Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) is one of the most original and influential figures in the history of modern art, and this book is the first historically substantiated critical account of his life and work. An innovative sculptor, photographer, and draftsman, Rosso was vital in paving the way for the transition from the academic forms of sculpture that persisted in the nineteenth century to the development of new and experimental forms in the twentieth. His antimonumental, antiheroic work reflected alienation in the modern experience yet showed deep feeling for interactions between self and other. Rosso's art was transnational: he refused allegiance to a single culture or artistic heritage and declared himself both a citizen of the world and a maker of art without national limits. In this book, Sharon Hecker develops a narrative that is an alternative to the dominant Franco-centered perspective on the origin of modern sculpture in which Rodin plays the role of lone heroic innovator. Offering an original way to comprehend Rosso, A Moment's Monument negotiates the competing cultural imperatives of nationalism and internationalism that shaped the European art world at the fin de siecle.

Whistler embarked on a new project in the 1880s, working on a small scale in oil, pastel and watercolour, representing new London subjects and painting portraits of new urban types. This book is the first critical study of Whistler and his Impressionist followers and offers an in-depth analysis of Whistler's art as well as new insights into his modernist project. Anna Gruetzner Robins shows how Whistler formed an avant-garde group around himself and sought out followers who included Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes, Mortimer Menpes, Theodore Roussel, Walter Sickert and Sidney Starr to emulate his art and proselytise on his behalf. Their reminiscences and writings provide new information about Whistler's art, while their own little-known work, much of which is published here for the first time, is a testimony to its persuasive effect. Using a wealth of primary material, Robins tracks the history of Whistler and his group and shows through testimony and practice that they were formulating an identity as avant-garde artists. This is the first critical study of these Impressionist artists and throws new light on this neglected aspect of British art.

As one of the Tiny Folio Great Museum series, this book is designed as a tour of the National Gallery's collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture. Visitors to the National Gallery in Washington usually make straight for the rooms holding the museum's works by the greatest Impressionist artists, including Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and many others. This miniature compendium includes all the favourites, along with many less-familiar works photographed especially for this volume.

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.

In 1891, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) traveled to Tahiti in an effort to live simply and to draw inspiration from what he saw as the island's exotic native culture. Although the artist was disappointed by the rapidly westernizing community he encountered, his works from this period nonetheless celebrate the myth of an untainted Tahitian idyll, a myth he continued to perpetuate upon his return to Paris. He created a travel journal entitled Noa Noa (fragrant scent), a largely fictionalized account that recalled his immersion into the spiritual world of the South Seas. To illustrate his text, Gauguin turned for the first time to the woodcut medium, creating a series of ten dark and brooding prints that he intended to publish alongside his journal-a publication that was never realized. The woodcuts crystallized important themes from his work and are the focus of this major new study. Gauguin's Paradise Remembered addresses both the artist's representation of Tahiti in the woodcut medium and the impact these works had on his artistic practice. Through its combined sense of immediacy (in the apparent directness of the printing process) and distance (through the mechanical repetition of motifs), the woodcut offered Gauguin the ideal medium to depict a paradise whose real attraction lay in its remaining always unattainable. With two insightful essays, this book posits that Gauguin's Noa Noa prints allowed him to convey his deeply Symbolist conception of his Tahitian experience while continuing his experiments with reproductive processes and other technical innovations that engaged him at the time. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Princeton University Art Museum(09/25/10-01/02/11)

"Long-awaited, this full-scale revision of Impressionism immediately supersedes all other studies in the field. Herbert rejuvenates even the most famous paintings by seeing them in a dense and flexible context touching on everything from the hierarchy of theater boxes to the role of beer-hall waitresses. His mind and eye are as supple as his lucid prose, and his command of sociological data is staggering. In this classic of art history, both art and history are triumphantly reborn."-Robert Rosenblum, New York University This remarkable book will transform the way we look at Impressionist art. The culmination of twenty years of research by a preeminent scholar in the field, it fundamentally revises the conventional view of the Impressionist movement and shows for the first time how it was fully integrated into the social and cultural life of the times. Robert L. Herbert explores the themes of leisure and entertainment that dominated the great years of Impressionist painting between 1865 and 1885. Cafes, opera houses, dance halls, theaters, racetracks, and vacations by the sea were the central subjects of the majority of these paintings, and Herbert relates these pursuits to the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire. Sumptuously illustrated with many of the most beautiful Impressionist images, both familiar and unfamiliar, this book presents provocative new interpretations of a wide range of famous masterpieces. Artists are seen to be active participants in, as well as objective witnesses to, contemporary life, and there are many profound insights into the social and cultural upheaval of the times. "A social history of Impressionist art that is truly about the art, informed by a penetrating analysis of the ways in which its pictorial structure and qualities communicate its social content. Herbert brings that society to life, but above all he makes some of the most familiar and frequently discussed works in the history of art come wonderfully and vividly to life again."-Theodore Reff, Columbia University Robert L. Herbert is Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on nineteenth-century French art.

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.

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.

No pictorial device in nineteenth-century French painting more clearly represented the free-ranging self than the loose brushstroke. From the romantics through the impressionists and post-impressionists, the brushstroke bespoke autonomous artistic individuality and freedom from convention. Yet the question of how much we can credit to the individual brushstroke is complicated-and in Brushstroke and Emergence, James D. Herbert uses that question as a starting point for an extended essay that draws on philosophy of mind, the science of emergence, and art history. Brushstrokes, he reminds us, are as much creatures of habit and embodied experience as they are of intent. When they gather in great numbers they take on a life of their own, out of which emerge complexity and meaning. Analyzing ten paintings by Courbet, Manet, Cezanne, Monet, Seurat, and Picasso, Herbert exposes vital relationships between intention and habit, the singular and the complex. In doing so, he uncovers a space worthy of historical and aesthetic analysis between the brushstroke and the self.

A unique and intimate look into Claude Monet's outstanding personal collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures by fellow artists Claude Monet (1840-1926) was the founder of French Impressionism and remains one of the world's best-known and most beloved painters. His works are on view in many of the finest museums, and details of his storied life are well documented. Less well known are Monet's activities as an art collector; Monet as Collector is a sumptuously illustrated volume that traces this history, and in the process reconstitutes the artist's private collection. The masterpieces he assembled throughout his life form an outstanding, unique ensemble, one that has never before been analyzed in its entirety. The collection includes paintings, drawings, and sculptures by such artists as Delacroix, Corot, Boudin, Jongkind, Manet, Renoir, Caillebotte, Cezanne, Morisot, Pissarro, Rodin, and Signac, and offers a new kind of insight into the artistic tastes and vision of this legendary artist. Distributed for Editions Hazan, Paris Exhibition Schedule: Musee Marmottan Monet (09/14/17-01/14/18)

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

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 features Vincent van Gogh's 'Bedroom at Arles'. Vincent van Gogh sought refuge from Paris in February 1888. He set off for Arles to satisfy his yearning to experience the colours of the South. Initially, he took up lodgings at a local hotel but shortly after, he rented the famous Yellow House on Place Lamartine, nestled in between the rail tracks and river on the north side of town. This famous painting depicts his bedroom in the house.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's (1841-1919) timelessly charming paintings still reflect our ideals of happiness, love, and beauty. Derived from our large-format volume, the most comprehensive retrospective of his work published to date, this compact edition examines the personal history and motivation behind the legend. Though he began by painting landscapes in the Impressionist style, Renoir found his true affinity in portraits, after which he abandoned the Impressionists altogether. Though often misunderstood, Renoir remains one of history's most well-loved painters-undoubtedly because his works exude such warmth, tenderness, and good spirit. In an incisive text tracing the artist's career and stylistic evolution, Gilles Neret shows how Renoir reinvented the painted female form, with his everyday goddesses and their plump contours, rounded hips and breasts. Renoir's later phase, marked by his return to the simple pleasure of the female nude in his Bathers series, was his most innovative and stylistically influential, and would inspire such masters as Matisse and Picasso. With a complete chronology, bibliography, photos, sketches, and brilliant reproductions, this is the essential work of reference on this enduring master artist. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

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.

Manet's well-known painting in the National Gallery London of a cafe-concert - a kind of cabaret performance and musicmaking that was the latest fashion in Paris of the 1870s - has a peculiar history. The painter initially planned an ambitious canvas with which he grew dissatisfied, then cut it in two, one half being the painting in the National Gallery and the other half now in Winterthur in Switzerland. He repainted both fragments to make each work as a picture in their own right, but modern technology has discovered and reconstructed the original greater work. New research has also identified the cafe, the Reichshoffen, and even the Folies-Bergere performance that is advertised on a poster represented in the picture. This study of a pivotal work in the troubled painter's oeuvre reveals his pioneering genius and the modernity of his search to capture a distillation of life in his own time through disconcertingly direct brushstrokes. The book discusses and illustrates related drawings and other paintings on the same theme, which would culminate a mere three or four years later in the Bar in the Folies-Bergere in the Courtauld Gallery, London. Without the experimentation, false paths and new discoveries of the Reichshoffen he would never have painted that masterpiece.

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.

Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, astonishing sums are paid today for the works of these artists. Their dazzling pictures are familiar - but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people? In a vivid and moving narrative, biographer Sue Roe shows the Impressionists in the studios of Paris, rural lanes of Montmartre and rowdy riverside bars as Paris underwent Baron Haussman's spectacular transformation. For over twenty years they lived and worked together as a group, struggling to rebuild their lives after the Franco-Prussian war and supporting one another through shocked public reactions to unfamiliar canvasses depicting laundresses, dancers, spring blossom and boating scenes. This intimate, colourful, superbly researched account takes us into their homes as well as their studios and describes their unconventional, volatile and precarious lives, as well as the stories behind their paintings.

This enthralling and comprehensive new book on Henri Matisse is an eye-opener for all students and art lovers interested in early twentieth-century art. Taking fifty of Matisse's most iconic works of art, John Cauman provides an accessible narrative about the man and his work, deciphering the themes, methods and intentions of this truly great artist. Chronologically spanning from the late nineteenth century to the mid 1950s, each painting, drawing and mural is described and analysed in beautiful detail, within the context of the period, so that the reader can really understand what the artist was hoping to achieve with each work. The paintings are prefaced by an informative introduction that presents the milieu and key characters that featured in Matisse's life. Among his most famous works, this book includes Luxe, calme et volupte (1904), Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life) (1905-6), Self-Portrait in a Striped Shirt (1906), Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra) (1907), Bathers by a River (1909-17), Harmony in Red (1908), Dance I (1909), Entrance to the Casbah (1912-13), Pianist and Checker Players (1924), Still Life with a Magnolia (1941), Memory of Oceania (1951-2) and The Snail (1953).

Celebrations of city streets; tranquil vistas of the countryside and seashore; enchanting images of the leisured classes in domestic interiors or at fashionable Parisian cafes -- the work of the Impressionists gives pleasure to art lovers everywhere. But while Impressionism today may appear 'natural' and effortless, contemporaries were shocked by the loose handling of paint and the practice of painting out-of doors. In defiance of the conservative official Salon, the Impressionists -- led by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas -- sought to capture the immediacy of experience.

This fascinating, comprehensive study brings together the most recent research on Impressionism. James Rubin makes accessible its philosophical, political and social context. As well as the acknowledged masters, our attention is drawn to lesser known Impressionists such as Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Gustave Caillebotte.

The first comprehensive examination of the painter's formative years, tracing the evolution of Monet's early style and personal ambitions that drove the rest of his career This elegant volume is the first to be devoted to the young genius of Claude Monet (1840-1926). Bringing together the greatest paintings from his early career-including his first Salon-exhibited work, the Kimbell Art Museum's La Pointe de la Heve at Low Tide; Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) and The Magpie from the Musee d'Orsay; and The Green Wave and La Grenouillere from the Metropolitan Museum of Art-it features essays by distinguished scholars, focusing on the evolution of Monet's own distinctive mode of painting. Through the 1860s, the young painter absorbed and transformed a variety of influences, from the lessons of the Barbizon school and his mentor Boudin to the challenges posed by his friends Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley. Artistic innovation and personal ambition shaped the work of the celebrated impressionist painter from the very start of his long and illustrious career. Distributed for the Kimbell Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Kimbell Art Museum (10/16/16-01/29/17) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (02/25/17-05/29/17)