Image: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Van Gogh Museum is publishing 'From Proof to Perfection', a book by curator Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho about four colour-lithograph series made around 1900.
Vollard commissioned the four suites from the Nabi artists Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel, with printing by the master lithographer Auguste Clot. Published around 1899, the suites each comprise twelve prints and a cover, and are described as among the finest accomplishments in artistic colour lithography.
Although the series have long been recognized as highlights of fin-de-siècle printmaking, their creative genesis has never been examined in depth. That genesis was shaped by prolonged experimentation, technical innovation and intensive collaboration between the artists and their printer.
'From Proof to Perfection' reunites preparatory drawings, trial proofs and related works in other media to reveal the artistic decisions behind the completed suites. The book situates the project within late nineteenth-century lithography, introduces its central protagonists and traces the collaborative process behind each series, combining technical insight with art-historical analysis.
Through refined tonal harmonies, layered and hermetic draughtsmanship, and an innovative use of lithography’s flatness and abstraction, the artists distilled their poetic inner worlds into an idiom that was luminous and ambiguous, distinctively modern and profoundly personal. The publication is presented as a major contribution to scholarship on the Nabis and colour lithography, as well as a tribute to a monumental achievement in modern print culture.
