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Jules Breton (1827-1906), known as one of the first 'peasant painters', created beautiful scenes of rural French life and was a highly popular figure among the Salon artists of his era. Taking his inspiration from his native Artois and from the landscapes of Brittany, where he stayed for long periods, he painted peasant women and men performing their daily activities, meticulously observing their world and making it a place of peace and harmony. During the second half of the nineteenth century, rewards and official decorations were heaped upon him, and his paintings were purchased not only by the emperor but also by collectors in America, Britain and Ireland. However, Breton's work became ec...
In recent years, American art scholars have increasingly focused on the importance of cross-cultural exchanges during the nineteenth century. As essayist François Brunet puts it, mid-nineteenth century landscapes were “transnational . . . permeated by complex transactions where ‘American’ originality produced itself not only in imitation of or reaction against ‘European’ influences, . . . but as critical mirroring and incorporating of ‘European’ images.” Articles in this collection make clear that the “conversation of cultures” went both ways, with American artworks and culture also affecting European artistic and literary practice. Essays explore the transnational origi...
"Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875) was an extraordinarily gifted sculptor, the greatest in 19th-century France before Rodin, and embodied the emotionally charged artistic climate of his era ... Carpeaux's wrenching representations of human forms, shown in beautiful color details and illustrations, echo his turbulent personal life, fraught with episodes of violence and fatal illness. The book covers the entire span of Carpeaux's career, and includes the masterpiece Ugolino and His Sons, newly discovered drawings, and a number of rarely seen or studied works. Previously unpublished letters between Carpeaux and his family and friends, a wealth of archival material, and the most detailed chronology of the artist's life ever published."--Yale University Press website.
A revelatory exploration of one of Jean-François Millet’s most contentious paintings. A monumentalizing portrayal of a peasant bowed over by brutal toil, Man with a Hoe (1860–62) by Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) is arguably the most art historically significant painting in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of nineteenth-century European art. This volume situates the work in the arc of Millet’s career and traces its fascinating and contentious reception, from its scandalous debut at the 1863 Paris Salon to the years following its acquisition by American collectors in the 1890s. The essays examine the painting’s tumultuous public life, beginning in France, where critics at...
Co-published by Museum of Modern Art and the Van Gogh Museum in conjunction with the first exhibition to focus on Vincent van Gogh's depictions of nocturnal and twilight scenes, Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night examines the artist's night landscapes, interior scenes, and representations of the effects of both gaslight and natural light on their surroundings. It features over one hundred illustrations, including details of Van Gogh's iconic paintings and works by other artist important to the development of his style.
Traditional dress is a common phenomenon across much of Western Europe, often originating in elaborate practices for rural religious events. Yet despite its fundamentally local nature, traditional dress in various European regions developed along a similar trajectory, sometimes being transformed into political symbols and regional promotion for tourism, and always revealing the complexity of rural society in terms of religious divisions, class inequality and tension between the desires to protect tradition and embrace modernity. To better understand how traditional dress evolved in France and Germany from the 19th to 21st centuries, this book takes Alsace as its case study and in doing so il...
Revealing a vibrant and intertwined artistic scene in the Balkans On the Very Edge brings together fourteen empirical and comparative essays about the production, perception, and reception of modernity and modernism in the visual arts, architecture, and literature of interwar Serbia (1918–1941). The contributions highlight some idiosyncratic features of modernist processes in this complex period in Serbian arts and society, which emerged ‘on the very edge’ between territorial and cultural, new and old, modern and traditional identities. With an open methodological framework this book reveals a vibrant and intertwined artistic scene, which, albeit prematurely, announced interests in plu...