Please join Dr Francesca Berry (Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies, University of Birmingham) for the launch of her book, Édouard Vuillard, the Nabis, and the Politics of Domesticity (published 9 January 2025 by Bloomsbury Visual Arts, Material Culture of Art and Design):

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/%C3%A9douard-vuillard-the-nabis-and-the-politics-of-domesticity-9781350186736/

This ground-breaking book is the first to address the feminine and feminist politics of domesticity in the Intimiste art of Édouard Vuillard and the Nabi ‘brotherhood’. Personal in motif and decorative in form, Francesca Berry’s extensive historical research and skilled visual analysis reveal the social and political, sometimes even feminist, meanings of many complex artworks. Through comparative visual interpretation she argues that Vuillard attempted a profound engagement with the material conditions of feminine domesticity in cooperation with his first and most sustained audience: women. He did so, the author reveals, in artworks that explore a complex range of feminine experiences such as sexual initiation, stillbirth, illicit work, and unceasing housework. Transcending the structural repression of domesticity in histories of modernist art, this book powerfully overturns residual myths of aesthetic introspection and social retreat that for too long have been attached to Nabi Symbolism.

Francesca will be joined by Dr Claire Moran, Reader in French Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, for short papers, panel discussion, and audience Q&A on creative collaborations across gender in artistic households — those of Édouard Vuillard and Berthe Morisot.