During the 1870s and 1880s, a loose group of French artists, including Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir, adopted a style of painting and subject matter that challenged the art prompted by the Academie Francaise and the Salons where "official" assumptions about the meaning of painting prevailed. What has been called "the revolutionary nature of the Impressionist enterprise" emerged from political radicalism, belief in science and individualism, and a view of art true to modern life and to immediate visual perception. In all these respects, Impressionism initiated the radical tendencies of modern art.

Today the revolutionary aims of Impressionist artists are generally overlooked. Impressionist art has been marketed more successfully than any other style: the price of Impressionist paintings surpasses that of the Old Masters, exhibitions draw blockbuster crowds, and books and mass reproductions are ubiquitous.

In her perceptive new survey, Belinda Thomson challenges both sentimentalized and simplistic views of Impressionism. Drawing upon recently discovered documents -- critical reviews and letters between artists, writers, and dealers -- she illuminates the thinking and the personal lives of the artists themselves, examining the factors and experiences that allowed Impressionism to develop when it did. She investigates the family background of the Impressionists, the importance of the art market and collecting, and the influence of the critical reception to their exhibitions.

Innovative Impressions explores an under-examined aspect of three impressionists' careers: their groundbreaking prints and the new techniques they developed through collaboration and experimentation. In 1879, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro formed the most active core of a group of artists planning a periodical to feature their prints. Through this collaborative effort they challenged each other to develop a new language of printmaking whose visual and expressive potential went well beyond the traditional reproductive purpose of the medium. Indeed, the intimacy of small-scale works on paper at times spurred the artists to be even more daringly creative than they were in their paintings. Their interactions and engagement with printmaking varied over time, culminating in the 1890s, when each developed distinctive methods of introducing color into their work. For much of their careers this unlikely trio of artists inspired and challenged each other, and these dynamics played a crucial role in their creative processes.

In 1863, the French painter Ernest Meissonier was one of the most famous artists in the world and the darling of the 'Salon' - that all important public art exhibition held biannually in Paris. Manet, on the other hand, was struggling in obscurity. Beginning with the year that Manet exhibited his ground-breaking Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe and ending in 1974 with the first 'Impressionist' exhibition, Ross King plunges into Parisian life during a ten-year period full of social and political ferment with his usual narrative brillliance. These were the years in which Napoleon III's autocratic and pleasure-seeking Second Empire fell from its heights into the ignominy of the Franco-Prussian war and the ensuing Paris Commune of 1871. But it was also a period in which a group of artists, with Manet in the vanguard began to challenge the establishment by turning to the landscapes and ordinary people they saw around them. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to get their paintings exhibited in pride of place at the Salon was not just about art, it was about how to see the world.

Collectors played an essential yet misunderstood role in the success of Impressionism. Even though they were not immune to economic and social woes, they were often engaged in defending this artistic movement that they had helped come to life, establish itself or make known, each according to their times. It is this group of committed collectors that the present work seeks to examine. From assembling a collection to donating it to a museum, from supporting artists within the borders of France to publicising the movement internationally, from the first intimate private showings to the questions raised by the presentation of these works in museums, collectors were present at every stage of the development of Impressionism, from the dawn of the movement to the middle of the 20th century. This volume aims to re-examine and reassess the importance of these collectors in the political, social and economic contexts of their times through the contributions of 16 international specialists. Depeaux, De Nittis, the Palmers, O'Hara, Buhrle, Caillebotte, Fayet: whether they are the subjects of dedicated case studies or part of a broader discourse, the multiplicity of profiles of these collectors and the paths they followed will allow readers to gain a better understanding of their importance in the history of the Impressionist movement.

Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was a clerk in the Paris customs service who dreamed of becoming a famous artist. At the age 49, he decided to give it a try. At first, Rousseau's bright, bold paintings of jungles and exotic flora and fauna were dismissed as childish and simplistic, but his unique and tenacious style soon won acclaim. After 1886, he exhibited regularly at Paris's prestigious Salon des Independants, and in 1908 he received a legendary banquet of honor, hosted by Picasso. Although best known for his tropical scenes, Rousseau, in fact, never left France, relying on books and magazines for inspiration, as well as trips to natural history museums and anecdotes from returning military acquaintances. Working in oil on canvas, he tended toward a vibrant palette, vivid rendering, as well as a certain lush, languid sensuality as seen in the nude in the jungle composition The Dream. Today, "Rousseau's myth" is well established in art history, garnering comparison with such other post-Impressionist masters as Cezanne, Matisse, and Gauguin. In this dependable TASCHEN introduction, we explore the makings of this late-blooming artist and his legacy as an unlikely hero of modernism. "Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see." - Henri Rousseau

A perfect gift for art lovers or anyone interested in Impressionism, this collection of 365 pictures gathers the best of the genre's masterpieces from around the world. Covering a wide range of artists and countries associated with the movement, the book features double-page spreads with an Impressionist painting on one side and a blank page on the other, offering space for notes and reminders of significant events. The vibrant colors and dynamic brush strokes that characterize Impressionist art come fully to life in these beautifully reproduced pictures. Each day readers will encounter renowned works by Renoir, Gauguin, Degas, Cezanne, Monet, and Seurat as well as paintings by lesser- known practitioners such as Lovis Corinth, Childe Hassam, Lesser Ury, Peder Severin Kroyer, and Dame Laura Knight. Perfect for work, home, or studio this beautiful volume will brighten any room and offer inspiration every day.

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.

This 1997 revised and updated biography of the celebrated artist, using the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd's two-volume first edition in the mid 1970s, reveals the complete story of John and his circle, from one of our great biographers. John studied at the Slade with his sister Gwen before both of them went to Paris. He lived and worked at feverish speed and his drawings were astonishing for their fluid lyrical line, their vigor and spontaneity. His life became a complex tale of two cities, London and Paris, of two wives and many families. 'The age of Augustus John was dawning,' Virginia Woolf wrote of the year 1908, which saw many portraits of writers and artists and small glowing oil panels of figures in a landscape. His most striking work was done in the years before the First World War and when he died in 1961 his death was treated as a landmark signaling the end of a distant era.

The essays in this wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated volume capture the theoretical range and scholarly rigor of recent criticism that has fundamentally transformed the study of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Readers are invited to consider the profound issues and penetrating questions that lie beneath this perennially popular body of work as the contributors examine the art world of late nineteenth-century France - including detailed looks at Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Cezanne, Morisot, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. The authors offer fascinating new perspectives, placing the artworks from this period in wider social and historical contexts. They explore these painters' pictorial and market strategies, the critical reception and modern criteria the paintings engendered, and the movement's historic role in the formation of an avant-garde tradition. Their research reflects the wealth of new documents, critical approaches, and scholarly exhibitions that have fundamentally altered our understanding of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. These essays, several of which have previously been familiar only to scholars, provide instructive models of in-depth critical analysis and of the competing art historical methods that have crucially reshaped the field. Contributors of this title include: Carol Armstrong, T. J. Clark, Stephen F. Eisenman, Tamar Garb, Nicholas Green, Robert L. Herbert, John House, Mary Tompkins Lewis, Michel Melot, Linda Nochlin, Richard Shiff, Debora Silverman, Paul Tucker, and Martha Ward.

<div>Steven Z. Levine provides a new understanding of the life and work of Claude Monet and the myth of the modern artist. Levine analyzes the extensive critical reception of Monet and the artist's own prolific writings in the context of the story of Narcissus, popular in late nineteenth-century France. Through a careful blending of psychoanalytical theory and historical study, Levine identifies narcissism and obsession as driving forces in Monet's art and demonstrates how we derive meaning from the accumulated verbal responses to an artist's work.</div>

Several decades have now passed since postcolonial and feminist critiques presented the art-historical world with a demythologized Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), a much-diminished image of the artist/hero who had once been universally admired as "the father of modernist primitivism." In this volume, both long-established and more recent Gauguin scholars offer a provocative picture of the evolution of Gauguin scholarship in the recent postmodern era, as they confront and consider how the dismantling of the longstanding Gauguin myth positions us now in the 21st century to deal with and assess the life, work, and legacy of this still perennially popular artist. To reassess the challenges that Gauguin faced in his own day as well as those that he continues to present to current and future scholarship, they explore the multiple contexts that influenced Gauguin's thought and behavior as well as his art and incorporate a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, from anthropology, philosophy, and the history of science to gender studies and the study of Pacific cultural history. Dealing with a wide range of Gauguin's production, they challenge conventional art-historical thinking, highlight transnational perspectives, and offer clues to the direction of future scholarship, as audiences worldwide seek to make multicultural peace with Gauguin and his art. Broude has raised the bar of Gauguin scholarship ever higher in this groundbreaking volume, which will be necessary reading for students and scholars of art history, late 19th-century French and Pacific culture, gender studies, and beyond.

Michael Doran has gathered texts by contemporaries of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)--including artists, critics, and writers--that illuminate the influential painter's philosophy of art especially in his late years. The book includes historically important essays by a dozen different authors, including Emile Bernard, Joaquim Gasquet, Maurice Denis, and Ambroise Vollard, along with selections from Cezanne's own letters. In addition to the material included in the original French edition of the book, which has also been published in German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, this edition contains an introduction written especially for it by noted Cezanne scholar Richard Shiff. The book closes with Lawrence Gowing's magisterial essay, "The Logic of Organized Sensations," first published in 1977 and long out of print. Cezanne's work, and the thinking that lay behind it, have been of inestimable importance to the artists who followed him. This gathering of writings will be of enormous interest to artists, writers, art historians--indeed to all students of modern art.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) is one of the best-known and most beloved painters in the history of art, with myriad publications and exhibitions devoted to his oeuvre. And yet there remains a previously undiscovered aspect of his career: his surprisingly significant role as a draftsman. This book is the first to focus on Monet's pastels, drawings, and sketchbooks, offering a revolutionary new interpretation of the artist's life and work. Monet has long been seen as an anti-draftsman, an artist who painted his subjects directly and whose rarely seen graphic works were marginal to his artistic process. In an effort to develop his public image, Monet denied the role of drawing in his working method. In actuality, Monet began his career as a caricaturist and as a teenager developed a passion for drawing that was never extinguished. He went on to master the medium of pastel and included seven in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Citing recently discovered, unpublished documents that overturn the accepted image of the artist, The Unknown Monet reveals an extensive group of graphic works created over the course of the artist's career, many of which are unknown to the general public and to scholars: beautiful pastels, stunning black chalk drawings, and fascinating sketchbooks, which include pencil studies that relate to many of his paintings. The book also shows how Monet exploited the print media to promote his art. The most important publication on Monet to appear in a generation, this illuminating volume is essential to anyone interested in his work, Impressionism, and nineteenth-century French culture. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts Exhibition Schedule: Royal Academy of Arts, London (March 17 - June 10, 2007) Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (June 24 - September 16, 2007)

Gustave Caillebotte was more than a painter: he collected and researched postage stamps; designed and built yachts; administered and participated in the sport of yachting; collected paintings; cultivated and collected rare orchids; designed and tended his gardens; and engaged in local politics. Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter presents the first comprehensive account of Caillebotte's manifold activities. It presents a completely new critical interpretation of Caillebotte's broad career that highlights the singular salience of 'work', and which intersects histories and theories of visual culture, ideology, and psychoanalysis. Where the recent art historical 'rediscovery' of Caillebotte offers multiple narratives of his identification with working men, this book goes beyond them towards excavating what his work was in its own terms. Born to an haut bourgeois milieu in which he was never completely comfortable and assailed by traumatic familial bereavements, Caillebotte adopted and adapted the ideologically normative category of work for his own purposes, deconstructing its ostensibly class-determinate parameters in order to bridge the chasm of his social alienation.

L'oeuvre d'Henri Matisse (1869-1954) revele sa croyance eternelle dans le pouvoir des couleurs pures et des formes simples. Bien qu'il soit surtout reconnu pour sa peinture, Matisse s'est aussi illustre en dessin, en sculpture, en lithographie, dans l'art du vitrail ainsi que du collage, dont il a developpe sa propre technique de decoupage quand son grand age l'empechait de rester debout et de peindre. Matisse a la plupart du temps peint des sujets classiques: nus, portraits, paysage animes de silhouettes, scene orientales et vues interieures. Pourtant, son traitement des couleurs intenses et son dessin fluide lui conferent une place de maitre du XXe siecle. La palette de Matisse a particulierement enchante l'imagination moderne. Par son usage du bleu intense, du violet amethyste et du jaune d'oeuf dans toutes leurs nuances, il a libere son oeuvre des carcans d'une representation rigoureuse de la realite et a plutot cherche une "harmonie vitale", en prenant la musique comme source d'inspiration et figure de comparaison dans son travail. Des grands tableaux remplis de motifs aux portraits simples et tendres, ce livre presente l'immense richesse et l'intense creativite qui a caracterise la carriere de Matisse, en parcourant ses premieres oeuvres rattachees au mouvement fauviste jusqu'a ses derniers projets tels que Jazz et la chapelle du Rosaire, a Vence. A propos de la collection Chaque volume de la Basic Art Series de TASCHEN contient: une chronologique detaillee de la vie et de l'oeuvre de l'artiste qui rend compte de son importance culturelle et artistique une biographie concise une centaine d'illustrations couleur accompagnees de legendes explicatives

Steven Z. Levine provides a new understanding of the life and work of Claude Monet and the myth of the modern artist. Levine analyzes the extensive critical reception of Monet and the artist's own prolific writings in the context of the story of Narcissus, popular in late nineteenth-century France. Through a careful blending of psychoanalytical theory and historical study, Levine identifies narcissism and obsession as driving forces in Monet's art and demonstrates how we derive meaning from the accumulated verbal responses to an artist's work.

The personality of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) - a 9th-century combination of dropout, rebel, and genius - and the source of his enormous achievement continue to fascinate people as deeply as his vivid, wildly painted canvasses of sunflowers, peasants, and starry nights. In this first and only in-depth study of the relationship between van Gogh's psychological development and his art, Albert J. Lubin, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (Emeritus) at Stanford University and a practicing psychoanalyst, draws on the tremendous wealth of information available about van Gogh to explore his personal conflicts in the context of the forces that molded him: familial, historical, cultural, religious, artistic, and literary. Dr. Lubin approaches van Gogh not as a mysterious mix of sick eccentric and martyred artist, but as a complete man who transformed his suffering into a phenomenal body of work. Lubin's daring psychological insights and art criticism create a compelling portrait that allows us to better understand, and more fully appreciate, van Gogh's artistic triumph over his inner torment.

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.

This collection of Paul Cezanne's letters provides an insight into his thoughts and work.

Drawing on a broad foundation in the history of nineteenth-century French art, Richard Shiff offers an innovative interpretation of Cezanne's painting. He shows how Cezanne's style met the emerging criteria of a "technique of originality" and how it satisfied critics sympathetic to symbolism as well as to impressionism. Expanding his study of the interaction of Cezanne and his critics, Shiff considers the problem of modern art in general. He locates the core of modernism in a dialectic of making (technique) and finding (originality). Ultimately, Shiff provides not only clarifying accounts of impressionism and symbolism but of a modern classicism as well.

There are some collectors who through foresight and dedication have built truly outstanding art collections and shared them widely as part of public museums. Among these were Samuel Courtauld in London and Rasmus Meyer in Bergen. At the heart of each man's collection were single artists who were their greatest passions: for Courtauld it was Paul Cezanne and for Meyer, Edvard Munch. This unique collaboration between KODE art museums in Bergen and The Courtauld in London, celebrates these two remarkable collectors and two great artists by showing masterpieces by Cezanne in Bergen and Munch in London. The Courtauld is home to some of the most important paintings by Cezanne, such as The Card Players and Montagne Sainte-Victoire. "Cezanne. Masterpieces from The Courtauld at KODE Art Museum" is the story about how collectors and artists became aware of Cezanne. This publication not only presents ten key works from The Courtauld along with Cezannes from Norwegian collections, it also brings them together with eye witness accounts from the early years of his profound influence, seen through the lens of the Norwegian art scene around 1900. With essays by Barnaby Wright, Oystein Sjastad and Karen Serres and an introduction by Line Daatland. Forewords by Petter Snare and Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen.