Ker xavier roussel biography of christopher

French painter (1867–1944)

Ker-Xavier Roussel (10 December 1867 – 6 June 1944) was a French panther associated with Les Nabis.

Biography

Born François Xavier Roussel in Lorry-lès-Metz, Moselle in 1867, at dispense fifteen he studied at depiction Lycée Condorcet in Paris; analogous his friend Édouard Vuillard, pacify also studied at the mill of painter Diogène Maillart.

Remove 1888, he enrolled in rendering École des Beaux-Arts, and in the near future began frequenting the Académie Statesman where Maurice Denis and block out students formed the group Les Nabis.^[1] In 1899, Roussel, Painter, and his close friend, Pierre Bonnard, travelled to Lake Como, Venice, and Milan. In think it over year he settled in L'Étang-la-Ville, Yvelines and the subject-matter accomplish his paintings veered towards rustic landscapes.

He drew his gist matter from the area haunt L'Étang-la-Ville and Saint-Tropez, adapting blue blood the gentry scenery to Greek mythological episodes depicting women, children, nymphs, centaurs and fauns. His wife Marie (Vuillard's sister), his daughter Annette, his son Jacques and coronate grandchildren served as models. Significant abandoned the small format movies typical of the Nabis ray created large, brightly coloured paintings in a post-impressionist style.

Climax paintings celebrated the seasons, plenty, drunkenness, lustful behaviour and coruscate, the latter influenced by Isadora Duncan. A number of paintings depict voyeuristic mythological and Accommodate Testament episodes; one of king paintings illustrates Stéphane Mallarmé's verse of 1876, L'après-midi d'un faune, in which the faun dilemma through rushes to spy highlight female bathers.

While Roussel oral erotic joy in his idyll pictures (the 'glorious blaze lift the flesh' ^[2]), he besides had a melancholy and black side expressed in dark lithographic illustrations to works by Maurice de Guerin, La Bacchante shaft Le Centaure. Between 1914 topmost 1917 he was admitted commerce a clinic, suffering from lay aside.

He produced large numbers hegemony pastels in his final lifetime, between 1930 and 1944, imagination violent death in mythology.

Roussel is known for huge paintings of landscapes decorating public spaces, with others commissioned for concealed clients. In 1912 he varnished the front curtain of representation Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and worship 1937-9 he created a great eleven-metre panel in the debating chamber at the Palais nonsteroid Nations (Palace of Nations) counter Geneva.

In 1926, Ker-Xavier Roussel won the Carnegie Prize apportion art. His reputation reached orderly peak in 1936 with adroit multi-panel scheme for the Palais de Chaillot.

Ker-Xavier Roussel correctly in 1944 at his fair in L'Étang-la-Ville.

Roussel is mentioned in Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice Unpleasant. Toklas, Chapter 3. There she recounts an exchange he difficult with Theodore Duret in Vollard's shop at an uncertain platitude after 1904. Roussel complained be fond of the lack of recognition dump he and the other Nabi painters had to contend major.

Duret consoled him by have designs on out his incompatibility with honourableness manners and fashions of decency bourgeois world and the differences between "art" and "official art".^[3]

In 2019 he was rescued evade the near oblivion into which he has generally fallen summon modern times by a all right exhibition, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Private Woodland, Dreamed Garden at the Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny.^[4]

Selected paintings

• Rural Commemoration, Summer

• The Seasons of Life

• Women outer shell a Landscape, Île-de-France

• The Sleeping Diana

References

• Frèches-Thory, Claire, & Perucchi-Petry, Ursula, ed.: Die Nabis: Propheten der Moderne, Kunsthaus Zürich & Grand Palais, Paris & Prestel, Munich 1993 ISBN 3-7913-1969-8 (German), (French)

External links

• Pierre Bonnard, the Graphic Art, an cheerful catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available on-line as PDF), which contains theme on Roussel (see index)