movement-by that time it was already a general European trend in art, with an indispensable accent on the importance of applied art, aesthetic design of life in general and generally all kinds (The reader will easily remember domestic parallels).
Another source of inspiration for Wuyar and his friends from Nabi is Japanese art and, above all, the engravings of Hiroshiga (Wuyiar collected a large collection of Japanese engravings).
It is not surprising that when Tade Natanson, a connoisseur and philanthropist, began to publish the LA art magazine in 1889 Revue Blanche , he attracted Vuyar. Along with Toulouse-Latra and other contemporaries, Wuir and willingly collaborated with this magazine, which gathered the color of the then French intelligentsia.
Not a single biography of Wuyar can do without mentioning Misi Natanson, wife of Tada Natanson. Misya, nee Maria Godebsk (1872–1950), a talented pianist, studied with Gabriel Foret, but early abandoned a brilliant public career for home music. The Salon Natansonov, where Debyussi and Rael played new works, the poets dedicated poetry to Misa, and the artists painted her, was the natural environment of Wuyar’s life until 1903, when the Natanson family broke up.
At the beginning of the century, Wuir was already a rather famous and independent artist; He received a lot of orders, including decorative panels, which came into fashion, successfully worked in the technique of color engraving.
In 1904, Wuyar met closely with the galleryman and artist Jos (Joseph) Hessele and his wife Lucy. In the future - and until the end of his days - Wuyar was associated with Lucy, in essence, family relations.
Wuir was a popular portraitist; It is curious, however, that he himself insisted that he writes not portraits, but “people V their surroundings . " And in fact: the “environment” of his heroes and heroines almost always has independent value, so that the author’s artistic task, as a rule, does not come down to the portrait.
Vuyar's attention is attracted by the color of the model dress, the general flavor of the interior, the shadows on the tablecloth, the ornament of the curtains and carpets, the paintings on the walls, moreover, the thing They are depicted not as a “signs” of a profession or symbols of a social role, but as aesthetically self -valuable forms.
Here, for example, the picture of Wuyar “The fireplace” (1905). In vain, the viewer will look for a symbolic interpretation of the depicted objects: it's just fireplace In the corner of the room (judging by the edge of the white drapery that is visible on the left, this is a bedroom).
The gray smooth lining of the fireplace is released against the background of dark red wallpaper with patterns; On the fireplace is a flowering branch of some kind of shrub and wildflowers similar to chamomiles; A large bottle and smaller bottles with stickers. In the upper cut of the picture, the lower edge of the frame is visible - most likely, a mirror hangs over the fireplace; Bow, directly to the wall, sideways, a small picture is carelessly put, and on the floor, two ready -made canvases without frames are leaned against the fireplace.
The contemporary of Wuyar, the famous art critic Julius Meyer Gref, once noticed that in Wuyar’s works there is always a secret: you can have a picture in his house for at least a month, and then suddenly find “somewhere in the corner of a new face, but not just a face, but a whole story!”.
Wuyar’s special decorativeness was fully demanded by the era - decorative panels at the beginning of the twentieth century began to be used not only in public, but also in private interiors.
On the Internet, Wuyar is well represented. See, for example, [1].