Most known for her bold and darkly painted portraits, Brooks was revolutionary in her feminist renderings of women in resistance. Openly queer, she challenged conceptions of gender and sexuality in her art, which also served as her refuge. While many of her male counterparts were disfiguring and cubing their subjects-often women-Brooks gave personhood and power to the figures she painted. Her frank approach to her complicated relationship with her mother, faith, wealth, sexuality, and gender is complemented by a keen wit that echoes the gray tones of her work. Though her paintings are held in major collections, Brooks's influence in modernist circles of the early twentieth century is largely underexplored. This new publication, guided by Brooks's own impressionistic musings, bridges an important gap between the art and the artist. An introduction by Lauren O'Neill-Butler explores Brooks's role as an artist in the early twentieth century through the lens of gender and sexuality.

Claude Monet's water lily paintings are among the most iconic and beloved works of art of the past century. Yet these entrancing images were created at a time of terrible private turmoil and sadness for the artist. The dramatic history behind these paintings is little known; Ross King's Mad Enchantment tells the full story for the first time and, in the process, presents a compelling and original portrait of one of our most popular and cherished artists. By the outbreak of war in 1914, Monet, then in his mid-seventies, was one of the world's most famous and successful painters, with a large house in the country, a fleet of automobiles and a colossal reputation. However, he had virtually given up painting following the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and the onset of blindness a year later. Nonetheless, it was during this period of sorrow, ill health and creative uncertainty that - as the guns roared on the Western Front - he began the most demanding and innovative paintings he had ever attempted. Encouraged by close friends such as Georges Clemenceau, France's dauntless prime minister, Monet would work on these magnificent paintings throughout the war years and then for the rest of his life. So obsessed with his monumental task that the village barber was summoned to clip his hair as he worked beside his pond, he covered hundreds of yards of canvas with shimmering layers of pigment. As his ambitions expanded with his paintings, he began planning what he intended to be his legacy to the world: the `Musee Claude Monet' in the Orangerie in Paris. Drawing on letters and memoirs and focusing on this remarkable period in the artist's life, Mad Enchantment gives an intimate portrayal of Claude Monet in all his tumultuous complexity, and firmly places his water lily paintings among the greatest achievements in the history of art.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example is based on 'Wheat Field with Cypresses' by Vincent van Gogh. Vincent Van Gogh composed this painting while he was in the Saint-Remy mental asylum, near Arles. The bold use of impasto and the beauty of the towering trees have made this one of his most recognisable works. There are various other versions of the painting, one of which features a closer view of the cypresses painted vertically, as well as a replica of this version that Van Gogh painted for his mother and sister.

Rilke's prayerful responses to the french master's beseeching art

For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes.

Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cezanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life.

Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cezanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cezanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cezanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.

This volume is dedicated to 100 of the artist's most beautiful and unforgettable canvases, as well as a rich selection of lesserknown works. It explores the paintings in the context of Van Gogh's short but brilliant career, allying the works to his correspondence, which provides the narrative thread around which this study develops.

A singular thinker and an uncompromising seeker after artistic truth, Cezanne channelled a large part of his wide-ranging intellect and ferocious wit into his letters. This translation by Alex Danchev is based on a thorough re-examination of Cezanne's correspondence with family, friends and major figures from the literary and art worlds. Danchev's great achievement is to allow readers in English to hear Cezanne's voice for the first time in his own idiomatic, idiosyncratic style. And he sounds rather different from the Cezanne we thought we knew - richer, wittier, wiser, more philosophical, more irascible, above all more fully human. The letters offer fresh perspectives on his artistic vision, politics, friendships, psychology, philosophy, literary tastes and classical frame of reference. They provide an intimate insight into the preoccupations and personality of a legend.

Claude Monet spent most of his life painting his own spontaneous impressions of nature and the world that was closest to him. His works provoked the description 'Impressionist', the name given to the style of art that he created together with Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.

John Peters investigates the impact of Impressionism on Conrad and links this to his literary techniques as well as his philosophical and political views. Impressionism, Peters argues, enabled Conrad to encompass both surface and depth not only in visually perceived phenomena but also in his narratives and objects of consciousness, be they physical objects, human subjects, events or ideas. Conrad and Impressionism investigates the sources and implications of Conrad's impressionism in order to argue for a consistent link among his literary technique, philosophical presuppositions and socio-political views.

This book offers microhistories related to the transnational circulations of impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The contributors rethink the role of "French" impressionism in shaping these iterations by placing France within its global and imperialist context and arguing that impressionisms might be framed through the mobility studies' concept of "constellations of mobility." Artists engaging with impressionism in France, as in other global contexts, relied on, responded to, appropriated, and resisted elements of form and content based on fluid and interconnected political realities and market structures. Written by scholars and curators, the chapters demand reconsideration of impressionism as a historical construct and the meanings assigned to that term. This project frames future discussion in art history, cultural studies, and global studies on the politics of appropriating impressionism.

Today we view Cezanne as a monumental figure, but during his lifetime (1839-1906), many did not understand him or his work. With brilliant insight, drawing on a vast range of primary sources, Alex Danchev tells the story of an artist who was never accepted into the official Salon: he was considered a revolutionary at best and a barbarian at worst, whose paintings were unfinished, distorted and strange. His work sold to no one outside his immediate circle until his late thirties, and he maintained that 'to paint from nature is not to copy an object; it is to represent its sensations' - a belief way ahead of his time, with stunning implications that became the obsession of many other artists and writers, from Matisse and Braque to Rilke and Gertrude Stein. Beginning with the restless teenager from Aix who was best friends with Emile Zola at school, Danchev carries us through the trials of a painter tormented by self-doubt, who always remained an outsider, both of society and the bustle of the art world. Cezanne: A life delivers not only the fascinating days and years of the visionary who would 'astonish Paris with an apple', with interludes analysing his self-portraits, but also a complete assessment of Cezanne's ongoing influence through artistic imaginations in our own time. He is, as this life shows, a cultural icon comparable to Monet or Toulouse.

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 Sunflowers. Van Gogh painted a series of pictures depicting sunflowers, having first been inspired by the yellow flowers in Paris when he saw them growing in the gardens of Montmartre. Sunflowers were symbolic of life and hope to the artist, and could also be associated with his concept of the sun - glowing, yellow and hopeful.

Vincent van Gogh used art to express his intensely emotional response to the world around him. Enraptured by the beauty of nature and tormented by the sorrows of human existence, he produced in his tragically short life some of the most powerfully expressive paintings ever seen. Many have made the mistake of thinking him mad, and he did suffer throughout his life periods of mental anguish. But Van Gogh's paintings are not the works of a madman. Van Gogh famously sold only one painting during his life, but within a few years of his death he was recognized as one of the greatest modern painters.

Gauguin's great diary from Tahiti almost never saw the light of day in its original form. The manuscript was sent by the artist from his island refuge to his friend Charles Morice in Paris, and published in 1901 with immediate success, under the two names of Paul Gauguin and Charles Morice. Morice, with Gauguin's permission, had 'edited' and enlarged it to make it more readable. How much of the charm and crispness of the manuscript had been lost in the process was anyone's guess. It was to be 40 years before Gauguin's original version came to light, and it is published here in a translation by the poet Jonathan Griffin, together with a detailed description by the art historian Jean Loize, who re-discovered the manuscript. Loize shows that Morice had in parts altered Gauguin's text beyond recognition - a startling discovery that entirely changed ideas about Gauguin's style and intentions. This genuine version of Noa-Noa is not only an important document, it is also a beautiful piece of writing: amusing, acid, wide-eyed, moving. Gauguin feared that, unedited, it would seem absurdly crude; and no doubt it would have, to most readers in his day. Today we can appreciate its sketch form, jerky directness, authentic freshness. This edition is illustrated with the watercolours, wood-engravings and drawings that Gauguin assembled for the book.

Paul Cezanne challenged convention and pioneered new possibilities in painting. He was remarkable for his ability to perceive and paint aspects of everyday life in ways that revealed dynamic yet deeply harmonious visions of the world. But the intellectual and emotional difficulties of his achievements were considerable. Mainly self-taught, most of his career was plagued by rejection. The critics, and the public, disliked his paintings, and in 1884 Cezanne declared that Paris, the centre of the nineteenth-century art world, had defeated him. Repeatedly, he retreated into self-doubt and bad temper. This book follows Cezanne on his extraordinary artistic journey, focusing on his formative discoveries, made not in the flashy, fashionable metropolis of Paris but in provincial and rural France, often in isolation.

First published in 1984. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent not only era of rapidly changing artistic methods but a crucial evolution in art criticism. This book gathers together a wide-range of the criticism that greeted the work of the Impressionists artists in the English Press. The selected examples of praise and antagonism reflect the sentiments expressed in the comments of prominent newspaper and periodical critics. The selection shows the importance of Impressionist art to English art criticism and wide comprehension of the formal qualities in painting. It also demonstrates how forward-looking critics created new criteria for the discussion of modern painting.

No other artist, apart from J. M. W. Turner, tried as hard as Claude Monet (1840-1926) to capture light itself on canvas. Of all the Impressionists, it was the man Cezanne called "only an eye, but my God what an eye!" who stayed true to the principle of absolute fidelity to the visual sensation, painting directly from the object. It could be said that Monet reinvented the possibilities of color. Whether it was through his early interest in Japanese prints, his time as a conscript in the dazzling light of Algeria, or his personal acquaintance with the major painters of the late 19th century, the work Monet produced throughout his long life would change forever the way we perceive both the natural world and its attendant phenomena. The high point of his explorations was the late series of water lilies, painted in his own garden at Giverny, which, in their approach towards almost total formlessness, are really the origin of abstract art. This biography does full justice to this most remarkable and profoundly influential artist, and offers numerous reproductions and archive photos alongside a detailed and insightful commentary.

Alone of his contemporaries, J.M.W. Turner is commonly held to have prefigured modern painting, as signalled in the existence of The Turner Prize for contemporary art. Our celebration of his achievement is very different to what Victorian critics made of his art. This book shows how Turner was reinvented to become the artist we recognise today. On Turner's death in 1851 he was already known as an adventurous, even baffling, painter. But when the Court of Chancery decreed that the contents of his studio should be given to the nation, another side of his art was revealed that effected a wholescale change in his reputation. This book acts as a guide to the reactions of art writers and curators from the 1850s to the 1960s as they attempted to come to terms with his work. It documents how Turner was interpreted and how his work was displayed in Britain, in Europe and in North America, concentrating on the ways in which his artistic identity was manipulated by art writers, by curators at the Tate and by designers of exhibitions for the British Council and other bodies. -- .

A vibrant, colourful and beautiful book that introduces readers to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. It explains the difference between the two movements and the main artists associated with each. Illustrations are drawn from the renowned and outstanding collection of French art held by the National Galleries of Scotland and they include a number of rarely seen works. This book tells the fascinating stories of how key paintings and drawings found their way into the collection. Artists include Monet, Millet, Gauguin, Bastien-Lepage, Charles Jacque, Troyon, Corot, Degas, Seurat, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Vuillard, Bonnard, Derain, Matisse, Legros and Rodin.

First published in 1984. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent not only era of rapidly changing artistic methods but a crucial evolution in art criticism. This book gathers together a wide-range of the criticism that greeted the work of the Impressionists artists in the English Press. The selected examples of praise and antagonism reflect the sentiments expressed in the comments of prominent newspaper and periodical critics. The selection shows the importance of Impressionist art to English art criticism and wide comprehension of the formal qualities in painting. It also demonstrates how forward-looking critics created new criteria for the discussion of modern painting.

This book offers microhistories related to the transnational circulations of impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The contributors rethink the role of "French" impressionism in shaping these iterations by placing France within its global and imperialist context and arguing that impressionisms might be framed through the mobility studies' concept of "constellations of mobility." Artists engaging with impressionism in France, as in other global contexts, relied on, responded to, appropriated, and resisted elements of form and content based on fluid and interconnected political realities and market structures. Written by scholars and curators, the chapters demand reconsideration of impressionism as a historical construct and the meanings assigned to that term. This project frames future discussion in art history, cultural studies, and global studies on the politics of appropriating impressionism.

Bringing forth fresh perspectives on Manet's art by established scholars, this volume places this compelling and elusive artist's painted A"uvre within a broader cultural context, and links his artistic preoccupations with literary and musical currents. Rather than seeking consensus on his art through one methodology, or focusing on one crucial work or period, this collection investigates the range of Manet's art in the context of his time and considers how his vision has shaped subsequent interpretations. Specific essays explore the relationship between Manet and Whistler; Emile Zola's attitude toward the artist; Manet's engagement with moral and ethical questions in his paintings; and the heritage of Charles Baudelaire and Clement Greenberg in critical responses to Manet. Through these and other analyses, this volume illuminates the scope of Manet's career, and indicates the crucial position the artist held in generating a modernist avant-garde aesthetic.

Paul Gauguin achieved a high public profile during his lifetime, and was one of the first artists of his generation to achieve international recognition. But his prominence has always had as much to do with the dramatic events of his life - his self-imposed exile on a remote South Sea island, his turbulent relationships with his peers - as with the appeal of his art. Belinda Thomson gives a comprehensive and accessible account of the life and work of one of the most original artists of the late nineteenth century. Gauguin's work - painting, sculpture, prints and ceramics - is discussed in the light of his public persona, his relations with his contemporaries, his exhibitions and their critical reception. His private world, beliefs and aspirations are revealed through his extensive cache of journals, letters and other writings. Fully updated throughout, drawing on the insights of thirty years of scholarship since its first edition, Thomson's text remains the best introduction to this controversial and often contradictory artist.

The Impressionists are world renowned for their vibrant depictions of the atmospheric effects and shimmering beauty of the French countryside. These paintings, often produced in Paris, found an enthusiastic market in the city. The inhabitants of that hub of modernity had an apparently paradoxical interest in the mythologies of rural living. As the city became more and more the motive force of social change so the country was understood as the anchor of changelessness and nostalgia. The essayists in this volume examine the complex relationship between country and city. Their work draws widely on the contemporary culture exploring folklore and children's literature, anarchism and urbanism, and offers significant new insights into the work of major artists and writers including Courbet, Millet, Monet, Van Gogh and Zola.