Books by Raphael Bouvier

Odilon Redon

by Jodi Hauptman, Margret Stuffman, Raphael Bouvier

Odilon Redon’s oeuvre marks the threshold between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and thus also represents the interplay between tradition and innovation. Fractures and contrasts characterize his artistic development, from the black-and-white of his early, dark lithographs and works in charcoal to the veritable explosions of color in his bright pastels and oils. Bizarre monsters appear alongside heavenly creatures in a blend of dream and nightmare, nature and vision. Tending toward internalization, the mythic, sacred and biological motifs in Redon’s works underwent a turn toward the mystical, not only on account of his subject matter, but also through the aesthetic aspects of color and form. Greatly admired by contemporaries such as Paul Cézanne and Edgar Degas, Redon influenced artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Surrealists. The artist’s brilliant ideas and his contextually, technically and materially multifaceted body of work are presented in this catalogue.
Born in France to a prosperous family, Odilon Redon (1840–1916) began drawing at an early age and moved to Paris after unsuccessful forays into architecture and sculpture. Redon began his career working primarily in charcoal and lithography, before transitioning to oils and pastels in the 1890s. With his keen interest in literature, Redon found champions and collaborators in Joris-Karl Huysmans, Emile Hennequin and, most significantly, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Redon’s work achieved international renown after being exhibited at the American Armory Show in 1913.

Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape

by Raphael Bouvier, Andreas Franzke, Catherine Iselin, Florence Queneau, Sophie Webel

Jean Dubuffet is one of the most influential and versatile artists of the postwar period. With his novel aesthetic inspired by Art Brut (a term he coined), Dubuffet succeeded in breaking away from modernist conventions and redefining the concept of art, and in doing so leaving his mark on the second half of the 20th century and exercising a considerable influence on numerous young artists. Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape―the first substantial English-language Dubuffet monograph in decades―is published for a large-scale retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, with around 100 major works from all of the artist’s important creative phases. It opens with an exploration of Dubuffet’s multilayered notion of landscape, which the artist transforms into bodies, faces or objects. Dubuffet experimented with new techniques and materials, and in the process created a completely independent, fascinating pictorial cosmos. Besides important paintings and sculptures from international museums and private collections, the book also presents the ensemble of figures from Dubuffet’s stage play Coucou Bazar, his unparalleled Gesamtkunstwerk synthesis of the arts.
The French painter, sculptor and writer Jean Dubuffet (1901–85) evolved his style of art from pictures created spontaneously by children, self-taught artists and the mentally ill. In 1948 he founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut which advocated working artistically outside the bounds of art-canon norms and academic training. During this decade he developed a powerful reputation in the US, where his work was championed by Clement Greenberg and the Abstract Expressionists; he also forged close relationships with writers and artists such as Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge and Antonin Artaud. In 1962 he developed a semi-figurative, semi-abstract artistic idiom in a large series of works he called Hourloupe. In his later work Dubuffet returned to the gestural techniques of Art Informel.

Matisse Invitation to the Voyage

by Raphael Bouvier

A journey through Matisse's epoch-making practice, from his early Fauvist works to his brilliant cutouts

The volume is anchored by and named after Charles Baudelaire's 1857 poem "Invitation to the Voyage," to which Matisse repeatedly referred in his lifetime. Following Baudelaire's poem, the book is thus conceived as a journey through the work and life of Matisse, in which travel played an important role.
Published alongside the Matisse retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, this monograph sails across the many waves of the artist's practice. Beginning with his early paintings from around 1900, Invitation to the Voyage then carries the reader from his revolutionary Fauvist works of the 1910s to the sensual paintings of his Nice period in the 1930s and his legendary silhouettes of the late 1940s and 1950s. The wealth of important paintings, sculptures and silhouettes gathered here reveals the development and richness of Matisse's masterful oeuvre.
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is one of Modernism's leading exponents. By liberating color from its conventional associations and simplifying forms, he redefined painting and brought a hitherto unknown lightness to art. Matisse was also an innovator in sculpture, and in his late silhouettes he developed an unmistakable interplay between painting, drawing and sculpture.