The Impressionists Revealed

Attractively illustrated art book which presents a range of privately owned impressionist paintings which are rarely or never viewed by the public. Artists represented include Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh and Gaugin, as well as 25 lesser known painters. Each painting is described and discussed with reference to its creator's background. Includes biographical details of each collector, a bibliography and an index.

A group of young artists in 1874, in opposition to the established authority of the Salon and the Academy, decided to show their work directly to the public in an exhibition which they organized themselves. The artists forming the core of this group - Pissarro, Degas, Sisley, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir and Morisot - came to be known as "the Impressionists." Seen to be following the independent spirit of Manet, they were immediately identified as the avant-garde and their first exhibition became an historic landmark in the development of modern art. We now tend to see the landscapes of Impressionist paintings as perfect images of nature. It is easy to overlook their startling and fragmented appearance at the time they were painted. The documents in this book show how the paintings looked to contemporary eyes: to both the critics and the artists. Some of the criticism these paintings received is almost as famous as the works themselves, and several important documents appear here in English translation for the first time. The book tells the story of the personal struggles, debates, problems and solutions involved in a new way of painting that quickly led in unforeseen directions and took enormous risks with the traditional means of representing the world in art. These experiences are revealed in the letters and recorded comments of the artists themselves, and in the writings of friends and contemporary critics, many of whom, such as Baudelaire, Zola, Valery, Mallarme, Huysmans, Laforgue and Mirbeau, were also novelists and poets. The continuing interpretation of Impressionism within the changing art and art criticism of the twentieth century is examined through the writings of artists such as Leger, Kandinsky, Masson, Matisse and Hofmann as well as recent critics, philosophers and art historians including Meyer Schapiro, Gaston Bachelard, Clement Greenberg and Lawrence Gowing. The text is illustrated with 116 colour plates and 117 black and white reproductions of photographs, documents and contemporary cartoons, prints and drawings. After Harvard Martha Kapos studied painting and the history of art at the Chelsea School of Art, where she is now teaching. Her art criticism has appeared in various magazines including Artscribe, Art Monthly and Screen. A collection of poems was published in 1989 by the Many Press.

Including over 200 specially commissioned photographs, this guide to Impressionist art reveals the techniques used by some of the greatest artists in order to create their works.

Julie Manet, the niece of Edouard Manet and the daughter of the most famous female Impressionist artist, Berthe Morisot, was born in Paris on 14 November 1878 into a wealthy and cultured milieu at the height of the Impressionist era. Many young girls still confide their inner thoughts to diaries and it is hardly surprising that, with her mother giving all her encouragement, Julie would prove to be no exception to the rule. At the age of ten, Julie began writing her `memoirs' but it wasn't until August 1893, at fourteen, that Julie began her diary in earnest: no neat leather-bound volume with lock and key but just untidy notes scribbled in old exercise books, often in pencil, the presentation as spontaneous as its contents. Her extraordinary diary - newly translated here by an expert on Impressionism - reveals a vivid depiction of a vital period in France's cultural history seen through the youthful and precocious eyes of the youngest member of what was surely the most prominent artistic family of the time.

This volume plunges readers into the heart of the Impressionists' world as it examines the complex network of artistic and personal relationships--from studio to coffeehouse to gallery--that nurtured such figures as Manet, Degas, Cezanne, Monet and Renoir. 235 illustrations, 24 in color.

Seventy-four masterpieces of French painting, long believed lost in World War II, by many of the greatest artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

"The purpose of this book is to describe the aims and achievements of the Impressionist movement, and to illustrate them in a magnificent series of colour plates. It shows how, withing the framework of the movement, each artist has applied his own interpretation of these aims to landscape, portraiture and still-life, employing new technical methods as he discovered them"--Jacket.