Paris Collections

Edouard Vuillard and Paul Gauguin are an odd couple: one famous for his depictions of drawn-curtain bourgeois interiors, the other for bare-breasted Polynesian reveries. But the link between them is direct. In 1889, Vuillard joined a band of fellow art students who called themselves Les Nabis — “prophets” in Hebrew and Arabic. Their credo was “the simplification of form and the exaltation of color,” and their guru was Gauguin. Now, the two artists are sharing the same roof, in a superb pair of exhibits at the Grand Palais that round off a blockbuster fall art season in Paris. The lineup includes Botticelli at the Musée du Luxembourg, Bazille at the Musée Marmottan Monet, and a huge Jean Cocteau retrospective at the Pompidou Center.

With over 200 paintings, drawings, woodcuts, sculptures, photographs and sketches, Gauguin-Tahiti, the Atelier of the Tropics (Oct. 3-Jan. 19) offers brilliant confirmation of Gauguin’s primary role in the liberation of color in modern art. From his first 1891-93 voyage alone, the show brings together 15 major works now scattered around the world, including Woman With a Mango from Baltimore; the audacious Hail Mary — a Tahitian Madonna in a red sarong with the child astride one shoulder — from New York; Philadelphia’s stunning There is the Temple, with its daffodil hillside against a cerulean sky, and others from Copenhagen, Buffalo, Madrid, Moscow, Paris and St. Petersburg. The result is a spellbinding symphony of color that’s not likely to be seen again for many years — and that’s only the first half of the show. The second half, and the remarkable sculpture collection, are just as rich, almost to the end, when the sick and penniless 54-year-old artist was running out of strength, canvas, paint, alcohol, morphine and time.

The show’s keynote is the 1.39-m-by-3.75-m Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1898) from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Intended as Gauguin’s final testament, the panorama “reads” from right to left, from infancy to death. The despairing figure of old age, seated with head in hands, echoes the position of a Peruvian mummy Gauguin saw at the Paris Exposition of 1889, the colonial extravaganza that was one of the catalysts for his Tahitian wanderlust. The piece will return home when the show moves to Boston in February.

Vuillard is the most comprehensive exhibit ever dedicated to the artist, with 230 paintings, drawings, photographs and theatrical posters produced between the late 1880s and the 1930s. The young artist’s red-orange beard provides a perfect Nabi foil in the Octagonal Self-Portrait that opens the show, paired with shocking yellow hair to frame his half-shadowed face. The small Elegant Woman is a masterful bit of minimalism — a column of black skirt, a blob of pink blouse and a swish of black hat with carnation-red sprigs against a brilliant yellow and orange doorway. But Vuillard was a Nabi colorist more out of friendship than conviction, and even the dramatic Grandmother Michaud in Silhouette, with its imposing seated figure silhouetted against a carmine table and a molten-gold wall, points the way to the more subdued domestic interiors that would be his true forte.

If color was the Nabi language, Vuillard’s hues were the soft murmur of parlor conversation in the burnished glow of lamplight. The show features more than two dozen of his interior scenes, masterfully cluttered with contrasting patterns of rugs, wallpapers, curtains and clothing, building up to the superb 1897 Grand Interior With Six Figures. Like Gauguin, Vuillard firmly believed in making no distinction between the fine and decorative arts. Among a delightful series of decorative works, eight of Vuillard’s nine Public Gardens panels, reunited for the first time since 1929, provide the show with a spectacular centerpiece, and a welcome breath of outdoor air. The show will remain in Paris until Jan. 5, before moving to London’s Royal Academy of Arts from Jan. 31-April 18.

Botticelli, from Lorenzo the Magnificent to Savonarola (Oct. 1-Feb. 22) assembles 20 Botticelli paintings and six drawings, plus a dozen works by contemporaries like Filippo Lippi and Piero di Cosimo, all working during the late 15th century, when Florence blossomed in the humanist atmosphere of the Medici court before being swallowed up by the fire-and-brimstone fervor of the Dominican monk Savonarola. Along with several of Botticelli’s delicate Madonnas, the show’s highlights include a colored-ink Map of the Inferno illustration for Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and St. Augustine in his cell, a fresco for Florence’s Ognissanti church later transposed to canvas. It will go to Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi (March 10-July 11) after the Paris run.

The scion of a wealthy Montpellier family, the ebullient young Impressionist painter Frédéric Bazille shared his ateliers and his allowance with Monet and Renoir and painted with Sisley (while Renoir painted him in the act). His 1870 The Condamine Street Atelier portrayed his friends Manet, Monet, Maitre, Renoir and writer Emile Zola while his own tall, lanky figure was painted in by Manet. That same year, the 29-year-old Bazille volunteered and was killed in combat in the Franco-Prussian War. Frédéric Bazille (Oct. 1-Jan. 18) is the first retrospective of his brief career to appear in Paris since 1950. With such accomplished paintings as the big, crystalline Family Reunion and the sensuous, almost Orientalist, La Toilette this small show makes clear how much extraordinary promise was lost with Bazille’s early death.

Jean Cocteau was a jack-of-all-trades — poet, playwright, novelist, artist, designer, filmmaker and quintessential Parisian socialite — whose career covered the decades from 1909 to 1963. Jean Cocteau, Spanning the Century, which opened last week and runs until Jan. 5 before moving to Montreal, is, like the man, somewhere in the surrealist realm of wretched excess, offering more than 700 drawings, photographs, collages, film clips, set and costume designs, letters, manuscripts and bits of memorabilia. There are portraits of Cocteau by Jacques-Emile Blanche, Man Ray, Picasso and Andy Warhol, and portraits by Cocteau of Modigliani, Picasso and Kisling, each done in the sitter’s own style. It’s all in dire need of editing, but remains surprisingly good entertainment, which is appropriate for a man who had more than one talent to amuse.