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The private home and family in Nabi art, Paris, 1889-1900.
Exhibition 23 October 2021 − 23 January 2022
"Private Life: Home and Family in Nabi Art, 1889-1900" explores the beautiful, enigmatic and paradoxical works of Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis and Felix Valloton, four members of the Nabi Brotherhood. The Nabis were a group of young artists inspired by the growing stream of symbolism in literature and theater. They sought to create an art of suggestion and emotion. Private Lives closely examines their paintings, prints and drawings depicting home, family and children, or what Bonnard called small pleasures and "humble acts".
Throughout their formative years in the 1890s, these four artists were closely linked in life; Bonnard, Vuillard and Denis shared a studio, and Valloton, born in Switzerland, became a close associate of all three and remained a confidant of Vuillard throughout his life. Although their styles varied, each repeatedly returned to motifs of family life, romantic love and family. However, the domestic world was not always what it seemed; hidden secrets, hidden affairs, and family tensions bubble beneath the surface, forcing the viewer to construct an unspoken narrative of these small but vivid images of interiors, gardens, and the city of Paris. Loans from the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Musée d'Orsay, as well as many additional public and private collections, will be featured in this exhibition alongside the rich holdings of Nabi materials in the Cleveland collections. Art Museum and the Portland Museum of Art.
The exhibition is curated by Mary Weaver Chapin of the Portland Art Museum and Heather Lemonedes Brown of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Private Lives is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Cleveland Museum of Art and Yale University Press. The catalogue features essays by the co-curators and vignettes by leading historians and art historians that offer insight into the private worlds of the Nabis: Francesca Berry of the University of Birmingham interrogates the Nabis and gender roles; Kathleen Kete of Trinity University reveals the importance of pets to private life in nineteenth-century France; Saskia Ooms of the Musée Montmartre describes the role of the camera in the personal world of these artists; and Francesca Brittan of Case Western Reserve University illuminates the centrality of music in constructing the bourgeois family home.
Throughout their formative years in the 1890s, these four artists were closely linked in life; Bonnard, Vuillard and Denis shared a studio, and Valloton, born in Switzerland, became a close associate of all three and remained a confidant of Vuillard throughout his life. Although their styles varied, each repeatedly returned to motifs of family life, romantic love and family. However, the domestic world was not always what it seemed; hidden secrets, hidden affairs, and family tensions bubble beneath the surface, forcing the viewer to construct an unspoken narrative of these small but vivid images of interiors, gardens, and the city of Paris. Loans from the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Musée d'Orsay, as well as many additional public and private collections, will be featured in this exhibition alongside the rich holdings of Nabi materials in the Cleveland collections. Art Museum and the Portland Museum of Art.
The exhibition is curated by Mary Weaver Chapin of the Portland Art Museum and Heather Lemonedes Brown of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Private Lives is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Cleveland Museum of Art and Yale University Press. The catalogue features essays by the co-curators and vignettes by leading historians and art historians that offer insight into the private worlds of the Nabis: Francesca Berry of the University of Birmingham interrogates the Nabis and gender roles; Kathleen Kete of Trinity University reveals the importance of pets to private life in nineteenth-century France; Saskia Ooms of the Musée Montmartre describes the role of the camera in the personal world of these artists; and Francesca Brittan of Case Western Reserve University illuminates the centrality of music in constructing the bourgeois family home.
