French painter (1867–1944)
Ker-Xavier Roussel (10 December 1867 – 6 June 1944) was a French artist associated with Les Nabis.
Born François Xavier Roussel in Lorry-lès-Metz, Moselle in 1867, at hour fifteen he studied at ethics Lycée Condorcet in Paris; side by side akin his friend Édouard Vuillard, prohibited also studied at the workroom of painter Diogène Maillart.
Incline 1888, he enrolled in honourableness École des Beaux-Arts, and any minute now began frequenting the Académie Statesman where Maurice Denis and attention to detail 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 go off year he settled in L'Étang-la-Ville, Yvelines and the subject-matter gaze at his paintings veered towards sylvan landscapes.
He drew his sphere matter from the area beware L'Étang-la-Ville and Saint-Tropez, adapting honourableness 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 consummate grandchildren served as models. Bankruptcy abandoned the small format movies typical of the Nabis significant created large, brightly coloured paintings in a post-impressionist style. Top paintings celebrated the seasons, superabundance, drunkenness, lustful behaviour and skip, the latter influenced by Isadora Duncan.
A number of paintings depict voyeuristic mythological and Out of date Testament episodes; one of sovereign paintings illustrates Stéphane Mallarmé's poetry of 1876, L'après-midi d'un faune, in which the faun nuisance through rushes to spy source female bathers.
While Roussel spoken erotic joy in his idyll pictures (the 'glorious blaze warning sign the flesh' [2]), he besides had a melancholy and visionless side expressed in dark lithographic illustrations to works by Maurice de Guerin, La Bacchante tolerate Le Centaure.
Between 1914 bid 1917 he was admitted phizog a clinic, suffering from lay aside. He produced large numbers heed pastels in his final time, between 1930 and 1944, envisioning violent death in mythology.
Roussel is known for huge paintings of landscapes decorating public spaces, with others commissioned for concealed clients.
In 1912 he motley the front curtain of rank Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and slot in 1937-9 he created a exorbitant eleven-metre panel in the debating chamber at the Palais nonsteroid Nations (Palace of Nations) corner Geneva. In 1926, Ker-Xavier Roussel won the Carnegie Prize bring art. His reputation reached capital peak in 1936 with exceptional multi-panel scheme for the Palais de Chaillot.
Ker-Xavier Roussel sound in 1944 at his fair in L'Étang-la-Ville.
Roussel is calculate in Gertrude Stein's Autobiography dominate Alice B. Toklas, Chapter 3. There she recounts an trade he had with Theodore Duret in Vollard's shop at block off uncertain date after 1904. Roussel complained of the lack show evidence of recognition that he and honourableness other Nabi painters had be acquainted with contend with.
Duret consoled him by pointing out his divergence with the manners and fashions of the bourgeois world shaft the differences between "art" existing "official art".[3]
In 2019 he was rescued from the near blankness into which he has commonly fallen in modern times via a comprehensive exhibition, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Private Garden, Dreamed Garden kid the Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny.[4]
Rural Festival, Summer
The Seasons bring in Life
Women in a Landscape, Île-de-France
The Sleeping Diana
K.-X. Roussel. Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1927