As an artist, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) defies easy description. Allied with the French impressionists through his commitment to portraying modern life, he also took an independent course, preferring line over color and the visible brushstroke, and working in a studio instead of out-of-doors. He is perhaps best known as a painter, but his most widely known work is a sculpture, "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen." Executed in wax, near life-sized, dressed in a ballerina's tutu, with real ballet slippers and real hair, the sculpture caused a sensation when it was exhibited in 1881. It is the only sculpture Degas ever showed publicly, though more than one hundred--of dancers, horses, and bathers--were found in his studio after he died, all dusty, some fallen apart. For almost forty years after his death, these works were known only through the bronzes his heirs had cast from the originals.Then, in 1955, the waxes themselves appeared on the art market. Thanks to the discernment and generosity of Paul Mellon, the majority are now preserved at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, most on permanent display.

This groundbreaking volume honors this extraordinary gift by linking art and science. It brings together the insights of a distinguished art historian of nineteenth-century painting and sculpture and the specialized knowledge of National Gallery conservators and scientists who have published pioneering technical studies. Including essays on Degas' life and work, his sculptural technique and materials, and the story of the sculptures after his death, it features art-historical and technical discussions of every work in the collection as well as indispensable concordances and bibliography. The richly illustrated text is intended for both art lover and specialist. Was Degas the sculptor technically inept or unusually inventive? How do we understand his sculpture in light of his paintings, prints, and photographs? These questions and many others are explored with originality and depth, adding immeasurably to our understanding of the artistic avant-garde in the late nineteenth century and to our appreciation of this controversial artist.

It's well known that Claude Monet was a gourmand as well as an artistic genius. His culinary journals are filled with detailed recipes and notes about what he ate and with whom he shared his meals. Now, sixty of those recipes are gathered in this elegantly produced book brimming with the colors and flavors of Giverny, France. Each chapter features recipes that were served in Monet's famed yellow dining room, eaten al fresco in the gardens at Giverny, or at several of the fine restaurants along the Seine in Normandy. Beautiful reproductions of Monet's art compliment the recipes, along with photographs of the artist enjoying these dishes with his family, friends, and fellow artists. The recipes themselves, selected for their rustic appeal and use of only the freshest ingredients, range from simple galettes and hearty casseroles to fine souffle s, seafood dishes, and delicious tarts, cakes, and other pastries. A fitting tribute to the painter and his legendary aesthetic, this cookbook is the next best thing to sitting at Monet's table.

Bradford Collins has assembled here a collection of twelve essays that demonstrates, through the interpretation of a single work of art, the abundance and complexity of methodological approaches now available to art historians. Focusing on Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, " each contributor applies to it a different methodology, ranging from the more traditional to the newer, including feminism, Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and semiotics. By demonstrating the ways that individual practitioners actually apply the various methodological insights that inform their research, "Twelve Views of Manet's "Bar"" serves as an excellent introduction to critical methodology as well as a provocative overview for those already familiar with the current discourse of art history. In the process of gaining new insight into Manet's work, and into the discourse of methodology, one discovers that it is not only the individual painting but art history itself that is under investigation. An introduction by Richard Shiff sets the background with a brief history of Manet scholarship and suggestions as to why today's accounts have taken certain distinct directions. The contributors, selected to provide a broad and balanced range of methodological approaches, include: Carol Armstrong, Albert Boime, David Carrier, Kermit Champa, Bradford R. Collins, Michael Paul Driskel, Jack Flam, Tag Gronberg, James D. Herbert, John House, Steven Z. Levine, and Griselda Pollock."

In December 1888, Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear. It is the most famous story about any artist in history. But what really happened on that dark winter night? In Van Gogh's Ear, Bernadette Murphy reveals the truth. She takes us on an extraordinary journey from major museums to forgotten archives, vividly reconstructing Van Gogh's world. We meet police inspectors and cafe patrons, prostitutes and madams, his beloved brother Theo and fellow painter Paul Gauguin. Why did Van Gogh commit such a brutal act? Who was the mysterious 'Rachel' to whom he presented his macabre gift? Did he really remove his entire ear? Murphy answers these important questions with her groundbreaking discoveries, offering a stunning portrait of an artist edging towards madness in his pursuit of excellence. BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK PRIMETIME BBC2 DOCUMENTARY WITH JEREMY PAXMAN

Each volume in this new series offers an in-depth exploration of one major work in MoMA's collection. Through a lively illustrated essay by a MoMA curator that examines the work in detail, the publication delves into aspects of the artist's oeuvre and places the work in a broader social and arthistorical context.

I AM THE FIRST CONSCIOUSNESS OF CHAOS collects the key "noirs" - lithographs, etchings and charcoals - of Odilon Redon, perhaps the most enigmatic and esoteric figure in the artistic lineage that leads directly from Symbolism to Surrealism. Never previously available in a single trade volume, the majority of Redon's noirs - over 250 illustrations - are finally collated here, along with illuminating excerpts from the decadent texts which inspired their creation. Authors featured include J-K Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, St John the Divine, Edgar Allan Poe and others; the book also includes an autobiographical introductory essay by Redon himself. With proclamations such as "everything in art occurs through voluntary submission to the advent of the unconscious" and "my originality consists in putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible," Odilon Redon (1840-1916) established a theoretical legacy which now places him as one of the key precursors of Surrealist thought. And along with Gustave Moreau and Georges Seurat, Redon was one of the first painters to excite the imagination of a young Andre Breton. A contemporary of the Impressionists, Redon chose to align himself with literary Symbolism, demonstrated by his friendship with Stephane Mallarme and his visual interpretations of the "decadent" texts of such writers as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Poe, and others. His reputation as a purveyor of phantasmic visions was sealed by the description of his work included in J-K Huysmans' decadent bible A Rebours, in 1884, and his rise to prominence in the 20th century was precipitated by the inclusion of many of his works at the controversial Armory Show, held in New York in 1913."

Few artists have exerted such an influence on modern art as Paul Cezanne. 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 Cezanne's life and art, discussing the central 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 examines Cezanne's youth in Provence, a formative period which left a deep and abiding impression on the artist's painting, as well as exploring his turbulent time in Paris and the larger-than-life artistic persona he created for himself during these years. His initial style, characterized by violent and explicit subject-matter and a rugged manner of painting, gave rise to an enduring mythology of the artist. Paul Cezanne explores the personal and artistic relationships that influenced Cezanne: from his close friendship with Emile Zola to his artistic dialogue with Manet, collaboration with Camille Pissarro and association with the Impressionists. Above all, Paul Cezanne tells the story of his life as a part of the pivotal shift towards the twentieth century, illuminating how much his work and ideas helped to usher it in.

A gorgeous new edition with the cover printed on silver. Vincent van Gogh is considered one of the world's greatest painters, his work having had a huge and far-reaching influence on 20th-century art as well as remaining visually and emotionally powerful to this day. We all know of Van Gogh's troubled genius, but now through his letters to his brother Theo, as discussed in this beautifully illustrated and fascinating giftbook, you will discover the true depth of the artist's thoughts, beliefs, ambitions and his struggle with his mental illness. Containing translations of some of the most revealing letters and insightful commentary, alongside photographs of the letters themselves and his best-loved artworks, this is a real treat.

This book offers a new look at works by notable French artists represented in the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Color reproductions of fifty-eight works-ranging from chalk drawings by Charles Francois Daubigny and Edgar Degas to woodcuts by Paul Gauguin and lithographs by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-accompany important reconsiderations of well-known works and print series. Essays by five prominent scholars consider the political, social, cultural, and market conditions that governed and motivated printmaking and drawing and examine how key artists contributed to the development of the graphic arts in 19th-century France. The volume concludes with a complete checklist of works included in the accompanying exhibition. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Exhibition Schedule: The Frick Collection(03/12/13-06/16/13)

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) is arguably one of the most important artists in the development of modern art, being as he was a key bridge between the stirrings of airy abstraction in Impressionism and the solid redefinition of space espoused by Cubism. Exhibiting with - but often apart - from the Impressionists, always striving to please the establishment and yet ultimately following his own path to find new ways of representing visual experience, his work is suffused with life and colour but also retains its power in the knowledge of its influence. This gorgeous book introduces the reader to Cezanne through an accessible discussion of the artist in context, his life, work and legacy, followed by a curated selection of full-page reproductions of his most representative and impressive work, from his many portraits and still lifes to his figure groups (the iconic bathers) and landscapes (his precious Montagne Sainte-Victoire).

In 1891, Paul Gauguin (1848 1903) arrives on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti. In this lush paradise, he is liberated from the concerns of the city-dwelling European. He is free: to love, to sing, and to create. In Copenhagen, Gauguin's wife enjoys no such freedom. She would rather forget her odious husband and his degenerate artwork. Instead, in a city resistant to the avant-garde, she is tasked with selling a collection of his extravagantly priced Tahitian paintings. When they finally go on sale in Paris, shortly after Gauguin's return sales are catastrophic. For Monet, Renoir, and the rest of the old guard, nothing indicates that these bizarre, visionary works are of any lasting significance. Gauguin: The Other World is a revelatory biography of an artist whose qualities as a man won him few admirers in his own lifetime, but whose talents as a painter would have an enormous influence on the art of Picasso, Matisse, and many more.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Sketch Books Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. The thick paper stock makes them perfect for sketching and drawing. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift.This example features Van Gogh's Almond Blossom

A native of Valencia, Spanish Impressionist Joaquin Sorolla (1863-1923) first went to Paris in 1885 as a young artist at the age of twenty-three. He exhibited at the international salons, winning the Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle in 1900, and in 1906, he exhibited for the first time at the Galerie Georges Petit, one of the principal galleries of the Impressionists. The exhibition was a resounding success and helped establish Sorolla's international reputation. Known for his vigorous compositions, unusual color palette, and loose, radiant brush strokes, Sorolla's sundrenched landscapes, beach scenes, and luminous portraits even impressed such contemporaries as Claude Monet. Richly illustrated and with newly researched essays by noted scholars, this important book reveals much new information about Sorolla's activities and relationships with other artists in Europe. Included are more than one hundred paintings reflecting the artist's career, from his early work in Paris in which the influence of the French Impressionists is clearly evident, to the distinctive pictures that reflect his mature and celebrated style.

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.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Few artists command such fervent devotion amongst art lovers and such high prices in the salerooms of the art world. Love him or hate him, Vincent van Gogh is one of a handful of artists who is now a cultural event.

Stuart Morris's study concentrates on the paintings first, and employs van Gogh's eloquent letters as an aesthetic reference point. Much of the book is concerned with metacriticism - the way van Gogh has been critically received over the years.

Vincent van Gogh is one of the most celebrated of painters. It's a bit of a mystery. The mystery (or irony) is that his paintings have commanded the highest prices in the auction rooms of the contemporary art world (88 million dollars, 53 million dollars, and so on), yet he only managed to sell one painting during his lifetime, and he lived in poverty (with financial support from his brother Theo).

Why is Vincent van Gogh so popular? His legend has developed relatively rapidly. His art is loved by the critics and public. The crazy prices paid for single oil paintings are the manifestations of the fervour that van Gogh seems to generate. He is one of the handful of painters who cause great excitement every time exhibitions of his work are put on. One thinks also of Claude Monet, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonaroti and Pablo Picasso. These are artists that the public go mad for, so that when they are exhibited, there are huge queues trailing around the block.

The 1990 centenary celebrations of 'poor Vincent' showed how much he is exalted. There were films about him, discussions and conferences, TV documentaries, magazine articles, reviews, letters, and much merchandize was sold, to the great glee of the manufacturers: posters, tea towels, calendars, mugs, souvenirs of all kinds. What would the dishevelled, obsessive man who painted those small canvases in the years up to 1890 in Southern France make of the amazing fuss that now surrounds his work? What would van Gogh think of just one of his paintings being bought for 88 million dollars? It is a huge sum even in today's expensive world. You could build a hospital or two with the money. Imagine it Did Vincent know that when he painted those blue irises on that small, standard-size canvas, that it would one day be 'worth' millions of dollars?

I shall count myself very happy if I can manage to work enough to earn my living, for it worries me a lot when I think that I have done so many pictures and drawings without ever selling one.

Like the workers he depicted in numerous images, Vincent van Gogh himself worked very hard to improve his art. With a dogged determination van Gogh copied the Old Masters, as well as Japanese prints. His determined self-education and self-improvement paid off, resulting in more than 800 paintings in about 8 years. The years of van Gogh's art are relatively few - nearly all of the important works were made in the decade 1880-90. Hence his paintings are credited in art history books with the month and sometimes the day as well as the year of production. For most artists, 1889 would suffice. For van Gogh, the credit is October 1889. Producing 800 paintings in 8 years is an average of a hundred per year, or one every three and a half days. More likely, van Gogh would have worked on a number at the same time, or within a short space of time.

This review considers the major Cezanne exhibition at the Tate Gallery London, staged from 8th February until 28th April 1996. Rather than focusing exclusively on the artist's work, the piece attempts to place the exhibition in context, exploring the institutional arena of presentation and the social and economic strata to which the retrospective is mainly addressed. To encompass these multiple levels of attention, the essay is based on a journey through the exhibition, seen at the press view on Tuesday 6th February 1996. The record is intentionally discursive, entwining impressions both of the works and the audience, groups of media professionals moving from room to room in sequence around the show. Further attention is given to the formulation of the catalogue, to gain a reasonably complete picture of the event.

Madame Vuillard is a particular focus of the work produced during the initial decade of Edouard Vuillard's (1868 - 1940) career, the 1890s, when Vuillard was a member of the Nabis and forging an artistic identity as part of the Parisian avant-garde. During this period Vuillard and his widowed mother shared a series of modest rented apartments in central Paris in which the artist sustained a works-on-paper and (from 1897) amateur photographic practice out of his 'studio-bedroom', whilst in the dining room Madame Vuillard ran the corsetry business employing a handful of seamstresses including Vuillard's sister. In these apartments Vuillard and Madame Vuillard operated mutually supportive, parallel working practices, to the extent that Vuillard put his mother and the fabric of her atelier 'in the picture' whilst she posed for his pencil and camera or developed his photographs in the kitchen. Their Parisian co-habitation, and Vuillard's portrayal of his mother across a range of pictorial media, lasted until Madame Vuillard's death as an elderly woman in 1928. This mutuality of working and living practice will constitute one of the themes of this unique loan exhibition, drawn from UK and Parisian collections and featuring paintings, lithographs and other works on paper as well as photographs. It will also explore the diverse domestic roles and responsibilities of a petit-bourgeois widow at the turn of the century in works that portray Madame Vuillard as seamstress; resting after dinner; imparting maternal advice and care to her daughter; as a woman at her toilette; and as the apartment's cook and cleaner. The exhibition will also foreground Vuillard's practice as modernist artist by focusing on the maternal fi gure in relation to the specifi c formal properties of his work. These include, in the 1890s at least, the paintings' diminutive size; their shallow, simplifi ed compositional structure worked over with dense webs or matt patches of pigment; and the omission of spaces between fi gures and things. It was the intimacy (sometimes serious or witty, often banal) of their maternal motifs, the intimate formal relation between fi gure and ground and the intimate viewing conditions these small works required of their viewers that caught the attention of Vuillard's earliest critics, who in the 1890s fi rst labeled him an 'intimiste' artist. This exhibition and accompanying illustrated catalogue will locate Madame Vuillard as muse, as motif and as everyday practical support at the core of Vuillard's developing Intimism; an artistic corpus spanning 40 years. The exhibition catalogue will feature an essay on Madame Vuillard's role in her son's practice by the exhibition's curator, Dr Francesca Berry, and an essay on Vuillard and photography by Mathias Chivot of the Archives Vuillard-Archives Roussel, Paris.

Across almost 50 years, Winston Churchill produced more than 500 paintings. His subjects included his family homes at Blenheim and Chartwell, evocative coastal scenes on the French Riviera, and many sun-drenched depictions of Marrakesh in Morocco, as well as still life pictures and an extraordinarily revealing self-portrait, painted during a particularly troubled time in his life. In war and peace, Churchill came to enjoy painting as his primary means of relaxation from the strain of public affairs.

In his introduction to Churchill: The Statesman as Artist, David Cannadine provides the most important account yet of Churchill's life in art, which was not just a private hobby, but also, from 1945 onwards, an essential element of his public fame. The first part of this book brings together for the first time all of Churchill's writings and speeches on art, not only Painting as a Pastime, but his addresses to the Royal Academy, his reviews of two of the Academy's summer exhibitions, and an important speech he delivered about art and freedom in 1937.

The second part of the book provides previously uncollected critical accounts of his work by some of Churchill's contemporaries: Augustus John's hitherto unpublished introduction to the Royal Academy exhibition of Churchill's paintings in 1959, and essays and reviews by Churchill s acquaintances Sir John Rothenstein, Professor Thomas Bodkin and the art critic Eric Newton. The book is lavishly illustrated with reproductions of many of Churchill's paintings, some of them appearing for the first time. Here is Churchill the artist more fully revealed than ever before.

She is famous throughout the world, but how many know her name? You can admire her figure in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden or Copenhagen but where is her grave? She danced as a 'petit rat' at the Paris Opera. She was also a model, she posed for painters and sculptors - among them Edgar Degas. Taking us through the underbelly of the Belle Epoque, Laurens casts a light on those who have traditionally been overlooked in the study of art, and opens a space for essential questions. She paints a compelling portrait of Marie van Goethem and the world she inhabited, in the 1880s; a time when art unsettled the hypocrisy of society.