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.

'Arnold Hausers Social History of Art - a very important and under-appreciated text.' - Whitney Davis, John Evans Professor of Art History, Northwestern University

'It is no exaggeration to say that more than any other work Hauser's four volumes inspired my interest in art history.' - Alan Wallach, Ralph H Wark Professor of Art History, College of William and Mary

'This work has great value in a contemporary context. I look forward to seeing what Jonathan has done with the introduction, but I cannot think of anyone better suited to the task.' - Johanna Drucker, Professor of Art History, Yale University

Hausers extraordinary energy and subtlety wave a brilliant synthesis of the interaction between the aesthetic and societal, giving us at one and the same time a wealth of artistic detail and a consistent and fully elaborated exposition of the social process. - Albert Boime, UCLA, author of The Social History of Modern Art, 1750-1989

Edouard Manet (1832-83) was one of the greatest, as well as one of the most interesting, of nineteenth century French painters. Acute observation, an extraordinary skilful handling of paint and a feeling for exquisite harmonies of colour makes his work both vivid and enchanting. It is also of great significance in the story of European painting, since Manet, a pioneer in depicting modern life in a modern style, was a formative influence on the whole impressionist movement. Olympia and The Picnic are among the key works of the nineteenth century. These, and many other crucial points - among them Manet's personality, with its many contradictions - are fully discussed by John Richardson in his introductory essay, an abridged version of the brilliant text which was widely admired when it was first published in 1958 and which started a full-scale revival of Manet studies. Richardson's classic text was first revised in 1982, with notes to the forty-eight colour plates by Kathleen Adler and comparative illustrations to emphasize the quality, variety and character of Manet's work. This perfect introduction to the work of such an influential painter is now reissued in an attractive new design.

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: Cafe Terrace.

Through his intense vision Van Gogh was able to create paintings that speak directly to us all, and today this disturbed and rejected misfit is the most universally loved of all artists. The story of his thirty seven years of poverty, loneliness and failure is in fact a triumphant saga of absolute dedication and the final realization of genius. This extravagantly illustrated volume in the hugely popular New Horizons series, includes the story of his life; his relationships with his brother Theo and contemporaries such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro and Gauguin; his descent into madness and his eventual suicide. As well as the many reproductions of paintings and drawings by Van Gogh and his contemporaries, extensive documentary evidence includes extracts from his letters, critical writings and documentary photographs.

The incomparable play of light and color in Paul Cezanne's work was the foundation of his reputation as a forerunner of modernism. From the start he went his own way, and his paintings initially evoked a lack of understanding in art critics of the time, as well as ridicule. Despite his romantic, baroque, impressionist, and finally classical influences, it is still difficult to ascribe Cezanne to any particular art movement. Still, which specific places left lasting impressions on the scion of a provincial banker's family? What and who were major influences supporting and advancing his innovative oeuvre? James H. Rubin traces Cezanne's life and work from A to Z in this brief volume, creating an image of a painter who wanted to transform painting itself. The author-and established connoisseur-succeeds in closely approaching the artist while at the same time maintaining the necessary distance to his inimitable paintings.

Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany is the first English-language examination of this German impressionist painter whose long life and career spanned nine decades. Through a close reading of key paintings and by a discussion of his many cultural networks across Germany and throughout Europe, this study by Marion Deshmukh illuminates Liebermann's importance as a pioneer of German modernism. Critics and admirers alike saw his art as representing aesthetic European modernism at its best. His subjects included dispassionate depictions of the rural Dutch countryside, his colorful garden at the Wannsee, and his many portraits of Germany's cultural, political, and military elites. Liebermann was the largest collector of French Impressionism in Germany - and his cosmopolitan outlook and his art created strong antipathies towards both by political and cultural conservatives throughout his life.

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.

Were late nineteenth-century gender boundaries as restrictive as is generally held? In Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings: Work Place/Domestic Space, Kirstin Ringelberg argues that it is time to bring the current re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres to these images. Focusing on studio paintings by American artists William Merritt Chase and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies Low, she explores how the home-based painting studio existed outside of entrenched gendered divisions of public and private space and argues that representations of these studios are at odds with standard perceptions of the images, their creators, and the concept of gender in the nineteenth century. Unlike most of their bourgeois contemporaries, Gilded Age artists, whether male or female, often melded the worlds of work and home. Through analysis of both paintings and literature of the time, Ringelberg reveals how art history continues to support a false dichotomy; that, in fact, paintings that show women negotiating a complex combination of professionalism and domesticity are still overlooked in favor of those that emphasize women as decorative objects. Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings challenges the dominant interpretation of American (and European) Impressionism, and considers both men and women artists as active performers of multivalent identities.

Impressionism took its name from the title of a painting that Claude Monet (1840-1926) exhibited in 1874. More than any other artist, Monet was the creator of the Impressionist vision, which has so forcefully shaped the way in which he habitually see nature today. For sixty years he continuously explored ways of translating his experiences into paint, in pictures that take us from the bustling life of Paris in the 1860s to the seclusion of his own water-garden, which he painted in his last years. John House's introduction to Monet's life and work presents a sequence of dazzling illustrations that chart the artist's progress as he became increasingly preoccupied with colour and atmospheric effect, and the direct studies of nature gave way to paintings of greater richness and harmony, in which the play of varied colours replaced the conventional drawing and modelling of forms.

Vincent van Gogh never owned a garden, but throughout his career he painted and drew outdoor spaces and natural objects frequently, both fascinated and stimulated by each location s unique character. In this book Ralph Skea surveys the gardens that were most dear to Van Gogh from the domestic havens of parsonage gardens in the Netherlands to the romance of Parisian city parks, from the blazing flower beds of Provence to the asylum gardens that provided the artist with seclusion and calm in his final months. Whether joyous paintings of plants in bloom or the intensely beautiful studies of lilacs, roses, irises, and pine trees that he produced in the asylum at Saint-Remy, all the oils and sketches included here are monuments to the artist s originality and poetic sensibility.

In the latter half of the 19th century, in the verdant countryside near Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), busily plied his brush to landscapes and still lifes that would become anchors of modern art. With compact, intense dabs of paint and bold new approaches to light and space, he mediated the way from Impressionism to the defining movements of the early 20th century and became, in the words of both Matisse and Picasso, "father of us all." This fresh artist introduction selects key works from Cezanne's oeuvre to understand his development, innovation, and crucial influence on modern art. From compositions of fruits and pears to scenes of outdoor bathers, we trace his experimentation with color, perspective, and texture to evoke "a harmony parallel to Nature," as well as the very process of seeing and recording. Along the way, we discover Cezanne's celebrated Card Players, his layering of warm and cool hues to build up form and surface, and the geometric rigor of his landscapes from the vicinity of Aix-en-Provence, as bright with the light of southern France as they are bold with a radical new rendering of dimensions and depth. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

How did the tumult caused by German composer Richard Wagner result in the first modernist painting? In the first full-length book dedicated to the study of Edouard Manet and music, art historian Therese Dolan demonstrates that the 1862 painting Music in the Tuileries represents the progressive musical culture of his time, heretofore read by scholars predominantly through the words of Charles Baudelaire. Dolan sees in this painting's radical style the conceptual shift to modernism in both painting and music, a transition that, she convincingly argues, received a strong impetus from Manet's Music in the Tuileries and Wagner's controversial Tannhauser, which premiered the previous year. Supplemental to analysis of the painting, Dolan incorporates discussion of texts by Theophile Gautier, Champfleury, and Baudelaire who are represented in the painting. This book incorporates studies of the major artistic, literary, and musical figures of nineteenth-century France. It represents an important contribution to an understanding of French culture in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a period of intense literary, artistic, and musical activity that formed the crucible for modernism.

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.

Bringing to life the gorgeous, inspiring art of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro and their group, Impressionists takes the reader back to Nineteenth Century Paris to explore one of the most influential, and popular art movements in the history of painting. A careful selection of the period's most enduring artworks sits alongside some lesser known, but equally impressive images to convey the spirit and passion of the era.

"This year, the Fondation Vuitton strikes again with an exhibition of the Morozov Collection, about 200 French and Russian works bought by two other textile magnates, the brothers Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, who also made multiple Paris shopping trips" - New York Times The Morozov brothers, wealthy Moscow textile merchants Mikhail (1870-1903) and Ivan (1871-1921), played a key role in bringing Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art to Russia in the first decades of the 20th century. Along with Sergei Shchukin, a fellow industrialist and art collector, they created an international audience for French art and had a transformative effect on Russian cultural life. Between the years 1903 and 1914, Ivan Morozov spent more money than any other collector of his time, amassing a stunning collection of works by Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Bonnard, Sisley, Renoir, Signac, Vuillard, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Degas, Pissarro, and, most especially, Cezanne (17 paintings, all of which will be on display). On his bi-annual trips to Paris, he bought from the most discerning dealers, including Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, and Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, as well as directly from the artists themselves. His collection comprises 278 paintings, not including 300 paintings by Russian artists (Chagall, Malevich, Serov, Vrubel, Levitan, Larionov, Goncharova) and 28 sculptures. The Morozov collection was nationalised after the October 1917 Revolution, and after World War II it was divided among the Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and the Tretyakov State Museum. This stunning catalogue has been published for a show of 100 highlights from the Morozov Collection that will run from 22 September 2021 - 22 February 2022 at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. It is the first time that works from the collection will travel abroad since they were acquired. This landmark exhibition will be the only stop for the show outside of Russia.

Were late nineteenth-century gender boundaries as restrictive as is generally held? In Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings: Work Place/Domestic Space, Kirstin Ringelberg argues that it is time to bring the current re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres to these images. Focusing on studio paintings by American artists William Merritt Chase and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies Low, she explores how the home-based painting studio existed outside of entrenched gendered divisions of public and private space and argues that representations of these studios are at odds with standard perceptions of the images, their creators, and the concept of gender in the nineteenth century. Unlike most of their bourgeois contemporaries, Gilded Age artists, whether male or female, often melded the worlds of work and home. Through analysis of both paintings and literature of the time, Ringelberg reveals how art history continues to support a false dichotomy; that, in fact, paintings that show women negotiating a complex combination of professionalism and domesticity are still overlooked in favor of those that emphasize women as decorative objects. Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings challenges the dominant interpretation of American (and European) Impressionism, and considers both men and women artists as active performers of multivalent identities.

Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings are fabulously expensive. Millions of people admire his work, but are those masterpieces all genuine? To this day, the international art world struggles to separate the real Van Goghs from the fake ones, and the key question addressed in this book is what may happen to art experts when they publicly voice their opinions on a particular Van Gogh (or not). The story starts with art expert J.B. de la Faille who discovered to his own bewilderment that he had included dozens of fake Van Goghs in his 1928 catalogue raisonne. He wanted to set the record straight, but met with strong resistance from art dealers, collectors, critics, politicians and others, marking the beginning of a fierce clash of interests that had seized the art world for many decades of the twentieth century. In his fascinating account of the struggle for the genuine Vincent van Gogh, Tromp shows the less attractive side of the art world. His reconstruction of many such confrontations yields a host of intriguing and sometimes bewildering insights into the fates of art experts when they bring unwelcome news.

The joy that permeates Renoir's paintings was created by a complicated person. Even close friends and family members were often baffled by the multi-faceted and contradictory artist. Having known Renoir for over twenty years, Camille Pissarro complained in a letter to his son Lucien: `Nor can I understand Renoir's mind - but who can fathom the most changeable of men?' Here, the world's leading authority on the life and work of Auguste Renoir presents an intimate biography of this great Impressionist artist. Her narrative is interspersed with over a thousand extracts from letters by, to, and about Renoir, of which 452 come from unpublished letters. Through these words, the reader gains direct contact with Renoir, as an artist, friend and father. Renoir became hugely popular despite great obstacles: thirty years of poverty followed by thirty years of progressive paralysis of his fingers. Close friendships with scores of people who helped him with money, contacts and companionship enabled him to overcome these challenges to create more than 4,000 optimistic, life-affirming paintings. Barbara Ehrlich White brings a lifetime of research to bear in her biography to provide an unparalleled and intimate portrait of this complex artist.

Inspired by the works of French Post-Impressionist and Fauvist artists, the Scottish Colourists (Samuel Peploe, J.D. Fergusson, Leslie Hunter and F.C.B. Cadell) introduced 1920s Britain to a whole new style of painting. While they did not regard themselves as a collective, they are known for their bold use of colour, vigorous brushwork and affinity for painting en plein air. Though each had a distinct style and focus, they were united by pioneering efforts to buck the prevailing artistic conventions of their time, creating works of art that burst with life and beauty. With over 80 images and a broad introduction, this is a fine addition to Flame Tree's ever-increasing series on painting and illustration, Masterpieces of Art.

The career of Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90) as a painter was short, but his paintings revolutionized artistic practice and styles. The intensity of his vision, his wonderful sense of colour and the extraordinary boldness of his technique created masterpieces that exercised a profound influence on the art of the twentieth century. There are also enormously popular, and paintings such as The Yellow Chair, The Drawbridge and The Sower are among the most the best-loved images of our time. Wilhelm Uhde was an outstanding art critic and dealer who was born during Van Gogh's lifetime and witnessed at first hand his rise to fame at the beginning of the twentieth century. His masterly essay was first published in 1937 and remains one of the best introductions to Van Gogh's work. For this revised and expanded edition, the notes to the plates were added by Griselda Pollock, Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds.

In 1874 Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise caused uproar among the critics and a revolution in painting. His inventiveness was inexhaustible: with paintings of haystacks, poplars and, finally, the enchanting water-lilies of Giverny, Monet captured light in all its fleeting qualities. At last, almost blind - 'I fear the dark more than death' - he feverishly produced near-abstract landscapes of water and reflection, a vision of nature that paved the way for the art of our own times. Including hundreds of beautiful reproductions and contemporary illustrations, comprehensive text, documentary witness accounts and letters, this pocket-sized book is perfect both for the lover of Monet and of the history of Impressionism.

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) was one of the best-known and most influential painters of the seminal Modern art movement, Impressionism, which sought to capture the fleeting moments in nature and the subtle passage of time with flickering light effects and hurried brush strokes of soft color on canvas. This Mini Sticky Book is a portable hardcover containing a full-colour sticky notepad for easy note and list-taking at home or on the road. durable, pocket-sized, hardcover book cardstock and fabric inside pocket for business cards, cash, receipts, stamps, etc. 130 full-colour illustrated note sheets book measures 89 x 127mm. We choose the best images from well-known classic and contemporary fine artists, plus talented emerging illustrators and designers from around the globe.

Modern matters: A blow-by-blow account of groundbreaking modernismMost art historians agree that the modern art adventure first developed in the 1860s in Paris. A circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, began painting pictures with rapid, loose brushwork. They turned to everyday street life for subjects, instead of overblown heroic scenes, and they escaped the power of the Salon by organizing their own independent exhibitions.After this first assault on the artistic establishment, there was no holding back. In a constant desire to challenge, innovate, and inspire, one modernist style supplanted the next: Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Abstract Art, renewed Realism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and conceptual practice.This indispensable overview traces the restless energy of modern art with a year-by-year succession of the groundbreaking artworks that shook standards, and broke down barriers. Introductory essays outline the most significant and influential movements alongside explanatory texts for each major work and its artist.About the series: Bibliotheca Universalis Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, the name TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together nearly 100 of our all-time favorite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.Bookworm s delight never bore, always excite!"