The Post-impressionists: Cézanne by 
The Post-Impressionists: Gauguin by 
The Post-Impressionists: Munch by 
The Post-impressionists: Rousseau by 
The Post-Impressionists: Toulouse-Lautrec by 
The Post-impressionists: Van Gogh by 
Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model & Her Own Desire by
Eunice Lipton was a fledging art historian when she first became intrigued by Victorine Meurent, the nineteenth-century model who appeared in Edouard Manet's most famous paintings, only to vanish from history in a haze of degrading hearsay. But had this bold and spirited beauty really descended into prostitution, drunkenness, and early death--or did her life, hidden from history, take a different course altogether? Eunice Lipton's search for the answer combines the suspense of a detective story with the revelatory power of art, peeling off layers of lies to reveal startling truths about Victorine Meurent--and about Lipton herself.
American Impressionism by 
American Impressionism and Realism: A Landmark Exhibition from the Met by 
American Impressionist Masterpieces by 
Berthe Morisot by
Of the six Impressionist painters whose first exhibition scandalized and fascinated Paris in 1874, Berthe Morisot was the only woman. She reached a pinnacle of artistic achievement despite the restraints society placed on her sex, adroitly combining her artistic ambitions with a rewarding family life. Anne Higonnet brings fully to life an accomplished artist and her world.
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) by
Camille Pissarro was a pivotal figure of Impressionism, perhaps the world's most famous art movement. He also tackled different forms of Neoimpressionism, while maintaining very personal characteristics in his art all throughout his life. A key figure in the Impressionist movement and a participant in every one of their exhibitions, Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was considered the patriarch of the group. Born in the Danish West Indies, he travelled to Venezuela, and studied with Corot in France, who influencedhis early works and who triggered his passion to paint outdoors. His style evolved as he progressed in life, influenced too by the debateswith his fellow-painters.After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he moved to England, but his style of painting, which was a forerunnerof the"Impressionism", did not do very well.Like Degas, Pissarro was a great draughtsman. His representations of rural and urban life are often closely intertwined with his social concerns and anarchist beliefs. A quintessential artist ahead of his time, Pissaro sold very few works during his lifetime.
Cassatt by
Mary was born in Pittsburgh. Her father was a banker of liberal educational ideas and the entire family appears to have been sympathetic to French culture. Mary was no more than five or six years old when she first saw Paris, and she was still in her teens when she decided to become a painter. She went to Italy, on to Antwerp, then to Rome, andfinally returned to Paris where in 1874, she permanently settled. In 1872, Cassatt sent her first work to the Salon, others followed in the succeeding years until 1875, when a portrait of her sister was rejected. She divined that the jury had not been satisfied with the background, so she re-painted it several times until, in the next Salon, the same portrait was accepted. At this moment Degas asked her to exhibit with him and his friends, the Impressionist Group, then rising into view, and she accepted with joy. She admired Manet, Courbet and Degas, and hated conventional art. Cassatt's biographer stressed the intellectuality and sentiment apparent in her work, as well as the emotion and distinction with which she has painted her favourite models: babies and their mothers. He then speaks of her predominant interest in draughtsmanship and her gift for linear pattern, a gift greatly strengthened by her study of Japanese art and her emulation of its style in the colour prints she made. While her style may partake of the style of others, her draughtsmanship, her composition, her light, and her colour are, indeed, her own. There are qualities of tenderness in her work which could have been put there, perhaps, only by a woman. The qualities which make her work of lasting value are those put there by an outstanding painter.
Cezanne and Beyond by
With essays by Roberta Bernstein, Yve-Alain Bois, Jean-François Chevrier, John Elderfield, John Golding, Christopher Green, Jennie Hirsh, Joop M. Joosten, Anabelle Kienle, Albert Kostenevich, Carolyn Lanchner, Mark D. Mitchell, Joseph J. Rishel, Katherine Sachs, Richard Shiff, Robert Storr, and Michael R. Taylor. The famous proclamation that Cézanne "is the father of us all" has been attributed to both Matisse and Picasso, and his influence has extended to a great diversity of artists thereafter. In this monumental book, a team of distinguished scholars offers the most comprehensive view to date on Cézanne's vital role in shaping European and American art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.
More than forty paintings and ten works on paper by Cézanne "many of his best-known and most admired" are juxtaposed throughout the catalogue with approximately 120 works by a range of modern and contemporary artists who found in Cézanne a central inspiration. They include Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Charles Demuth, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Marsden Hartley, Fernand Léger, Brice Marden, Piet Mondrian, Giorgio Morandi, Liubov Popova, and Jeff Wall, as well as Picasso, Matisse, Johns, and Kelly. The essays offer insights into the "conversation" between Cézanne and each of these other artists, who stand on a par with his greatness. Among its many features, this book contains conceptual overviews by Richard Shiff and Robert Storr as well as an illustrated chronology.
Cezanne and Modernism by
This book explores how traditional relations among the arts have changed in our time, focusing on the radical transformation of Paul Cezanne.
Cezanne in Provence by 
Childe Hassam: American Impressionist by
Childe Hassam (1859-1935) created an immense body of work in the Impressionist style, comprising oil paintings, watercolours, pastels, and prints. His distinctive and enchanting images, with their focus on effects of colour and light, are widely admired and are included in the collections of every major museum in the United States. In this handsomely illustrated book, the authors, all experts in the field, take a fresh look at Hassam's responses to his vibrant and complicated era. Their texts study his striking portrayals of cities and country sites in America and Europe. Also explored are his late works - those completed after 1900 - when Hassam felt increasingly challenged by both modern life and modern art. These include tranquil interior vignettes, iconic images of New England churches, and his great Flag series. Hampton as well as his travels are covered in fresh and insightful chapters. Essays on more specific subjects focus on Hassam's pride in his ancestry; his interest in architecture, gardens and allegorical themes; his accomplishments as a watercolourist and printmaker; his frames; the marketing of his art; and the contemporary critical response to it. The book, which also contains a chronology of Hassam's career and a comprehensive exhibition chronology, accompanies the first major museum retrospective of Hassam's works since 1972. Childe Hassam, American Impressionist examines this great artist's work in the context of his credo that the man who will go down to posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him.
Christ of the Coal Yards: A Critical Biography of Vincent van Gogh by
No one heard the shot. No one ever found the gun. It was Sunday, July 27, 1890. Vincent had recently finished Wheatfield with Crows, thought to be his final painting, one that he described as representing vast fields of wheat beneath troubled skies, one where he said in a letter he meant to send to Theo I did not need to go out of my way to try to express cheerlessness and extreme loneliness. The letter never got sent, but was found stuffed in his smock. That morning, as usual, he walked out into the wheat fields with his easel, brushes, tubes of color and folding stool, perhaps hoping to reach his destination before the gang of local boys and girls were up and able to tease him and throw tomatoes. Le Crau, a wide plain of ripe grain, fields of citron, yellow, tan, and ochre, spread out beneath the bright Provencal sun. It's safe to assume he heard the cicadas singing loudly, the swiping swishes of the farmers' scythes already cutting through the rich wheat stalks, the gusts of wind whispering through the olive branches. Driven and filled with energy for months, he had been quickly, with an assurance that overcame and perhaps even came from his doubts and struggles, putting his own dramatic visions on canvas after canvas. But today he did not go into the fields to paint, or, perhaps, in the beginning he did, perhaps in the morning that was his intention. No one will ever know. He said he brought the revolver to frighten off the crows. Possibly that was his original intention when he included it with his lunch of bread and milk. In the end it's probably not relevant, except for the endless attempts to analyze him, to dig into his complex psyche, at once brilliant and yet impelled to self-destruction. The Ravoux family were sitting on the terrace of their cafe when he returned, a bit concerned because he was late, but not overly so. When he finally appeared, his walk was more uneven than usual, and he held his hand over his stomach. Monsieur Vincent, Mrs. Ravoux said, we were worried, we are glad to see you come. Has anything bad happened? No, but I . . . he left his reply unfinished as he passed inside. Mr. Ravoux followed him upstairs, where he found him sitting on his bed, facing the wall. I wanted to kill myself. This book is a critical examination of Vincent van Gogh that offers insights into his life, his religious beliefs, his relationships with women, and, of course, his paintings. It includes discussions of his letters, and responds to many of the previous works about him, dispelling some of the myths that have no foundation and pointing out how many of the claims made about him and many of the popular beliefs that have grown up around him are at best guesswork. It explores psychological, neurological, theological, philosophical, aesthetic, and historical paradigms for comprehending his enigmatic and enticing personality.
Claude Monet by
For Claude Monet the designation 'impressionist' always remained a source of pride. In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true impressionist to the end of his very long life. He was so by deep conviction, and for his Impressionism he may have sacrificed many other opportunities that his enormous talent held out to him. Monet did not paint classical compositions with figures, and he did not become a portraitist, although his professional training included those skills. He chose a single genre for himself, landscape painting, and in that he achieved a degree of perfection none of his contemporaries managed to attain. Yet the little boy began by drawing caricatures. Boudin advised Monet to stop doing caricatures and to take up landscapes instead. The sea, the sky, animals, people, and trees are beautiful in the exact state in which nature created them - surrounded by air and light. Indeed, it was Boudin who passed on to Monet his conviction of the importance of working in the open air, which Monet would in turn transmit to his impressionist friends. Monet did not want to enrol at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He chose to attend a private school, L'Académie Suisse, established by an ex-model on the Quai d'Orfèvres near the Pont Saint-Michel. One could draw and paint from a live model there for a modest fee. This was where Monet met the future impressionist Camille Pissarro. Later in Gleyre's studio, Monet met Auguste Renoir Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. Monet considered it very important that Boudin be introduced to his new friends. He also told his friends of another painter he had found in Normandy. This was the remarkable Dutchman Jongkind. His landscapes were saturated with colour, and their sincerity, at times even their naïveté, was combined with subtle observation of the Normandy shore's variable nature. At this time Monet's landscapes were not yet characterized by great richness of colour. Rather, they recalled the tonalities of paintings by the Barbizon artists, and Boudin's seascapes. He composed a range of colour based on yellow-brown or blue-grey. At the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877 Monet presented a series of paintings for the first time: seven views of the Saint-Lazare train station. He selected them from among twelve he had painted at the station. This motif in Monet's work is in line not only with Manet's Chemin de fer (The Railway) and with his own landscapes featuring trains and stations at Argenteuil, but also with a trend that surfaced after the railways first began to appear. In 1883, Monet had bought a house in the village of Giverny, near the little town of Vernon. At Giverny, series painting became one of his chief working procedures. Meadows became his permanent workplace. When a journalist, who had come from Vétheuil to interview Monet, asked him where his studio was, the painter answered, "My studio! I've never had a studio, and I can't see why one would lock oneself up in a room. To draw, yes - to paint, no". Then, broadly gesturing towards the Seine, the hills, and the silhouette of the little town, he declared, "There's my real studio."Monet began to go to London in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He began all his London paintings working directly from nature, but completed many of them afterwards, at Giverny. The series formed an indivisible whole, and the painter had to work on all his canvases at one time. A friend of Monet's, the writer Octave Mirbeau, wrote that he had accomplished a miracle. With the help of colours he had succeeded in recreating on the canvas something almost impossible to capture: he was reproducing sunlight, enriching it with an infinite number of reflections. Alone among the impressionists, Claude Monet took an almost scientific study of the possibilities of colour to its limits; it is unlikely that one could have gone any further in that direction.
Claude Monet by
For Claude Monet the designation 'impressionist' always remained a source of pride. In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true impressionist to the end of his very long life. He was so by deep conviction, and for his Impressionism he may have sacrificed many other opportunities that his enormous talent held out to him. Monet did not paint classical compositions with figures, and he did not become a portraitist, although his professional training included those skills. He chose a single genre for himself, landscape painting, and in that he achieved a degree of perfection none of his contemporaries managed to attain. Yet the little boy began by drawing caricatures. Boudin advised Monet to stop doing caricatures and to take up landscapes instead. The sea, the sky, animals, people, and trees are beautiful in the exact state in which nature created them - surrounded by air and light. Indeed, it was Boudin who passed on to Monet his conviction of the importance of working in the open air, which Monet would in turn transmit to his impressionist friends. Monet did not want to enrol at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He chose to attend a private school, L'Académie Suisse, established by an ex-model on the Quai d'Orfèvres near the Pont Saint-Michel. One could draw and paint from a live model there for a modest fee. This was where Monet met the future impressionist Camille Pissarro. Later in Gleyre's studio, Monet met Auguste Renoir Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. Monet considered it very important that Boudin be introduced to his new friends. He also told his friends of another painter he had found in Normandy. This was the remarkable Dutchman Jongkind. His landscapes were saturated with colour, and their sincerity, at times even their naïveté, was combined with subtle observation of the Normandy shore's variable nature. At this time Monet's landscapes were not yet characterized by great richness of colour. Rather, they recalled the tonalities of paintings by the Barbizon artists, and Boudin's seascapes. He composed a range of colour based on yellow-brown or blue-grey. At the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877 Monet presented a series of paintings for the first time: seven views of the Saint-Lazare train station. He selected them from among twelve he had painted at the station. This motif in Monet's work is in line not only with Manet's Chemin de fer (The Railway) and with his own landscapes featuring trains and stations at Argenteuil, but also with a trend that surfaced after the railways first began to appear. In 1883, Monet had bought a house in the village of Giverny, near the little town of Vernon. At Giverny, series painting became one of his chief working procedures. Meadows became his permanent workplace. When a journalist, who had come from Vétheuil to interview Monet, asked him where his studio was, the painter answered, "My studio! I've never had a studio, and I can't see why one would lock oneself up in a room. To draw, yes - to paint, no". Then, broadly gesturing towards the Seine, the hills, and the silhouette of the little town, he declared, "There's my real studio."Monet began to go to London in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He began all his London paintings working directly from nature, but completed many of them afterwards, at Giverny. The series formed an indivisible whole, and the painter had to work on all his canvases at one time. A friend of Monet's, the writer Octave Mirbeau, wrote that he had accomplished a miracle. With the help of colours he had succeeded in recreating on the canvas something almost impossible to capture: he was reproducing sunlight, enriching it with an infinite number of reflections. Alone among the impressionists, Claude Monet took an almost scientific study of the possibilities of colour to its limits; it is unlikely that one could have gone any further in that direction.
Claude Monet: the Water-lilies and other Writings on Art by
In 1928, the former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau published Claude Monet: Les Nymphéas (The Water-Lilies), a memoir of his longtime friend. Bruce Michelson has produced a new English translation, presented here with useful notes and illustrations.Michelson's translations of three short essays on art by Clemenceau, originally published by La Justice in the late XIX c., are included as appendices.
Claude Monet: Vol 2 by
With Impression, Sunrise, exhibited in 1874, Claude Monet (18401926) took part in thecreation of the Impressionist movement that introduced the 19th century to modern art. All his life, he captured natural movements around him and translated them into visual sensations. A complex man and an exceptional artist, Monet is internationally famous for his poetic paintings of waterlilies and beautiful landscapes. He leaves behind the most wellknown masterpieces that still fascinate art lovers all over the world. In this twovolume illustrated work, Natalia Brodskaya and Nina Kalitina invite us on a journey across time to discover the history of Impressionism and Monet; a movement and an artist forever bound together. Specialists of 19th and 20th century art, the authors shed light on the birth of modernity in art, a true revolution responsible for the thriving art scene of the 20th century. The second volume covers Monet's age of maturity, the pinnacle and the crises of his extremely long and productive career. Nathalia Brodskaia, will introduce his method of painting the same scene many times to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. The reader will share the author's emotion about Monet's lily ponds and his famous water lilies. "Old man Monet," as Willem de Kooning called him, had become the wise mentor, passing on his insights to generations of artists. He was the initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style, of which the author explains every aspect in detail.
Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art by
This study analyzes the impact of color-making technologies on the visual culture of nineteenth-century France, from the early commercialization of synthetic dyes to the Lumière brothers' perfection of the autochrome color photography process. Focusing on Impressionist art, Laura Anne Kalba examines the importance of dyes produced in the second half of the nineteenth century to the vision of artists such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet. The proliferation of vibrant new colors in France during this time challenged popular understandings of realism, abstraction, and fantasy in the realms of fine art and popular culture. More than simply adding a touch of spectacle to everyday life, Kalba shows, these bright, varied colors came to define the development of a consumer culture increasingly based on the sensual appeal of color. Impressionism-emerging at a time when inexpensively produced color functioned as one of the principal means by and through which people understood modes of visual perception and signification-mirrored and mediated this change, shaping the ways in which people made sense of both modern life and modern art. Demonstrating the central importance of color history and technologies to the study of visuality, Color in the Age of Impressionism adds a dynamic new layer to our understanding of visual and material culture.
Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors by
In the last years of his life, Paul Cezanne produced a stunning series of watercolours, many of them still lifes. Still Life with Blue Pot is one of these late masterpieces; it is now in the collection of the Getty Museum. In Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong places this great painting within the context of Cezanne's artistic and psychological development and of the history of the genre of still life in France. Still life - like the medium of watercolour - was traditionally considered to be low in the hierarchy of French academic painting. watercolours that contained echoes of grand landscapes and even historical paintings in the manner of Poussin - the highest of classical art forms. In so doing, he charged his still lifes with new meanings; both in terms of his own notoriously difficult personality and in the way he used the genre to explore the very process of looking at, and creating, art. Carol Armstrong's study - published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum from October 12, 2004 to January 2, 2005 - is a fascinating exploration of the brilliant watercolour paintings that brought Cezanne's career to a complex, and triumphant, conclusion. The book includes new photographic studies of the Getty's painting that allow the reader to encounter this great watercolour as never before - in its full richness and detail.
Degas: The Man and his Art by 
Edgar Degas by
Degas was closest to Renoir in the impressionist's circle, for both favoured the animated Parisian life of their day as a motif in their paintings. Degas did not attend Gleyre's studio; most likely he first met the future impressionists at the Café Guerbois. He started his apprenticeship in 1853 at the studio of Louis-Ernest Barrias and, beginning in 1854, studied under Louis Lamothe, who revered Ingres above all others, and transmitted his adoration for this master to Edgar Degas. Starting in 1854 Degas travelled frequently to Italy: first to Naples, where he made the acquaintance of his numerous cousins, and then to Rome and Florence, where he copied tirelessly from the Old Masters. His drawings and sketches already revealed very clear preferences: Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Mantegna, but also Benozzo Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio, Titian, Fra Angelico, Uccello, and Botticelli. During the 1860s and 1870s he became a painter of racecourses, horses and jockeys. His fabulous painter's memory retained the particularities of movement of horses wherever he saw them. After his first rather complex compositions depicting racecourses, Degas learned the art of translating the nobility and elegance of horses, their nervous movements, and the formal beauty of their musculature. Around the middle of the 1860s Degas made yet another discovery. In 1866 he painted his first composition with ballet as a subject, Mademoiselle Fiocre dans le ballet de la Source (Mademoiselle Fiocre in the Ballet 'The Spring') (New York, Brooklyn Museum). Degas had always been a devotee of the theatre, but from now on it would become more and more the focus of his art. Degas' first painting devoted solely to the ballet was Le Foyer de la danse à l'Opéra de la rue Le Peletier (The Dancing Anteroom at the Opera on Rue Le Peletier) (Paris, Musée d'Orsay). In a carefully constructed composition, with groups of figures balancing one another to the left and the right, each ballet dancer is involved in her own activity, each one is moving in a separate manner from the others. Extended observation and an immense number of sketches were essential to executing such a task. This is why Degas moved from the theatre on to the rehearsal halls, where the dancers practised and took their lessons. This was how Degas arrived at the second sphere of that immediate, everyday life that was to interest him. The ballet would remain his passion until the end of his days.
Edgar Degas: Waiting by
Degas's pastel Waiting (L'Attente) is an extraordinary object in its craftsmanship and color, as well as in the emotional pull it exerts upon the viewer. But in addition to these, which we expect from a great work of art, Waiting also has an aura of ambiguity and even mystery. This study look at both its aesthetic qualities and the deeper questions that it arouses. Part of the Getty Museum Studies on Art series, the book offers a detailed discussion of Degas's pastel as well as an analysis of the broader context in which the work was created.
Edvard Munch by
Edvard Munch (1863-1944), a Norwegian painter involved in Expressionism, was so attached to his work that he called his paintings his children, which is rather unsurprising given that they were deeply personal. Indeed, Munch expressed much of his own inner turmoil through his art, particularly in the earlier part of his career. He painted not what he saw, but what he felt when he saw it, allowing his morbidity and illness to imbue his paintings with a sombre tone. These darker paintings, including his famous The Scream, endured and would greatly influence German Expressionism.
Expressionism in Germany and France: From van Gogh to Kandinsky by
This groundbreaking examination of the cultural exchange between early 20th century French and German artists illuminates new ways of understanding the development of Expressionism. Although the Expressionist movement is widely considered to have arisen out of a German aesthetic, it was actually as much a result of German artists' exposure to artists living and working in France, such as van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque. In fact, in its early days, Expressionism was assigned no specific nationality at all. This fascinating book focuses on the key exhibitions, galleries, and museum directors that helped disseminate styles and techniques of revolutionary French artists throughout Germany. Included here are French masterpieces seen not only by German artists in Paris but also in important galleries, exhibitions, and private collections in Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Weimar, and other cities. More than 100 paintings and works on paper are grouped to encourage an understanding of artistic influence and interchange. The volume also reflects new scholarship on issues of French-German relations and contributes to our understanding of the ways the visual arts are influenced by ideas of national identity and cultural heritage. 200 illustrations
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture by
A Pulitzer Prize Winner and landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born. "Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsmen. It is also a moving vindication of historical study itself, in the face of modernism's defiant suggestion that history is obsolete." -- David A. Hollinger, History Book Club Review "Each of [the seven separate studies] can be read separately....Yet they are so artfully designed and integrated that one who reads them in order is impressed by the book's wholeness and the momentum of its argument." -- Gordon A. Craig, The New Republic "A profound work...on one of the most important chapters of modern intellectual history" -- H.R. Trevor-Roper, front page, The New York Times Book Review "Invaluable to the social and political historian...as well as to those more concerned with the arts" -- John Willett, The New York Review of Books "A work of original synthesis and scholarship. Engrossing." -- Newsweek
Gauguin by
Paul Gauguin was first a sailor, then a successful stockbroker in Paris. In 1874 he began to paint at weekends as a Sunday painter. Nine years later, after a stock-market crash, he felt confident of his ability to earn a living for his family by painting and he resigned his position and took up the painter's brush full time. Following the lead of Cézanne, Gauguin painted still-lifes from the very beginning of his artistic career. He even owned a still-life by Cézanne, which is shown in Gauguin's painting Portrait of Marie Lagadu. The year 1891 was crucial for Gauguin. In that year he left France for Tahiti, where he stayed till 1893. This stay in Tahiti determined his future life and career, for in 1895, after a sojourn in France, he returned there for good. In Tahiti, Gauguin discovered primitive art, with its flat forms and violent colours, belonging to an untamed nature. With absolute sincerity, he transferred them onto his canvas. His paintings from then on reflected this style: a radical simplification of drawing; brilliant, pure, bright colours; an ornamental type composition; and a deliberate flatness of planes. Gauguin termed this style "synthetic symbolism".
Georges Seurat (1859-1891) by
Universally celebrated for the intricacy of his pointillist canvases, Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was a painter whose stunning union of art and science produced uniquely compelling results. Seurat's intricate paintings could take years to complete, with the magnificent results impressing the viewer with both their scientific complexity and visual impact. His Un Dimanche Après-Midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte (Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte) has held its place among the most treasured and distinguished pieces of 20th-century art. Klaus H. Carl offers readers an intriguing glimpse into the detailed scientific technique behind Seurat's pointillist masterpieces.
Georges Seurat: (1859-1891) by
Universally celebrated for the intricacy of his pointillist canvases, Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was a painter whose stunning union of art and science produced uniquely compelling results. Seurat's intricate paintings could take years to complete, with the magnificent results impressing the viewer with both their scientific complexity and visual impact. His Un Dimanche Après-Midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte (Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte) has held its place among the most treasured and distinguished pieces of 20th-century art. Klaus H. Carl offers readers an intriguing glimpse into the detailed scientific technique behind Seurat's pointillist masterpieces.
Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision by
This revelatory study of Georges Seurat (1859-1891) explores the artist's profound interest in theories of visual perception and analyzes how they influenced his celebrated seascape, urban, and suburban scenes. While Seurat is known for his innovative use of color theory to develop his pointillist technique, this book is the first to underscore the centrality of diverse ideas about vision to his seascapes, figural paintings, and drawings. Michelle Foa highlights the importance of the scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, whose work on the physiology of vision directly shaped the artist's approach. Foa contends that Seurat's body of work constitutes a far-reaching investigation into various modes of visual engagement with the world and into the different states of mind that visual experiences can produce. Foa's analysis also brings to light Seurat's sustained exploration of long-standing and new forms of illusionism in art. Beautifully illustrated with more than 140 paintings and drawings, this book serves as an essential reference on Seurat.
Graphic Works of Edvard Munch by
90 haunting, evocative prints by first major Expressionist artist and one of the greatest graphic artists of his time: The Scream, Anxiety, Death Chamber, The Kiss, Madonna, On the Jetty, Picking Apples, Ibsen in the Cafe of the Grand Hotel, etc. Introduction by Alfred Werner.
Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) by
The five hundred or more paintings of Caillebotte werenot given much attention during his lifetime. For years, he was considered primarily a generous patron ofimpressionists, but not as a painter in his own right. Later,his style was seen to be more realistic than those of his friends Degas, Monet and Renoir. In 1874, he helped to organise the First Impressionist Exhibition. However, hedid not include his own work - he would show in laterimpressionist exhibitions. In this typical work he capturesthe feeling of a new Parisian boulevard in an area of theBatignolles quarter on a rainy day. The realism with which Caillebotte depicts the scene is later praised by the writer Emile Zola: "Paris Street, Rainy Day displays strollers and, in particular, a man and a woman in the foreground, of a beautiful realism. When his talent will have softened a little, Caillebotte will certainly be the most audacious of the group."
Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist by
A study of Gustave Caillebotte, one of the most engaging personalities of the impressionist movement. Prepared by an international team of scholars to accompany the major 1994-5 retrospective organized by the Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Musee d'Orsay, Paris, and The Art Institute of Chicago, this volume reproduces 89 of his paintings and 28 of his drawings and studies, many of them from little-known private collections. There are essays examining his work and his crucial role as an early patron and promoter of impressionism. A chronology, list of exhibitions, and a selected bibliography provide additional information.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec by
Lautrec studied with two of the most admired academic painters of the day, Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon. Lautrec's time in the studios of Bonnat and Cormon had the advantage of introducing him to the nude as a subject. At that time life-drawing of the nude was the basis of all academic art training in nineteenth-century Paris. While still a student, Lautrec began to explore Parisian nightlife, which was to provide him with his greatest inspiration, and eventually undermined his health. Lautrec was an artist able to stamp his vision of the age in which he lived upon the imagination of future generations. Just as we see the English court of Charles I through the eyes of van Dyck and the Paris of Louis-Philippe through the eyes of Daumier, so we see the Paris of the 1890s and its most colourful personalities, through the eyes of Lautrec. The first great personality of Parisian nightlife whom Lautrec encountered - and a man who was to play an important role in helping Lautrec develop his artistic vision - was the cabaret singer Aristide Bruant. Bruant stood out as an heroic figure in what was the golden age of Parisian cabaret. Among the many other performers inspiring Lautrec in the 1890s were the dancers La Goulue and Valentin-le-Desossé (who both appear in the famous Moulin Rouge poster), and Jane Avril and Loïe Fuller, the singers Yvette Guilbert, May Belfort and Marcelle Lender, and the actress Réjane. Lautrec was, along with Degas, one of the great poets of the brothel. Degas explored the theme in the late 1870s in a series of monotype prints that are among his most remarkable and personal works. He depicts the somewhat ungainly posturing of the prostitutes and their clients with human warmth and a satirical humour that brings these prints closer to the art of Lautrec than anything else by Degas.However, the truthfulness with which Lautrec portrayed those aspects of life that most of his more respectable contemporaries preferred to sweep under the carpet naturally caused offence. The German critic Gensel probably spoke for many when he wrote: "There can of course be no talk of admiration for someone who is the master of the representation of all that is base and perverse. The only explanation as to how such filth - there can be no milder term for it - as Elles can be publicly exhibited without an outcry of indignations being heard is that one half of the general public does not understand the meaning of this cycle at all, and the other is ashamed of admitting that it does understand it."
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) by
Known for his posters for cabarets and performances, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864- 1901) was the painter of Parisian nightlife par excellence. Completely immerged in the bohemian milieu of the period, he produced numerous paintings and lithographs representing the lower levels of society. More than any other painter of his time, Lautrec stands out as the embodiment of Paris. At night, the city of hidden and frenzied pleasures, as well as of outdoor games during the day; the city on whose perpetual stage-boards the passing show ceaselessly changes into history has never been better understood or more strikingly expressed on canvas. Oscillating between Postimpressionism and Expressionism, he loved to paint dancers and singers at work in the cabarets of the capital. His touch is vigorous, his colors pure. Despite his personal handicap, his numerous works and posters are full of turbulent, incessant movement and figures such as the famous Goulue or Valentin le Désossé. Without doubt too entangled in this Parisian bohemia, he died of syphilis and chronic alcoholism at the age of only thirty-seven, leaving behind a substantial body of work.
Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin by
Paul Czanne, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin. The names of these brilliant nineteenth-century artists are known throughout the world. But what is remembered of their wives? What were these unknown women like? What roles did they play in the lives and the art of their famous husbands? In this remarkable book of discovery, art historian Ruth Butler coaxes three shadowy women out of obscurity and introduces them for the first time as individuals. Through unprecedented research, Butler has been able to create portraits of Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, and Rose Beuretthe models, and later the wives, respectively, of Czanne, Monet, and Rodin, three of the most famous French artists of their generation. The book tells the stories of three ordinary women who faced issues of a dramatically changing society as well as the challenges of life with a striving genius. Butler illuminates the ways in which these model-wives figured in their husbands achievements and provides new analyses of familiar works of art. Filled with captivating detail, the book recovers the lives of Hortense, Camille, and Rose, and recognizes with new insight how their unique relationships enriched the quality of their husbands artistic endeavors."
Hidden Treasures Revealed: Impressionist Masterpieces and Other Important French paintings preserved by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg by 
History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography by
Authoritative and insightful, Arnason's History of Modern Art remains the definitive source of information on the art of the Modern Era from modernism's mid-nineteenth century European beginnings to today's divergent art trends. Now full-color throughout, this Fifth Edition has been completely redesigned to make it even more elegant and easy-to-use. New heads, subheads, and a glossary have been added to help the reader navigate the material and quickly identify areas of interest.
Impressionism by
"Long-awaited, this full-scale revision of Impressionism immediately supersedes all other studies in the field. Herbert rejuvenates even the most famous paintings by seeing them in a dense and flexible context touching on everything from the hierarchy of theater boxes to the role of beer-hall waitresses. His mind and eye are as supple as his lucid prose, and his command of sociological data is staggering. In this classic of art history, both art and history are triumphantly reborn."--Robert Rosenblum, New York University This remarkable book will transform the way we look at Impressionist art. The culmination of twenty years of research by a preeminent scholar in the field, it fundamentally revises the conventional view of the Impressionist movement and shows for the first time how it was fully integrated into the social and cultural life of the times. Robert L. Herbert explores the themes of leisure and entertainment that dominated the great years of Impressionist painting between 1865 and 1885. Cafes, opera houses, dance halls, theaters, racetracks, and vacations by the sea were the central subjects of the majority of these paintings, and Herbert relates these pursuits to the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire. Sumptuously illustrated with many of the most beautiful Impressionist images, both familiar and unfamiliar, this book presents provocative new interpretations of a wide range of famous masterpieces. Artists are seen to be active participants in, as well as objective witnesses to, contemporary life, and there are many profound insights into the social and cultural upheaval of the times. "A social history of Impressionist art that is truly about the art, informed by a penetrating analysis of the ways in which its pictorial structure and qualities communicate its social content. Herbert brings that society to life, but above all he makes some of the most familiar and frequently discussed works in the history of art come wonderfully and vividly to life again."--Theodore Reff, Columbia University Robert L. Herbert is Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on nineteenth-century French art.
Impressionism by
This book is the catalogue for an exhibition held at the National Gallery in London from November 1990 to April 1991.
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism by
Impressionism is the most famous artistic movement. But what appears today as a charming and exquisite landscape painting, was actually one of the first avant-garde movements whose members had decided to fight the values of traditional art. The impressionist outdoor paintings shocked the public by the technique used, but also by their apparent banality. As Monet, Sisley, Pissarro and many others sought to capture the ephemeral nature of light, the next generation would reject naturalism. Indeed, post-impressionists such as Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne and Seurat favored the subjective rather than the objective and the eternal rather than the concrete. In doing so, they laid the formal foundations of 20th-century modern art. This book is a visual guide through the crucial moments in the history of art and the progression of the 19th-century to modernity.
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by 
James Mcneill Whistler by
Whistler suddenly shot to fame like a meteor at a crucial moment in the history of art, a field in which he was a pioneer. Like the impressionists, with whom he sided, he wanted to impose his own ideas. Whistler's work can be divided into four periods. The first may be called a period of research in which he was influenced by the Realism of Gustave Courbet and by Japanese art. Whistler then discovered his own originality in the Nocturnes and the Cremorne Gardens series, thereby coming into conflict with the academics who wanted a work of art to tell a story. When he painted the portrait of his mother, Whistler entitled it Arrangement in Grey and Black and this is symbolic of his aesthetic theories. When painting the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens it was not to depict identifiable figures, as did Renoir in his work on similar themes, but to capture an atmosphere. He loved the mists that hovered over the banks of the Thames, the pale light, and the factory chimneys which at night turned into magical minarets. Night redrew landscapes, effacing the details. This was the period in which he became an adventurer in art; his work, which verged on abstraction, shocked his contemporaries. The third period is dominated by the full-length portraits that brought him his fame. He was able to imbue this traditional genre with his profound originality. He tried to capture part of the souls of his models and placed the characters in their natural habitats. This gave his models a strange presence so that they seem about to walk out of the picture to physically encounter the viewer. By extracting the poetic substance from individuals he created portraits described as "mediums" by his contemporaries, and which were the inspiration for Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Towards the end of his life, the artist began painting landscapes and portraits in the classical tradition, strongly influenced by Velázquez. Whistler proved to be extremely rigorous in ensuring his paintings coincided with his theories. He never hesitated in crossing swords with the most famous art theoreticians of his day. His personality, his outbursts, and his elegance were a perfect focus for curiosity and admiration. He was a close friend of Stéphane Mallarmé, and admired by Marcel Proust, who rendered homage to him in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. He was also a provocative dandy, a prickly socialite, a demanding artist, and a daring innovator.
Japonisme in Britain by
Japan held a profound fascination for western artists in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the influence of Japonisme on western art was pervasive. Paradoxically, just as western artists were beginning to find inspiration in Japan and Japanese art, Japan was opening to the western world and beginning a process of thorough modernisation, some have said westernisation. The mastery of western art was included in the programme. This book examines the nineteenth century art world against this background and explores Japanese influences on four artists working in Britain in particular: the American James McNeill Whistler, the Australian Mortimer Menpes, and the 'Glasgow boys' George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel. Japonisme in Britian is richly illustrated throughout.
Klimt by
"I am not interested in myself as a subject for painting, but in others, particularly women..."Beautiful, sensuous and above all erotic, Gustav Klimt's paintings speak of a world of opulence and leisure, which seems aeons away from the harsh, post-modern environment we live in now. The subjects he treats - allegories, portraits, landscapes and erotic figures - contain virtually no reference to external events, but strive rather to create a world where beauty, above everything else, is dominant. His use of colour and pattern was profoundly influenced by the art of Japan, ancient Egypt, and Byzantium. Ravenne, the flat, two-dimensional perspective of his paintings, and the frequently stylised quality of his images form an oeuvre imbued with a profound sensuality and one where the figure of woman, above all, reigns supreme. Klimt's very first works brought him success at an unusually young age. Gustav, born in 1862, obtained a state grant to study at Kunstgewerbeschule (the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts) at the age of fourteen. His talents as a draughtsman and painter were quickly noticed, and in 1879 he formed the Künstlercompagnie (Artists' Company) with his brother Ernst and another student, Franz Matsch. The latter part of the nineteenth century was a period of great architectural activity in Vienna. In 1857, the Emperor Franz Joseph had ordered the destruction of the fortifications that had surrounded the medieval city centre. The Ringstrasse was the result, a budding new district with magnificent buildings and beautiful parks, all paid for by public expenses. Therefore the young Klimt and his partners had ample opportunities to show off their talents, and they received early commissions to contribute to the decorations for the pageant organised to celebrate the silver wedding anniversary of the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Empress Elisabeth. In 1894, Matsch moved out of their communal studio, and in 1897 Klimt, together with his closest friends, resigned from the Künstlerhausgenossenschaft (the Cooperative Society of Austrian Artists) to form a new movement known as the Secession, of which he was immediately elected president. The Secession was a great success, holding both a first and second exhibition in 1898. The movement made enough money to commission its very own building, designed for it by the architect Joseph Maria Olbrich. Above the entrance was its motto: "To each age its art, to art its freedom." From around 1897 onward, Klimt spent almost every summer on the Attersee with the Flöge family. These were periods of peace and tranquillity in which he produced the landscape paintings constituting almost a quarter of his entire oeuvre. Klimt made sketches for virtually everything he did. Sometimes there were over a hundred drawings for one painting, each showing a different detail - a piece of clothing or jewellery, or a simple gesture. Just how exceptional Gustav Klimt was is perhaps reflected in the fact that he had no predecessors and no real followers. He admired Rodin and Whistler without slavishly copying them, and was admired in turn by the younger Viennese painters Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, both of whom were greatly influenced by Klimt.
Klimt by
"I am not interested in myself as a subject for painting, but in others, particularly women..."Beautiful, sensuous and above all erotic, Gustav Klimt's paintings speak of a world of opulence and leisure, which seems aeons away from the harsh, post-modern environment we live in now. The subjects he treats - allegories, portraits, landscapes and erotic figures - contain virtually no reference to external events, but strive rather to create a world where beauty, above everything else, is dominant. His use of colour and pattern was profoundly influenced by the art of Japan, ancient Egypt, and Byzantium. Ravenne, the flat, two-dimensional perspective of his paintings, and the frequently stylised quality of his images form an oeuvre imbued with a profound sensuality and one where the figure of woman, above all, reigns supreme. Klimt's very first works brought him success at an unusually young age. Gustav, born in 1862, obtained a state grant to study at Kunstgewerbeschule (the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts) at the age of fourteen. His talents as a draughtsman and painter were quickly noticed, and in 1879 he formed the Künstlercompagnie (Artists' Company) with his brother Ernst and another student, Franz Matsch. The latter part of the nineteenth century was a period of great architectural activity in Vienna. In 1857, the Emperor Franz Joseph had ordered the destruction of the fortifications that had surrounded the medieval city centre. The Ringstrasse was the result, a budding new district with magnificent buildings and beautiful parks, all paid for by public expenses. Therefore the young Klimt and his partners had ample opportunities to show off their talents, and they received early commissions to contribute to the decorations for the pageant organised to celebrate the silver wedding anniversary of the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Empress Elisabeth. In 1894, Matsch moved out of their communal studio, and in 1897 Klimt, together with his closest friends, resigned from the Künstlerhausgenossenschaft (the Cooperative Society of Austrian Artists) to form a new movement known as the Secession, of which he was immediately elected president. The Secession was a great success, holding both a first and second exhibition in 1898. The movement made enough money to commission its very own building, designed for it by the architect Joseph Maria Olbrich. Above the entrance was its motto: "To each age its art, to art its freedom." From around 1897 onward, Klimt spent almost every summer on the Attersee with the Flöge family. These were periods of peace and tranquillity in which he produced the landscape paintings constituting almost a quarter of his entire oeuvre. Klimt made sketches for virtually everything he did. Sometimes there were over a hundred drawings for one painting, each showing a different detail - a piece of clothing or jewellery, or a simple gesture. Just how exceptional Gustav Klimt was is perhaps reflected in the fact that he had no predecessors and no real followers. He admired Rodin and Whistler without slavishly copying them, and was admired in turn by the younger Viennese painters Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, both of whom were greatly influenced by Klimt.
Legacies of Modernism by
Between 1890 and 1950 modernist art and culture set out to challenge century-old notions of the individual and the community, culture and politics, morality and freedom, placing into question the very foundations of Western civilization. The essays in this volume present a novel assessment of various manifestations of modernism in Germany and Scandinavia by posing the question of its critical and political impact beyond traditional polarities such as right vs. left, illiberalism vs. Enlightenment, apolitical vs. engaged. In drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including literary studies, art history, film and visual studies, urban studies, musicology, political theory, and the history of science and technology, the essays in this volume reexamine modernism's bold inquiry into areas such as the relation of art to technology and mass politics, the limits of liberal democracy, the reconceptualization of urban spaces, and the realignment of traditional art forms following the rise of new media such as film. The volume's contributors share a belief in the timeliness of modernism's critical impulse for a contemporary age confronted with ethical and political dilemmas that the modernists first articulated and to which they attempted to respond.
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh: A Critical Study by
Vincent van Gogh's letters are frequently admired for theirexceptional literary quality, but there is no extended critique of thisaspect of his writing. Addressing key constellations of metaphors andideas, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh shows the remarkableimaginative coherence underlying the painter's correspondence andcharts van Gogh's evolving conception of himself as anartist.
Light and Obscurity in Symbolism by
"The idea of light and darkness is one of the central ideas of the Symbolist movement, since this is a movement of contrasts. It encompasses the major themes of Symbolism, such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, the visible and the invisible, and the divine and the earthly. This volume brings together a range of studies in order to understand the notion of light and darkness and a variety of its Symbolist interpretations. It also stresses the interdisciplinary nature of the concepts of light and darkness in Symbolism, as well as the cohabitation and symbiosis of both, which are together or separately at the core of this movement."
Manet by
Manet is one of the most famous artists from the second half of the nineteenth century linked to the impressionists, although he was not really one of them. He had great influence on French painting partly because of the choice he made for his subjects from everyday life, the use of pure colours, and his fast and free technique. He made, in his own work, the transition between Courbet's Realism and the work of the impressionists.Born a high bourgeois, he chose to become a painter after failing the entry to the Marine School. He studied with Thomas Couture, an Academic painter, but it was thanks to the numerous travels he made around Europe from 1852 that he started to find out what would become his own style.His first paintings were mostly portraits and genre scenes, inspired by his love for Spanish masters like Velázquez and Goya. In 1863 he presented his masterpiece Luncheon on the Grass at the Salon des Refusés. His work started a fight between the defenders of Academic art and the young "refusés" artists. Manet became the leader of this new generation of artists.From 1864, the official Salon accepted his paintings, still provoking loud protests over works such as Olympia in 1865. In 1866, the writer Zolá wrote an article defending Manet's work. At that time, Manet was friends with all the future great impressionist masters: Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, and he influenced their work, even though he cannot strictly be counted as one of them. In 1874 indeed, he refused to present his paintings in the First Impressionist Exhibition. His last appearance in the official Salon was in 1882 with A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, one of his most famous works. Suffering from gangrene during the year 1883, he painted flower still-lifes until he became too weak to work. He died leaving behind a great number of drawings and paintings.
Manet and the American Civil War by
A study of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's acquisition, The 'Kearsarge' at Boulogne, by Edouard Manet (1832-1883).
Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) by
The New Art History and the Impressionist canon seem to have successfully claimed Edgar Degas as a misogynist, rabid nationalist and misanthrope whose art was both masterly and experimental. By analysing Degas's approach to space and his self-fashioning attitude towards identity within the ambiguities of the political and artistic culture of nineteenth-century France, this book questions the characterisation of Degas as a right-wing Frenchman and artist, and will change the way in which Degas is thought about today.
Mary Cassatt by
Although an American, Mary Cassatt spent the majority of her life in France and gained most of her fame and success in Europe. Not until after her death on June 14, 1926, at Chateau de Beaufresne, near Paris, did she become a truly celebrated American artist. Cassatt is known most for her paintings and pastels of mothers and their children. Never having been a mother herself, perhaps Cassatt was mesmerized by the familial bond so evident to observers of these unique relationships and in particular to someone with an artist's eye, just like that of Mary Cassatt. The only American, and only the second female, to be associated with the Impressionists--at the invitation of Edgar Degas, a very close friend-- Cassat's work was invigorated and enlivened by the exposure to the other Impressionists' avant garde ideas. Cassatt's contribution to history lies not only in the art she produced, but also in the role she played in bringing the work of the major Impressionists, such as Degas, Manet, and Corot, as well as others, such as El Greco and Rembrandt, to the United States.
Modern Art: 19th & 20th centuries by
This fourth volume of Schapiro's Selected Papers contains his most important writings--some well-known and others previously unpublished--on the theory and philosophy of art. His highly lucid arguments, graceful prose, and extraordinary erudition guide readers through a rich variety of fields and issues: the roles in society of the artist and art, of the critic and criticism; and the relationships between patron and artist, psychoanalysis and art, and philosophy and art.
Modernism by
The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.
Modern Theories of Art v2: From impressionism to Kandinsky by
In this volume, the third in his classic series of texts surveying the history of art theory, Moshe Barasch traces the hidden patterns and interlocking themes in the study of art, from Impressionism to Abstract Art. Barasch details the immense social changes in the creation, presentation, and reception of art which have set the history of art theory on a vertiginous new course: the decreased relevance of workshops and art schools; the replacement of the treatise by the critical review; and the interrelation of new modes of scientific inquiry with artistic theory and praxis. The consequent changes in the ways in which critics as well as artists conceptualized paintings and sculptures were radical, marked by an obsession with intense, immediate sensory experiences, psychological reflection on the effects of art, and a magnetic pull to the exotic and alien, making for the most exciting and fertile period in the history of art criticism.
Monet by
For Claude Monet the designation 'impressionist' always remained a source of pride. In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true impressionist to the end of his very long life. He was so by deep conviction, and for his Impressionism he may have sacrificed many other opportunities that his enormous talent held out to him. Monet did not paint classical compositions with figures, and he did not become a portraitist, although his professional training included those skills. He chose a single genre for himself, landscape painting, and in that he achieved a degree of perfection none of his contemporaries managed to attain. Yet the little boy began by drawing caricatures. Boudin advised Monet to stop doing caricatures and to take up landscapes instead. The sea, the sky, animals, people, and trees are beautiful in the exact state in which nature created them - surrounded by air and light. Indeed, it was Boudin who passed on to Monet his conviction of the importance of working in the open air, which Monet would in turn transmit to his impressionist friends. Monet did not want to enrol at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He chose to attend a private school, L'Académie Suisse, established by an ex-model on the Quai d'Orfèvres near the Pont Saint-Michel. One could draw and paint from a live model there for a modest fee. This was where Monet met the future impressionist Camille Pissarro. Later in Gleyre's studio, Monet met Auguste Renoir Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. Monet considered it very important that Boudin be introduced to his new friends. He also told his friends of another painter he had found in Normandy. This was the remarkable Dutchman Jongkind. His landscapes were saturated with colour, and their sincerity, at times even their naïveté, was combined with subtle observation of the Normandy shore's variable nature. At this time Monet's landscapes were not yet characterized by great richness of colour. Rather, they recalled the tonalities of paintings by the Barbizon artists, and Boudin's seascapes. He composed a range of colour based on yellow-brown or blue-grey. At the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877 Monet presented a series of paintings for the first time: seven views of the Saint-Lazare train station. He selected them from among twelve he had painted at the station. This motif in Monet's work is in line not only with Manet's Chemin de fer (The Railway) and with his own landscapes featuring trains and stations at Argenteuil, but also with a trend that surfaced after the railways first began to appear. In 1883, Monet had bought a house in the village of Giverny, near the little town of Vernon. At Giverny, series painting became one of his chief working procedures. Meadows became his permanent workplace. When a journalist, who had come from Vétheuil to interview Monet, asked him where his studio was, the painter answered, "My studio! I've never had a studio, and I can't see why one would lock oneself up in a room. To draw, yes - to paint, no". Then, broadly gesturing towards the Seine, the hills, and the silhouette of the little town, he declared, "There's my real studio."Monet began to go to London in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He began all his London paintings working directly from nature, but completed many of them afterwards, at Giverny. The series formed an indivisible whole, and the painter had to work on all his canvases at one time. A friend of Monet's, the writer Octave Mirbeau, wrote that he had accomplished a miracle. With the help of colours he had succeeded in recreating on the canvas something almost impossible to capture: he was reproducing sunlight, enriching it with an infinite number of reflections. Alone among the impressionists, Claude Monet took an almost scientific study of the possibilities of colour to its limits; it is unlikely that one could have gone any further in that direction.
Munch by
Edvard Munch, born in 1863, was Norway's most popular artist. His brooding and anguished paintings, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the development of Expressionism. During his childhood, the death of his parents, his brother and sister, and the mental illness of another sister, were of great influence on his convulsed and tortuous art. In his works, Munch turned again and again to the memory of illness, death and grief. During his career, Munch changed his idiom many times. At first, influenced by Impressionism and Post-impressionism, he turned to a highly personal style and content, increasingly concerned with images of illness and death. In the 1892s, his style developed a 'Synthetist' idiom as seen in The Scream (1893) which is regarded as an icon and the portrayal of modern humanity's spiritual and existential anguish. He painted different versions of it. During the 1890s Munch favoured a shallow pictorial space, and used it in his frequently frontal pictures. His work often included the symbolic portrayal of such themes as misery, sickness, and death. and the poses of his figures in many of his portraits were chosen in order to capture their state of mind and psychological condition. It also lends a monumental, static quality to the paintings. In 1892, the Union of Berlin Artists invited Munch to exhibit at its November exhibition. His paintings invoked bitter controversy at the show, and after one week the exhibition closed. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis labeled his work "degenerate art", and removed his works from German museums. This deeply hurt the anti-fascist Munch, who had come to feel Germany was his second homeland. In 1908 Munch's anxiety became acute and he was hospitalized. He returned to Norway in 1909 and died in Oslo in 1944.
Munch by
Edvard Munch, born in 1863, was Norway's most popular artist. His brooding and anguished paintings, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the development of Expressionism. During his childhood, the death of his parents, his brother and sister, and the mental illness of another sister, were of great influence on his convulsed and tortuous art. In his works, Munch turned again and again to the memory of illness, death and grief. During his career, Munch changed his idiom many times. At first, influenced by Impressionism and Post-impressionism, he turned to a highly personal style and content, increasingly concerned with images of illness and death. In the 1892s, his style developed a 'Synthetist' idiom as seen in The Scream (1893) which is regarded as an icon and the portrayal of modern humanity's spiritual and existential anguish. He painted different versions of it. During the 1890s Munch favoured a shallow pictorial space, and used it in his frequently frontal pictures. His work often included the symbolic portrayal of such themes as misery, sickness, and death. and the poses of his figures in many of his portraits were chosen in order to capture their state of mind and psychological condition. It also lends a monumental, static quality to the paintings. In 1892, the Union of Berlin Artists invited Munch to exhibit at its November exhibition. His paintings invoked bitter controversy at the show, and after one week the exhibition closed. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis labeled his work "degenerate art", and removed his works from German museums. This deeply hurt the anti-fascist Munch, who had come to feel Germany was his second homeland. In 1908 Munch's anxiety became acute and he was hospitalized. He returned to Norway in 1909 and died in Oslo in 1944.
Nature's Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form by
This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices. Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of "nature's experiments"-the belief that the study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths, above all about the human mind and body-extended from the scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists' solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a ready-made methodology for fin-de-siècle truth seekers. By using experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully strange. Focusing on the scientific, psychological, and experimental tactics of symbolism, Nature's Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form demystifies the avant-garde value of experimentation and reveals new and important insights into a foundational period for the development of European modernism.
Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon is a genre-breaking artist. A contemporary of the Impressionists, his oeuvre found its source not in reality but in his own dreams. His work has two sides, which appear to be almost opposite ends: one is daunting and grim, the other one, colourful and lively, they nevertheless merge into a kind of Symbolist magic. Odilon Redon (1840-1916) is without doubt one of the artists who was the most ahead of his time. Indifferent to Naturalism and Impressionism, he drew inspiration from his imagination and his dreams. Affected by infantile fears, the first part of his oeuvre is characterized by his Noirs, charcoal works which gave way to his famous monochrome lithographs. At the end of the 19th century, his work changed radically: his fear evolved and the colors burst out on the canvas. He painted numerous still lifes and turned towards decorative art. The magic, which emanates from his life's work places him within the Symbolist movement yet hails him as the precursor to Surrealism.The colours used are mostly yellow, grey, brown and light blue.
Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era by
In this engrossing book, Hollis Clayson provides the first description and analysis of French artistic interest in women prostitutes, examining how the subject was treated in the art of the 1870s and 1880s by such avant-garde painters as Cézanne, Degas, Manet, and Renoir, as well as by the academic and low-brow painters who were their contemporaries. Clayson not only illuminates the imagery of prostitution-with its contradictory connotations of disgust and fascination-but also tackles the issues and problems relevant to women and men in a patriarchal society. She discusses the conspicuous sexual commerce during this era and the resulting public panic about the deterioration of social life and civilized mores. She describes the system that evolved out of regulating prostitutes and the subsequent rise of clandestine prostitutes who escaped police regulation and who were condemned both for blurring social boundaries and for spreading sexual licentiousness among their moral and social superiors. Clayson argues that the subject of covert prostitution was especially attractive to vanguard painters because it exemplified the commercialization and the ambiguity of modern life. This is a reprint of the book first published by Yale University Press in 1991.
The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers by
The description for this book, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, will be forthcoming.
Paul Cézanne by
Few artists have exerted as much influence on modern art as Paul Cézanne. Picasso, Braque, and Matisse all acknowledged a profound debt to his painting, and many historians regard him as the father of modernism. This new biography reexamines Cézanne's life and art, discussing the key events and people who shaped his work and placing his oeuvre in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth-century art and culture. Jon Kear begins with Cézanne's formative years in Provence, highlighting the deep and abiding impressions the landscapes of the region would have on his paintings. He follows him through his turbulent years as a young artist in Paris, where he would create the larger-than-life artistic persona--through a rugged painting style detailing explicit subjects--that would become a lasting mythology for him throughout all of his phases. He looks closely at Cézanne's relationships with Edouard Manet--whom he both emulated and critiqued--and the writer Émile Zola, as well as his close collaboration with Camille Pissarro. Above all, he tells the story of his life as a part of the pivotal shift toward the twentieth century, illuminating how much his work and ideas helped to usher it in.
Paul Cézanne by
Since his death 100 years ago, Cézanne has become the most famous painter of the nineteenth century. He was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839 and the happiest period of his life was his early youth in Provence, in company with Emile Zolá, another Italian. Following Zolá's example, Cézanne went to Paris in his twenty-first year. During the Franco-Prussian war he deserted the military, dividing his time between open-air painting and the studio. He said to Vollard, an art dealer, "I'm only a painter. Parisian wit gives me a pain. Painting nudes on the banks of the Arc [a river near Aix] is all I could ask for." Encouraged by Renoir, one of the first to appreciate him, he exhibited with the impressionists in 1874 and in 1877. He was received with derision, which deeply hurt him. Cézanne's ambition, in his own words, was "to make out of Impressionism something as solid and durable as the paintings of the museums." His aim was to achieve the monumental in a modern language of glowing, vibrating tones. Cézanne wanted to retain the natural colour of an object and to harmonise it with the various influences of light and shade trying to destroy it; to work out a scale of tones expressing the mass and character of the form. Cézanne loved to paint fruit because it afforded him obedient models and he was a slow worker. He did not intend to simply copy an apple. He kept the dominant colour and the character of the fruit, but heightened the emotional appeal of the form by a scheme of rich and concordant tones. In his paintings of still-life he is a master. His fruit and vegetable compositions are truly dramatic; they have the weight, the nobility, the style of immortal forms. No other painter ever brought to a red apple a conviction so heated, sympathy so genuinely spiritual, or an observation so protracted. No other painter of equal ability ever reserved for still-life his strongest impulses. Cézanne restored to painting the pre-eminence of knowledge, the most essential quality to all creative effort. The death of his father in 1886 made him a rich man, but he made no change in his abstemious mode of living. Soon afterwards, Cézanne retired permanently to his estate in Provence. He was probably the loneliest of painters of his day. At times a curious melancholy attacked him, a black hopelessness. He grew more savage and exacting, destroying canvases, throwing them out of his studio into the trees, abandoning them in the fields, and giving them to his son to cut into puzzles, or to the people of Aix. At the beginning of the century, when Vollard arrived in Provence with intentions of buying on speculation all the Cézannes he could get hold of, the peasantry, hearing that a fool from Paris was actually handing out money for old linen, produced from barns a considerable number of still-lifes and landscapes. The old master of Aix was overcome with joy, but recognition came too late. In 1906 he died from a fever contracted while painting in a downpour of rain.
Paul Gaugin by
Gauguin's paintings are redolent of the South Sea islands, full of exotic women, vibrant flora, and brilliant color. In addition, his scenes range from normal life in France's Brittany, to Provence where he painted and lived briefly with Vincent van Gogh, to French Polynesia. Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7, 1848. After Napoléon III became the president of France, Gauguin's family left for Peru in December 1849. They remained there four years at which point they returned to Paris. An early exposure to a non-European lifestyle and culture undoubtedly opened Gauguin's mind to his later fascination with the Caribbean and with Tahiti and the peoples of those islands he portrayed so eloquently. Gauguin, a banker, started painting in his spare time. He never had any formal art training but set about painting as a hobby with commendable amateur skill. His first paintings were inspired by Corot and the Barbizon School and featured romantic naturalist subject matter. He soon aligned himself with the Impressionists, but is now labeled by art historians as a Post-Impressionist. Gauguin called himself a Synthesist. His technique was often called Cloisonnisme.
Paul Gauguin by
Paul Gauguin was first a sailor, then a successful stockbroker in Paris. In 1874 he began to paint at weekends as a Sunday painter. Nine years later, after a stock-market crash, he felt confident of his ability to earn a living for his family by painting and he resigned his position and took up the painter's brush full time. Following the lead of Cézanne, Gauguin painted still-lifes from the very beginning of his artistic career. He even owned a still-life by Cézanne, which is shown in Gauguin's painting Portrait of Marie Lagadu. The year 1891 was crucial for Gauguin. In that year he left France for Tahiti, where he stayed till 1893. This stay in Tahiti determined his future life and career, for in 1895, after a sojourn in France, he returned there for good. In Tahiti, Gauguin discovered primitive art, with its flat forms and violent colours, belonging to an untamed nature. With absolute sincerity, he transferred them onto his canvas. His paintings from then on reflected this style: a radical simplification of drawing; brilliant, pure, bright colours; an ornamental type composition; and a deliberate flatness of planes. Gauguin termed this style "synthetic symbolism".
Paul Gauguin: The Mysterious Centre of Thought by
French artist Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) once reproached the Impressionists for searching "around the eye and not at the mysterious centre of thought." But what did he mean by this enigmatic phrase? In this innovative investigation into Gauguin's art and thought, Dario Gamboni illuminates Gauguin's quest for this "mysterious centre" and offers a fresh look at the artist's output in all media--from ceramics and sculptures to prints, paintings, and his large corpus of writings. Foregrounding Gauguin's conscious use of ambiguity, Gamboni unpacks what the artist called the "language of the listening eye." Gamboni shows that the interaction between perception, cognition, and imagination was at the core of Gauguin's work, and he traces a line of continuity in them that has been previously overlooked. Emulating Gauguin's wide-ranging curiosity with literature, psychology, theology, and the natural sciences--not to mention the whole of art history--this richly illustrated book provides new insight into the life and works of this well-known yet little understood artist.
Paul Signac by
Inspired by Monet's work at a young age, Paul Signac (1863-1935) was a friend and disciple of Georges Seurat who combined the scientific precision of pointillism with the vivid colors and emotional expressivity of Impressionism. A close personal friend of Vincent van Gogh, who was a great admirer of his techniques, Signac traveled the world in search of inspiration for his monumental canvases. This book examines the intricacies of Signac's celebrated technique, as well as showcasing the details of some of his most celebrated works.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir: La promenade by
Renoir's La Promenade is one of the most engaging and approachable of all Impressionist paintings. This study of the work--a masterpiece from the Getty collection--reveals surprising details about the sexual, historical, and artistic contexts in which the painting was created.
Pissarro and Pontoise by 
Post-Impressionism by
The Post-Impressionist period was one of solitary painters; Gauguin, Sisley, Cézanne, Van Gogh etc... "There is no longer a unique school. There are a few groups, but even they break up constantly. All these movements remind me of moving geometrical pieces in a kaleidoscope, which separate suddenly only to better come together again. They move apart then get together, but, nevertheless, stay in the same circle - the circle of the new art." (Emile Verhaeren). Nathalia Brodskaïa, curator at the State Hermitage Museum, describes with her own unsurpassed talent the different paths taken by the heirs of Impressionism towards Modern Art.
Private Collection of Edgar Degas: A Summary Catalogue by
A companion volume to the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition of Degas's vast private art collection in late 1997. It contains much additional information concerning the 5000 paintings, drawings and prints, including such details as provenance, selected references and current locations.
The Private Journals of Edvard Munch by
Scandinavia's most famous painter, the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944), is probably best known for his painting The Scream, a universally recognized icon of terror and despair. (A version was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, in August 2004, and has not yet been recovered.) But Munch considered himself a writer as well as a painter. Munch began painting as a teenager and, in his young adulthood, studied and worked in Paris and Berlin, where he evolved a highly personal style in paintings and works on paper. And in diaries that he kept for decades, he also experimented with reminiscence, fiction, prose portraits, philosophical speculations, and surrealism. Known as an artist who captured both the ecstasies and the hellish depths of the human condition, Munch conveys these emotions in his diaries but also reveals other facets of his personality in remarks and stories that are alternately droll, compassionate, romantic, and cerebral. This English translation of Edvard Munch's private diaries, the most extensive edition to appear in any language, captures the eloquent lyricism of the original Norwegian text. The journal entries in this volume span the period from the 1880s, when Munch was in his twenties, until the 1930s, reflecting the changes in his life and his work. The book is illustrated with fifteen of Munch's drawings, many of them rarely seen before. While these diaries have been excerpted before, no translation has captured the real passion and poetry of Munch's voice. This is a translation that lets Munch speak for himself and evokes the primal passion of his diaries. J. Gill Holland's exceptional work adds a whole new level to our understanding of the artist and the depth of his scream.
Puvis de Chavannes by
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes is not a very well-known artist. Famous throughout his life yetquickly forgotten by the history of art, his work remains little-studied in comparison tothe Impressionist masterpieces of the same period. His oeuvre, however, was crucialin France at the end of the 19th century, in particular his mural paintings which are stillvisible today in numerous important public buildings, such as the Hotel de Ville and the Pantheon in Paris, or the Palais des Beaux-arts in Lyon. Puvis' specialty was monumental decorative works. He tackled traditionalsubjects from a more general angle and his works were accepted by all the artistic principlesof the time. Far from being a cold and academic painter, he supported artists includingCourbet, Bazile, and Degas when they were attacked by the critics. His oeuvreplayed an essential role in the construction of a national French identity in the 19thcentury.Today the glory of Puvis de Chavannes shines forth in uncontested splendour. No one dreams of comparing him with any of his contemporaries, because his art reveals no kinship with that of any one of them. He is recognized as the successor and the equal of the great fresco painters of the Italian Renaissance. Even to these he owes nothing, having borrowed nothing from them. But he shares with them his passionate love of truth, his nobility of inspiration and sincerity of execution.
Reading Vincent Van Gogh: A Thematic Guide to the Letters by
Soon after his death, Vincent van Gogh's reputation grew and developed through the remarkably symbiotic relationship evident between his paintings and letters. However, the sheer bulk and complexity of Van Gogh's complete surviving correspondence presents a formidable challenge to those who wish to read and analyze the whole text as a literary work. Reading Vincent van Gogh is at once an interpretive guide to Van Gogh's letters and a distillation of the key themes that reoccur throughout his collected letters - foremost among them the motifs of suffering, love, imagination, and the ineffable. In this indispensable, synoptic view of the letters, Patrick Grant makes the main lines of Vincent van Gogh's thinking accessible and displays the arresting vividness of the well-known artist's writing.
Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time by
The late 1870s and early 1880s were watershed years in the history of French painting. As outgoing economic and social structures were being replaced by a capitalist, measured time, Impressionist artists sought to create works that could be perceived in an instant, capturing the sensations of rapidly transforming modern life. Yet a generation of artists pushed back against these changes, spearheading a short-lived revival of the Realist practices that had dominated at mid-century and advocating slowness in practice, subject matter, and beholding. In this illuminating book, Marnin Young looks closely at five works by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Gustave Caillebotte, Alfred-Philippe Roll, Jean-François Raffaëlli, and James Ensor, artists who shared a concern with painting and temporality that is all but forgotten today, having been eclipsed by the ideals of Impressionism. Young's highly original study situates later Realism for the first time within the larger social, political, and economic framework and argues for its centrality in understanding the development of modern art.
Renoir by
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges on 25 February 1841. In 1854, the boy's parents took him from school and found a place for him in the Lévy brothers' workshop, where he was to learn to paint porcelain. Renoir's younger brother Edmond had this to say this about the move: "From what he drew in charcoal on the walls, they concluded that he had the ability for an artist's profession. That was how our parents came to put him to learn the trade of porcelain painter." One of the Lévys' workers, Emile Laporte, painted in oils in his spare time. He suggested Renoir makes use of his canvases and paints. This offer resulted in the appearance of the first painting by the future impressionist. In 1862 Renoir passed the examinations and entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and, simultaneously, one of the independent studios, where instruction was given by Charles Gleyre, a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The second, perhaps even the first, great event of this period in Renoir's life was his meeting, in Gleyre's studio, with those who were to become his best friends for the rest of his days and who shared his ideas about art. Much later, when he was already a mature artist, Renoir had the opportunity to see works by Rembrandt in Holland, Velázquez, Goya and El Greco in Spain, and Raphael in Italy. However, Renoir lived and breathed ideas of a new kind of art. He always found his inspirations in the Louvre. "For me, in the Gleyre era, the Louvre was Delacroix," he confessed to Jean. For Renoir, the First Impressionist Exhibition was the moment his vision of art and the artist was affirmed. This period in Renoir's life was marked by one further significant event. In 1873 he moved to Montmartre, to the house at 35 Rue Saint-Georges, where he lived until 1884. Renoir remained loyal to Montmartre for the rest of his life. Here he found his "plein-air" subjects, his models and even his family. It was in the 1870s that Renoir acquired the friends who would stay with him for the remainder of his days. One of them was the art-dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who began to buy his paintings in 1872. In summer, Renoir continued to paint a great deal outdoors together with Monet. He would travel out to Argenteuil, where Monet rented a house for his family. Edouard Manet sometimes worked with them too. In 1877, at the Third Impressionist Exhibition, Renoir presented a panorama of over twenty paintings. They included landscapes created in Paris, on the Seine, outside the city and in Claude Monet's garden; studies of women's heads and bouquets of flowers; portraits of Sisley, the actress Jeanne Samary, the writer Alphonse Daudet and the politician Spuller; and also The Swing and The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette. Finally, in the 1880s Renoir hit a "winning streak". He was commissioned by rich financiers, the owner of the Grands Magasins du Louvre and Senator Goujon. His paintings were exhibited in London and Brussels, as well as at the Seventh International Exhibition held at Georges Petit's in Paris in 1886. In a letter to Durand-Ruel, then in New York, Renoir wrote: "The Petit exhibition has opened and is not doing badly, so they say. After all, it's so hard to judge about yourself. I think I have managed to take a step forward towards public respect. A small step, but even that is something."
Renoir by
PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919) was born in Limoges, the son of a tailor who moved with his family to Paris when Renoir was a young child. His early ambition was to become a decorator of porcelain but, finding himself at the hub of the art world, he became a student at the Gleyre Academy where he made the acquaintance of Monet, Bazille and Sisley and where his career was redirected to painting. He had already attained some measure of success before he exhibited with them in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 when he was aged 33. His career was furthered by his early success as a portrait-painter but it was as a painter of la vie Parisenne, of the bars and theatres of the capital, of the Seine and ultimately, of the female form that he is best known. Later he ventured further afield to the South of France, working for a time with Cézanne where they painted similar subjects such as Mont Sainte-Victoire together. He also visited Algeria and Venice, through which he enlarged the range of his work. Later in his life he turned his attention to sculpture despite suffering crippling arthritis in his hands and wrists. In spite of al this, Renoir continued to paint almost until the day he died.
Seurat by
Georges Seurat was one of the most important Post-Impressionist painters to lead the way toward the modern era in art. He is best known for developing pointillism, an exacting and time-consuming technique whereby tiny dots of paint are combined to create a composition. His work is stylized and considered, in complete contrast to the impetuous spontaneity of his precursors and contemporaries, the Impressionists. Seurat had a life-long fascination with optical observations and experiments and taught himself to become a master of color theory and linear structures. On canvas this meant rather than just painting the apparent color or shade of an object, Seurat broke down the individual component colors and placed them in individual tiny dots or dashes so that the eye of the observer would see the overall color, but on closer inspection see each individual color component. His strangely stilted paintings have a quality of stillness about them and are almost photographic in their detail. By the time he died at the age of only 31, Seurat had produced several huge paintings, about 60 smaller ones, numerous studies for his larger paintings plus around 500 drawings. In later years the Surrealists hailed Seurat as an inspirational maverick and a spiritual father to them.
Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet's Paris by
In Sheer Presence, Marni Reva Kessler demonstrates how the ubiquitous veil and its visual representations knot together many of the precepts of Parisian life. Positioning the veil directly at the intersection of feminist, formalist, and social art history, Kessler offers a fresh perspective on period discourses of public health, seduction and sexuality, colonial stereotypes, and, ultimately, an emerging modernity.
Signac, 1863-1935 by
This book, the catalogue of the first retrospective of the work of the French Neoimpressionist artist Paul Signac to be held in nearly forty years, accompanies the 2001 exhibition organised by the Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Musee d'Orsay, Paris, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This long overdue tribute to Signac's power of expression and artistic influence features some two hundred paintings, drawings, watercolours, and prints from public and private collections worldwide. Fully illustrated in colour and discussed in individual entries, these works offer an unprecedented overview of Signac's fifty-year career. Signac's artistic development began with the luminous plein air paintings he made in the early 1880s which reveal the lessons he absorbed from Monet, Guillaumin, and other leading Impressionists. From 1884 until 1891 Signac's close association with Georges Seurat encouraged his explorations of colour harmony, contrasts, and Neoimpressionist technique. In the scintillating works of his maturity the rigours of Pointillism gave way to richly patterned, decorative colour surfaces. In a series of essays the exhibition's curators disc
Symbolism by
Sensuality and sexuality, the morbid and the decadent - these are the focal themes of symbolism. Caught in an industrial age, the movement's exponents sought solace in the world of mythology and fantasy. This book provides an examination of symbolism.
Symbolism by
Symbolism appeared in France and Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the 20th century. The Symbolists, fascinated with ancient mythology, attempted to escape the reign of rational thought imposed by science. They wished to transcend the world of the visible and the rational in order to attain the world of pure thought, constantly flirting with the limits of the unconscious.The French Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, the Belgians Fernand Khnopff and Félicien Rops, the English Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the Dutch Jan Toorop are the most representative artists of the movement.
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences by
The notion of the symbol is at the root of the Symbolist movement, but this symbol is different from the way it was used and understood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In the Symbolist movement, a symbol is not an allegory. The Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck defined its essence in an article that appeared on April 24, 1887, in L'Art moderne. He wrote that the notion of a symbol in the Symbolist movement is the opposite of the notion of the symbol in classical usage: instead of going from the abstract to the concrete (Venus, incarnated in the statue, represents love), it goes from the concrete to the abstract, from what is seen, heard, felt, tasted, and sensed to the evocation of the idea. This volume attempts to give a glimpse into the power of the Symbolist movement and the nature of its fundamental and interdisciplinary role in the evolution of art and literature of the twentieth century. It records the studies of a group of scholars, who met and discussed these topics together for the first time in 2009. While illuminating the specificity of Symbolism in art, architecture and literature in different European countries, these articles also demonstrate the crucial role of French Symbolism in the development of the international Symbolist movement. The authors hope that an expanding group, a society of Art, Literature and Music in Symbolism and Decadence (ALMSD), born out of the first meeting, will continue to further this discussion at future conferences and in the printed conference proceedings.
The Symbolist Generation: 1870-1910 by
Beginning with the Pre-Raphaelites and those pivotal French artists (de Chavannes, Moreau, Redon and others) who assured the transition from romanticism to symbolism, this magnificent (and splendidly color-illustrated) work turns to examine Gauguin's contribution to the spread of symbolism, an inter
The Total Work of Art in European Modernism by
In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.
Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh's life and work are so intertwined that it is hardly possible to observe one without thinking of the other. Van Gogh has indeed become the incarnation of the suffering, misunderstood martyr of modern art, the emblem of the artist as an outsider. An article, published in 1890, gave details about van Gogh's illness. The author of the article saw the painter as "a terrible and demented genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always at the brink of the pathological." Very little is known about Vincent's childhood. At the age of eleven he had to leave "the human nest", as he called it himself, for various boarding schools. The first portrait shows us van Gogh as an earnest nineteen year old. At that time he had already been at work for three years in The Hague and, later, in London in the gallery Goupil & Co. In 1874 his love for Ursula Loyer ended in disaster and a year later he was transferred to Paris, against his will. After a particularly heated argument during Christmas holidays in 1881, his father, a pastor, ordered Vincent to leave. With this final break, he abandoned his family name and signed his canvases simply "Vincent". He left for Paris and never returned to Holland. In Paris he came to know Paul Gauguin, whose paintings he greatly admired. The self-portrait was the main subject of Vincent's work from 1886c88. In February 1888 Vincent left Paris for Arles and tried to persuade Gauguin to join him. The months of waiting for Gauguin were the most productive time in van Gogh's life. He wanted to show his friend as many pictures as possible and decorate the Yellow House. But Gauguin did not share his views on art and finally returned to Paris. On 7 January, 1889, fourteen days after his famous self-mutilation, Vincent left the hospital where he was convalescing. Although he hoped to recover from and to forget his madness, but he actually came back twice more in the same year. During his last stay in hospital, Vincent painted landscapes in which he recreated the world of his childhood. It is said that Vincent van Gogh shot himself in the side in a field but decided to return to the inn and went to bed. The landlord informed Dr Gachet and his brother Theo, who described the last moments of his life which ended on 29 July, 1890: "I wanted to die. While I was sitting next to him promising that we would try to heal him. [...], he answered, 'La tristesse durera toujours (The sadness will last forever).'"
Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings by
Vincent van Gogh is regarded not only as a major pioneer of modernism, but as one of the greatest artists of all time. This book combines a detailed monograph on his life and art with a complete catalogue of his paintings.
The Van Gogh File: The Myth and the Man by
Incorporating recent discoveries about Vincent Van Gogh's life and work, including the only photograph of him as an adult, this updated biography investigates the creativity, successes, and frustrations of one of the world's most famous painters. With evidence accumulated from Van Gogh's European life, from Belgium, the Netherlands, England, and France, this illuminating account reveals sources of his unhappiness, terrible childhood illnesses, personal relationships, and even introduces his possible grandchildren. Fully illustrated with more than 50 photographs and art reproductions, these new facts show the seeds of Van Gogh's inspiration and shine light on one of the most enigmatic figures of 19th-century art.
Vincent Van Gogh by
The incarnation of the myth of a cursed artist, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is a legend who became a reference for modern art. An Expressionist during the Post-Impressionist movement, his art was misunderstood during his lifetime. In Holland, he partook in the Dutch realist painting movement by studying peasant characters. Anxious and depressed, Vincent van Gogh produced more than 2000 artworks, yet sold only one in his lifetime. A self-made artist, his work is known for its rough and emotional beauty and is amongst the most popular in the art market today.
Vincent Van Gogh - Ever Yours - The Essential Letters by
"There is scarcely one letter by Van Gogh which I, who am certainly no expert, do not find fascinating." --W. H. Auden In addition to his many remarkable paintings and drawings, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) left behind a fascinating and voluminous body of correspondence. This highly accessible book includes a broad selection of 265 letters, from a total of 820 in existence, that focus on Van Gogh's relentless quest to find his destiny, a search that led him to become an artist; the close bond with his brother Theo; his fraught relationship with his father; his innate yearning for recognition; and his great love of art and literature. The correspondence not only offers detailed insights into Van Gogh's complex inner life, but also re-creates the world in which he lived and the artistic avant-garde that was taking hold in Paris. The letters are accompanied by a general introduction, historic family photographs, and reproductions of 87 actual pages of letters that contain sketches by Van Gogh. Selected from the critically acclaimed 6-volume set of letters published by the Van Gogh Museum in 2009, Ever Yours is the essential book on Van Gogh's letters, which every art and literature lover needs to own.
Vincent van Gogh: The Complete Paintings by
Vincent van Gogh is regarded not only as a major pioneer of modernism, but as one of the greatest artists of all time. This book combines a detailed monograph on his life and art with a complete catalogue of his paintings.
Whistler by
Whistler suddenly shot to fame like a meteor at a crucial moment in the history of art, a field in which he was a pioneer. Like the impressionists, with whom he sided, he wanted to impose his own ideas. Whistler's work can be divided into four periods. The first may be called a period of research in which he was influenced by the Realism of Gustave Courbet and by Japanese art. Whistler then discovered his own originality in the Nocturnes and the Cremorne Gardens series, thereby coming into conflict with the academics who wanted a work of art to tell a story. When he painted the portrait of his mother, Whistler entitled it Arrangement in Grey and Black and this is symbolic of his aesthetic theories. When painting the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens it was not to depict identifiable figures, as did Renoir in his work on similar themes, but to capture an atmosphere. He loved the mists that hovered over the banks of the Thames, the pale light, and the factory chimneys which at night turned into magical minarets. Night redrew landscapes, effacing the details. This was the period in which he became an adventurer in art; his work, which verged on abstraction, shocked his contemporaries. The third period is dominated by the full-length portraits that brought him his fame. He was able to imbue this traditional genre with his profound originality. He tried to capture part of the souls of his models and placed the characters in their natural habitats. This gave his models a strange presence so that they seem about to walk out of the picture to physically encounter the viewer. By extracting the poetic substance from individuals he created portraits described as "mediums" by his contemporaries, and which were the inspiration for Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Towards the end of his life, the artist began painting landscapes and portraits in the classical tradition, strongly influenced by Velázquez. Whistler proved to be extremely rigorous in ensuring his paintings coincided with his theories. He never hesitated in crossing swords with the most famous art theoreticians of his day. His personality, his outbursts, and his elegance were a perfect focus for curiosity and admiration. He was a close friend of Stéphane Mallarmé, and admired by Marcel Proust, who rendered homage to him in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. He was also a provocative dandy, a prickly socialite, a demanding artist, and a daring innovator.
Whistler by
Although American by birth and heritage, James McNeill Whistler spent most of his life in western Europe, particularly in Paris and London, where he lived his life in a swirl of controversy over his art and his often self-aggrandizing behavior, which tainted his associations with fellow artists and the public. His guiding principle was "art for art's sake" meaning that the artist should only work to please himself. Whistler's tonally disciplined palette distinguishes his painting from all other artists and provides his work with sophistication and elegance. He was a leader in the Aesthetic Movement and frequently wrote and lectured about his ideas on art and philosophy. Common themes were landscapes and portraits. Whistler often gave his works generalized titles, such as Arrangement in Grey and Black: No.1 , better known as Whistler's Mother , in order to emphasize his belief in the importance of line over color, composition over content. Whistler also frequently titled his works using words such as symphonies, harmonies, compositions, and arrangements. Throughout his long and somewhat contentious professional life, Whistler steadily produced outstanding works of art held today in the world's most prestigious museums.
William Woodward by
William Woodward (1859-1939) was a force in New Orleans and the art world, and his legacy endures. In this first compilation of examples of Woodward's work spanning his career, essayists offer unique perspectives on the artist and his art. Woodward was a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts Normal Art School. He started the School of Art and organized the Department of Architecture at Tulane University, and he taught evening art classes to citizens of New Orleans. His oil crayon paintings of the French Quarter were instrumental in preserving the French Quarter buildings from destruction, and he was a leader in the Arts and Crafts movement in New Orleans. He was a member of the American Institute of Architects. Woodward also organized the Art Association of New Orleans and the Decorative Art League for Women, which founded the manufacture of art pottery in New Orleans. Woodward was a prolific artist and pioneered new techniques with his use of the Rafaelli oil crayon and the fiberloid dry etching process. Upon his retirement from Tulane in 1922, Woodward moved to Biloxi, Mississippi, where his paintings of the Mississippi Gulf Coast provide a historical record of an area now almost entirely changed by development and natural disasters. Woodward also traveled extensively and chronicled his travels in his art.
