Jewish Museum Holds Edouard Vuillard Exhibition and Five Lectures, Beg. Today, 5/7

In conjunction with the new exhibition, Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, The Jewish Museum is presenting five related lectures. Highlights include a three-pArt Daytime lecture series today, May 7, May 21 and June 4, featuring historian Jane Becker and Vuillard exhibition curator Stephen Brown; artist Lisa Yuskavage in conversation with Norman Kleeblatt, The Jewish Museum's Chief Curator, about Vuillard's influence on contemporary art, on Thursday, May 24; and a discussion of Vuillard's career with The Art Institute of Chicago curator Gloria Groom on Thursday, May 31.

Edouard Vuillard, Lucy Hessel Reading, 1913, oil on canvas. The Jewish Museum, New York: Purchase: Lore Ross Bequest.For further information regarding programs at The Jewish Museum, the public may call 212.423.3337, or visit the Museum's website at www.jewishmuseum.org.

Program Schedule

Mondays, May 7, May 21 and June 4
11:30 am
DAYTIME LECTURE SERIES
EDOUARD VUILLARD: A PAINTER AND HIS MUSES, 1890-1940

May 7
Vuillard in Turn-of-the-Century France
Jane Becker
Edouard Vuillard was a practitioner of intimism - intense exploration of domestic interiors-at the end of the 19th-century in France. His focus on interior scenes and portraits was shared by friends such as Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Felix Vallotton, as well as by fellow Parisians Eugène Carrière and Medardo Rosso. This lecture will explore Vuillard's work in relationship to his associates and discover the social and political contexts for his artistic vision.

May 21
Edouard Vuillard: From the Interiors of Montmartre to the League of Nations
Jane Becker
This lecture will focus on the full trajectory of Vuillard's career from his small interior scenes to his numerous portraits. Vuillard's subjects included his family, society figures and his dealers. His decorative panels and late large-scale commissions will also be considered.

June 4
Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940
Stephen Brown
Curator Stephen Brown will discuss the Vuillard exhibition, highlighting themes such as the milieu of patrons and muses who became the artist's subjects; the emotional response of both artist and spectator; the styles and forms employed by Vuillard; and the trajectory of this exceptional artist's career, from the 1890s to his late portraits.

Jane R. Becker, PhD, is an independent art historian specializing in late 19th- and early 20th-century European painting and sculpture. She lectures at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has published on academic and Impressionist artists, as well as Auguste Rodin, Eugène Carrière and Medardo Rosso.

Stephen Brown, PhD, is curator of Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940. He has worked on several Jewish Museum exhibitions including Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976 and The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice.

Series tickets: $45 general public; $40 Jewish Museum members
Single tickets: $20 general public; $18 Jewish Museum members

Evening Lectures

Thursday, May 24
6:30 pm
ARTIST CONVERSATION: LISA YUSKAVAGE
Contemporary artist Lisa Yuskavage and Chief Curator Norman Kleeblatt will discuss the paintings of Vuillard and his influence on artists working today.

Lisa Yuskavage's works are characterized by an ongoing engagement with the history of painting. Her oeuvre bears witness to a re-emergence of the figurative in contemporary painting and takes its point of departure in part in the immediacy and tawdriness of contemporary life spurred by the mass media and the psycho-social realm of the individual. Over the past decade, Yuskavage's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of prominent institutions worldwide, including the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2006); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2002); Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva (2001); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2000).