The Jewish Museum Presents Artist Lisa Yuskavage in Conversation with Chief Curator Norman Kleeblatt, 5/24

The Jewish Museum presents artist Lisa Yuskavage in conversation with Norman Kleeblatt, The Jewish Museum's Chief Curator, on Thursday, May 24 at 6:30 pm. They will discuss the paintings of Edouard Vuillard and his influence on artists working today. This program is offered in conjunction with the new exhibition, Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, on view at The Jewish Museum through September 23, 2012.

Tickets for the conversation are $15 general public; $12 over 65; $10 Jewish Museum members; and $5 for students. For further information regarding programs at The Jewish Museum, call 212.423.3337, or visit the Museum's website at TheJewishMuseum.org/vuillardprograms.

"There are a surprising number of contemporary artists, working in diverse media, who are channeling Vuillard," observed Norman Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator of The Jewish Museum. Yuskavage and Kleeblatt's conversation will highlight what makes Vuillard so relevant for this decade, look back at Vuillard's influence on artists of the post-World War II era, and discuss Yuskavage's own complex art.

The Intimist painter Edouard Vuillard was a major influence on Lisa Yuskavage's paintings early in her career, and he continues to inspire her work in unexpected ways. Vuillard remains a constant reference for the contemporary painter in her choices regarding composition, color and subject matter. 

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). 

Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator of The Jewish Museum, Norman Kleeblatt most recently organized the award-winning exhibition, Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976. His exhibitions have ranged widely, historically and thematically, including The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice (1987), Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities (1996), and John Singer Sargent: Portraits of the Wertheimer Family (2000). 

The art of Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) - a painter who began his career as a member of the Nabi group of avant-garde artists in Paris in the 1890s - is being celebrated at The Jewish Museum in the first major one-person, New York exhibition of the French artist's work in over twenty years. Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 includes over 50 paintings as well as a selection of prints, photographs and documents exploring the crucial role played by the patrons, dealers and muses who comprised Vuillard's circle. The exhibition examines the prominence of key players in the cultural milieu of modern Paris, many of them Jewish, and their influence on Vuillard's professional and private life. Vuillard's continuing significance from the turn of the 20th century to the onset of World War II is also being explored. Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 brings together works from public and private collections in the U.S. and Europe. A quarter of the paintings have never been exhibited publicly in America before. Vuillard's career spans fifty years. During his lifetime, Paris was the capital of the international avant-garde, the laboratory of new styles in art, music, poetry, and prose. Vuillard had unusually close and sustained relationships with his patrons; some became intimate and lifelong friends. In this glittering cultural milieu he became romantically involved with two fascinating women, Misia Natanson and Lucy Hessel, each of whom served as both patron and muse.Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 traces the entire arc of Vuillard's career, in which he pursued painterly experimentation in color, media, and ambience, especially in portraiture. Vuillard's late portraits are a revelation - among the great examples in the twentieth century and of dazzling virtuosity. Experimental, yet deeply committed to the old masters throughout his life, Vuillard maintained a continual tension in his work between tradition and modernism.

An infrared assistive listening system for the hearing impaired is available for programs in the Museum's S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Auditorium. 

Public Programs at The Jewish Museum are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Major annual support is provided by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. The stage lighting system has been funded by the Office of Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer. The audio-visual system has been funded by former New York State Assembly Member Jonathan Bing.