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V.J. Roux-Champion
Portrait de Ker-Xavier Roussel
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b
Lorry-les-Metz, Moselle, 10 Dec 1867; d L’Etang-la-Ville, Yvelines,
6 June 1944
French painter, printmaker and decorative artist. While still at the
Lycée Condorcet in Paris, he met Edouard Vuillard (whose sister
Marie he married in 1893), Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier; once
they had finished their studies, they all went together to the
Académie Julian, where Pierre Bonnard, Georges Lacombe, Paul Ranson
and Félix Valloton were already enrolled. Dissatisfied with the
teaching of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jules Lefebvre, they left
the Académie in 1890, two years after they had begun to meet
together as the NABIS. Roussel took part in the exhibitions at the
Cafe Volpini in 1889 and the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery in 1891.
At that time his pictures applied the rules of SYNTHETISM outlined
by Sérusier—flat planes of repeated colour encircled by dark lines
forming a harmonious rhythm; a typical example of his oil paintings
of this period is My Grandmother (1888; Paris, priv. col.). Like the
other Nabis, he did not restrict himself to easel painting but also
produced murals, stained glass and lithographs: the colour
lithograph the Dog’s Education, which he contributed to the
anthology Amours (Paris, 1892–8) published by the dealer Ambroise
Vollard, was the first of several such projects in which he
developed the Symbolist character of his work. The 12 lithographs he
contributed to another Vollard publication, Album de Paysages
(Paris, 1899), vividly expressed the pantheist vision of nature that
was to characterize his later work. |
