French Art

During the nineteenth century, France experienced an unprecedented growth in the visual arts, and Paris was its center. French art became a universally accepted benchmark, spreading its many ground-breaking developments -- the radicalism of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, the daring of Art Nouveau, and the innovations of Haussman's new urban landscape -- far beyond its borders, and in return receiving numerous influences from broad. During this extraordinary rich and productive period, French art also benefited from the synthesis of the past with the innovations of the present, resulting in an artistic output whose legacy is still being felt today. This chronological history, richly illustrated and recounted by experts from France's preeminent museums, charts the growth of this fruitful -- and revolutionary -- period in the history of world art. -- From publisher's description.

Sick of striving? Giving up on grit? Had enough of hustle culture? Daunted by the 10,000-hour rule? Relax: As the French know, it's the best way to be better at everything. In the realm of love, what could be less seductive than someone who's trying to seduce you? Seduction is the art of succeeding without trying, and that's a lesson the French have mastered. We can see it in their laissez-faire parenting, chic style, haute cuisine, and enviable home cooking: They barely seem to be trying, yet the results are world-famous--thanks to a certain je ne sais quoi that is the key to a more creative, fulfilling, and productive life. For fans of both Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, philosopher Ollivier Pourriol's The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard draws on the examples of such French legends as Descartes, Stendhal, Rodin, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Françoise Sagan to show how to be efficient à la française, and how to effortlessly reap the rewards. A PENGUIN LIFE TITLE

A sociological perspective

This transatlantic study analyses a missing chapter in the history of art collecting, the first art market bubble in the United States. In the decades following the Civil War, French art monopolized art collections across the United States. During this “Gilded Age picture rush,” the commercial art system-art dealers, galleries, auction houses, exhibitions, museums, art journals, press coverage, art histories, and collection catalogues-established a strong foothold it has not relinquished to this day. In addition, a pervasive concern for improving aesthetics and providing the best contemporary art to educate the masses led to the formation not only of private art collections, but also of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to the publication of art histories. Richly informed by collectors' and art dealers' diaries, letters, stock books, journals, and hitherto neglected art histories, The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age, 1867-1893 offers a fresh perspective on this trailblazing era.

A ground-breaking study of the musical and literary priorities, professional practices and creative interactions that shaped one of the most adventurous artforms of the Belle Époque.

Gérard Garouste, Colette Deblé, Georges Rousse, Geneviève Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Joël Kermarrec, Danièle Perronne, Daniel Dezeuze, Philippe Favier, Daniel Nadaud: after the eleven essays of Contemporary French Art 1, devoted to major artists from Ben Vautier and Niki de Saint Phalle to Annette Messager and Gérard Titus-Carmel, the present volume pursues its interrogations of the what, the how and the why of contemporary plastic production of some of France’s finest practitioners. If, as ever, such production can reveal elements of an interweaving of individualized preoccupations and modes, endless specificities demarcate and affirm originalities that pure theory and its leveling anonymity may obscure. Thus is it that Gérard Garouste is alone in that obsession with ‘indianness’ and ‘classicalness’; that Colette Deblé’s gesture is drawn implacably to the unseenness of female representation; that Georges Rousse plunges photography into the realm of matter’s poetic sacredness; that Geneviève Asse traverses a pure seemingness of abstraction to attain to an intimacy of silence; that Martial Raysse’s ‘hygiene of vision’ may endlessly renew and hybridize itself. Christian Jaccard, too, will explore with uniqueness an art of materiality at the frontier of metaphysics; Joël Kermarrec will offer us the inimitable exquisite traces of surging desire and deception; Danièle Perronne’s boxes and stringings, her paintings and her sheetings will unfold a psychic infinity at the heart of form. And, if Daniel Dezeuze seeks namelessness and pure structuration, the latter yet surge forth via works that relentlessly identify a gesture so distant, we may feel, from the at once sobering and ceremonial microproliferations of a Philippe Favier or the tense but genial articulations of Daniel Nadaud’s sculptural imagination.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.