The Private Lives of the Impressionists
by Sue Roe
from Harper Perennial
Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, today astonishing sums are paid for their paintings. Their dazzling works are familiar to even the most casual art lovers—but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people?
Sue Roe's colorful, lively, poignant, and superbly researched biography, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, follows an extraordinary group of artists into their Paris studios, down the rural lanes of Montmartre, and into the rowdy riverside bars of a city undergoing monumental change. Vivid and unforgettable, it casts a brilliant, revealing light on this unparalleled society of genius colleagues who lived and worked together for twenty years and transformed the art world forever with their breathtaking depictions of ordinary life.
Van Gogh (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists)
by Mike Venezia
from Children's Press (CT)
Presents a biography of Van Gogh
Monet (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists)
by Mike Venezia
from Childrens Press Chicago
Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cezanne, Monet, and Rodin
by Ruth Butler
from Yale University Press
Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin. The names of these brilliant nineteenth-century artists are known throughout the world. But what is remembered of their wives? What were these unknown women like? What roles did they play in the lives and the art of their famous husbands?
In this remarkable book of discovery, art historian Ruth Butler coaxes three shadowy women out of obscurity and introduces them for the first time as individuals. Through unprecedented research, Butler has been able to create portraits of Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, and Rose Beuret—the models, and later the wives, respectively, of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin, three of the most famous French artists of their generation. The book tells the stories of three ordinary women who faced issues of a dramatically changing society as well as the challenges of life with a striving genius. Butler illuminates the ways in which these model-wives figured in their husbands’ achievements and provides new analyses of familiar works of art. Filled with captivating detail, the book recovers the lives of Hortense, Camille, and Rose, and recognizes with new insight how their unique relationships enriched the quality of their husbands’ artistic endeavors.
The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings (Clark Art Institute)
by James A. Ganz
from Clark Art Institute
Monet has long been seen as an anti-draftsman, an artist who painted his subjects directly and whose rarely seen graphic works were marginal to his artistic process. In an effort to develop his public image, Monet denied the role of drawing in his working method. In actuality, Monet began his career as a caricaturist and as a teenager developed a passion for drawing that was never extinguished. He went on to master the medium of pastel and included seven in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.
Citing recently discovered, unpublished documents that overturn the accepted image of the artist, The Unknown Monet reveals an extensive group of graphic works created over the course of the artist’s career, many of which are unknown to the general public and to scholars: beautiful pastels, stunning black chalk drawings, and fascinating sketchbooks, which include pencil studies that relate to many of his paintings. The book also shows how Monet exploited the print media to promote his art.
The most important publication on Monet to appear in a generation, this illuminating volume is essential to anyone interested in his work, Impressionism, and nineteenth-century French culture.
The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism
by Ross King
from Walker & Company
The Judgment of Paris chronicles the dramatic decade between two famous exhibitions—the scandalous Salon des Refuses in 1863 and the first Impressionist showing in 1874—set against the rise and dramatic fall of Napoleon III and the Second Empire after the Franco-Prussian War. A tale of many artists, it revolves around the lives of two, described as “the two poles of art”—Ernest Meissonier, the most famous and successful painter of the 19th century, hailed for his precision and devotion to history; and Edouard Manet, reviled in his time, who nonetheless heralded the most radical change in the history of art since the Renaissance. Out of the fascinating story of their parallel lives, illuminated by their legendary supporters and critics—Zola, Delacroix, Courbet, Baudelaire, Whistler, Monet, Hugo, Degas, and many more—Ross King shows that their contest was not just about Art, it was about competing visions of a rapidly changing world.
With a novelist’s skill and the insight of an historian, King recalls a seminal period when Paris was the artistic center of the world, and a revolutionary movement had the power to electrify and divide a nation.
The Magic of Monet's Garden: His Planting Plans and Color Harmonies
by Derek Fell
from Firefly Books
"Gardening was something I learned in my youth. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers"
- Claude Monet
Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926) created a magnificent five-acre garden that he considered to be his greatest artistic achievement. It was restored in 1980 and is now the most visited garden of its size in the Western world. With its spectacular color combinations and distinctive structural elements, the Monet garden at Giverny, France, inspires the dreams of thousands of gardeners.
Award-winning garden writer and photographer Derek Fell has visited Giverny many times and always admired the beauty of its plantings and the subtle balance of colors. After years of carefully studying Monet's design and plantings, he shares the artist's secrets. In The Magic of Monet's Garden, Fell reveals Monet's breathtaking color harmonies and describes how the artist "painted" his living masterpiece. He guides the reader on how to scale down Monet's ideas for the home garden, with attention to:
- Understanding the laws of colors
- Building color harmonies
- Creating innovative combinations
- Recognizing the power of monochromatic plantings
- Using black in the garden
- Working with structure and form
- Building rhythm and surprise
- Capitalizing on sunlight and shadow
- Incorporating water features
- Attracting birds and butterflies.
With 175 color photographs and illustrations and a dozen detailed planting plans, The Magic of Monet's Garden will inspire and instruct home gardeners to create their own versions of Giverny.
(20071023)The Impressionists' Paris: Walking Tours of the Artists' Studios, Homes, and the Sites They Painted
by Ellen Williams
from Little Bookroom
One could hardly visit Paris without viewing the work of the French impressionist painters, whose innovative take on the City of Light left an indelible mark on the art world. This charming little hardcover, perfect for the pocket or backpack, allows travelers to venture beyond the museum walls and trace the footsteps of these great artists, including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet, just to name a few. Three city walking tours--surprisingly manageable considering the city's size--cover not only the sites depicted in many of their paintings, but also "the studios in which they worked, the buildings where they lived, and--this being Paris--the cafes in which they gathered." Expertly organized and packed with fascinating facts, including topographical and historical notes, detailed city maps and legends, recommendations for conveniently located restaurants, anecdotes about the artists and their work, and reproductions of the paintings, The Impressionists' Paris "brings the museum experience out into the real world, to better appreciate both the art and the city, one through the other." --Stefanie Hargreaves
Travelers who follow the walking tours in The Impressionists' Paris will never see the paintings—or the city—in the same way again. From the historic Paris along the Seine, through the bustling grands boulevards, to the cafés of Pigalle and the dance halls of Montmartre, this guidebook pairs some of the world's most beloved masterpieces with the exact locations where they were painted. Readers follow in the footsteps of the artists from the pont Neuf depicted by Monet and Renoir to the intersection where Caillebotte painted his haunting street scene; from the balcony of the Louvre where Monet literally and figuratively turned his back on the establishment to the Gare St. Lazare, the train station from which he departed for his home in Giverny. Also revealed is the view out Manet's window, where he watched—and immortalized—a one-legged veteran hobbling down the flag-draped street. Period dining recommendations and the addresses of the studios where the painters worked, the buildings where they lived, and their birthplaces and gravesites complement this delightful guide.
Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society
by Robert L. Herbert
from Yale University Press
Society of Six: California Colorists
by Nancy Boas
from University of California Press
When these six artists first banded together in 1917, the San Francisco art establishment found their work raw and undeveloped. According to Nancy Boas, however, these painters represent the first fully evolved reflection of modern art on the West Coast. Her scholarly and engaging study is tantamount to a discovery of a previously unknown group of painters, and it is unusual in that it recounts the birth of modern art in a nonurban setting. She elegantly and convincingly balances biography with analysis, intertwining six personal stories into a much larger story, which is really about the birth of modernism, an integral segment of America's artistic heritage. These artists' works are expressive, energetic, and ablaze with vivid color, reminiscent of a quality of rarefied light found in Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series or Vincent van Gogh's Arles paintings.
Six plein-air painters in Oakland, California, joined together in 1917 to form an association that lasted nearly fifteen years. The Society of Six--Selden Connor Gile, Maurice Logan, William H. Clapp, August F. Gay, Bernard von Eichman, and Louis Siegriest--created a color-centered modernist idiom that shocked establishment tastes but remains the most advanced painting of its era in Northern California. Nancy Boas's well-informed and sumptuously illustrated chronicle recognizes the importance of these six painters in the history of American Post-Impressionism.
The Six found themselves in the position of an avant garde not because they set out to reject conventionality, but because they aspired to create their own indigenous modernism. While the artists were considered outsiders in their time, their work is now recognized as part of the vital and enduring lineage of American art. Depression hardship ended the Six's ascendancy, but their painterliness, use of color, and deep alliance with the land and the light became a beacon for postwar Northern California modern painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Combining biography and critical analysis, Nancy Boas offers a fitting tribute to the lives and exhilarating painting of the Society of Six.
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