The Painting of Modern Life

Author: T.J. Clark
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525520511
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 636

Book Description
From T.J. Clark comes this provocative study of the origins of modern art in the painting of Parisian life by Edouard Manet and his followers. The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was a brand-new city, recently adorned with boulevards, cafés, parks, Great Exhibitions, and suburban pleasure grounds—the birthplace of the habits of commerce and leisure that we ourselves know as "modern life." A new kind of culture quickly developed in this remade metropolis, sights and spectacles avidly appropriated by a new kind of "consumer": clerks and shopgirls, neither working class nor bourgeois, inventing their own social position in a system profoundly altered by their very existence. Emancipated and rootless, these men and women flocked to the bars and nightclubs of Paris, went boating on the Seine at Argenteuil, strolled the island of La Grande-Jatte—enacting a charade of community that was to be captured and scrutinized by Manet, Degas, and Seurat. It is Clark's cogently argued (and profusely illustrated) thesis that modern art emerged from these painters' attempts to represent this new city and its inhabitants. Concentrating on three of Manet's greatest works and Seurat's masterpiece, Clark traces the appearance and development of the artists' favorite themes and subjects, and the technical innovations that they employed to depict a way of life which, under its liberated, pleasure-seeking surface, was often awkward and anxious. Through their paintings, Manet and the Impressionists ask us, and force us to ask ourselves: Is the freedom offered by modernity a myth? Is modern life heroic or monotonous, glittering or tawdry, spectacular or dull? The Painting of Modern Life illuminates for us the ways, both forceful and subtle, in which Manet and his followers raised these questions and doubts, which are as valid for our time as for the age they portrayed.

Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life

Author: T. J. Clark
Publisher: Tate
ISBN: 9781849760911
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This is a timely study of the life and work of L.S. Lowry, as well as his contribution to the development of 20th-century British art.

American Impressionism and Realism

Author: Helene Barbara Weinberg
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 0870997009
Category : Impressionism (Art)
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
An examination of the continuities and differences between American Impressionism and Realism. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Impressionism and the Modern Landscape

Author: James H. Rubin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520248015
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
The examples convey not only these major themes but also the painters' belief in the progress of civilization through science and industry. The book thus expands the scope of Impressionist celebrations of modernity to include what might be called Impressionism's "other landscape" and proposes that in the Impressionists' effort to forge a modern landscape art, those signs of modernity defined their vision most clearly."--BOOK JACKET.

Impressionist Cats & Dogs

Author: James Henry Rubin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300098730
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
Many Impressionist paintings of modern life and leisure include images of household pets. Their appealing presence lends charm to such works while alluding to middle-class prosperity and the growing importance of animals as family members. In many cases, such domestic denizens significantly complement representations of their owners. In certain others, the devotion of individual artists to their pets symbolically enhances their expressions of artistic identity. This enjoyable and informative book focuses on the role of pets in Impressionist pictures and what this reveals about art, artists, and society of that era. James H. Rubin discusses works in which artists paint themselves or their friends in the company of their pets, including several paintings by Courbet (who was fond of dogs) and Manet (a notorious lover of cats). He points out that in some works by Degas, dogs contribute to the artist's commentary on psychological and social relationships, and that in paintings by Renoir, dogs and cats have playful and erotic overtones. He also offers a theory to explain why Monet almost never painted pets. Drawing on early pet handbooks and treatises on animal intelligence, Rubin explores nineteenth-century opinions on cats and dogs and compares handbook illustrations to the animals shown in Impressionist works. He also provides fascinating information on pet ownership and on the place of Impressionism in the long history of animal painting.

Modern Life

Author: Edward Hopper
Publisher: Hirmer Verlag GmbH
ISBN: 9783777434018
Category : Art, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This exhibition sets the art of Edward Hopper in the context of the diverse and controversial movements dominating American art during the first half of the twentieth century.

Wyeth

Author: Laura J. Hoptman
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
ISBN: 0870708317
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 49

Book Description
In 1948 Andrew Wyeth produced what would become one of the most iconic paintings in American art: a desolate landscape featuring a woman lying in a field, that he called "Christina's World." The woman in the painting, Christina Olson, lived in Cushing, Maine, where Wyeth and his wife kept a summer house. She suffered from polio, and was paralyzed from the waist down; Wyeth was moved to portray her when he saw her one day crawling through the field towards her house. "Christina's World" was to become one of the most well-loved and most scorned works of the twentieth century, igniting heated arguments about parochialism, sentimentality, kitsch and elitism that have continued to dog the art world and Wyeth's own reputation, even after the artist's death in 2009. An essay by MoMA curator Laura Hoptman revisits the genesis of the painting, discussing Wyeth's curious focus, over the course of his career, on a deliberately delimited range of subjects and exploring the mystery that continues to surround the enigmatic painting.

Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris

Author: David H. Pinkney
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691656827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
In the two decades between 1850 and 1870 Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, created the modern city of Paris out of the congested and ill-equipped capital of the 18th century. They gave Paris many of its present major streets, its great municipal parks, the Central Markets, the Opera House and other well-known buildings, as well as a water supply system and a network of sewers that still serve the city. The various factors of the venture: the city's rapidly increasing population, the challenging engineering problems, the political complications, and the clash of personalities involved are here considered. The author presents the whole undertaking in the perspective of French political and economic history, shows its relation to the public health movement of the mid-nineteenth century, and explains its significance in the history of city planning. Originally published in 1958. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Painting of Modern Life

Author: Ralph Rugoff
Publisher: Hayward Gallery Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
Text by Ralph Rugoff, Kaja Silverman, Barry Schwabsky, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Martin Herbert.

Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World

Author: Miles J. Unger
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1476794227
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
One of The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 “An engrossing read…a historically and psychologically rich account of the young Picasso and his coteries in Barcelona and Paris” (The Washington Post) and how he achieved his breakthrough and revolutionized modern art through his masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In 1900, eighteen-year-old Pablo Picasso journeyed from Barcelona to Paris, the glittering capital of the art world. For the next several years he endured poverty and neglect before emerging as the leader of a bohemian band of painters, sculptors, and poets. Here he met his first true love and enjoyed his first taste of fame. Decades later Picasso would look back on these years as the happiest of his long life. Recognition came first from the avant-garde, then from daring collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1907, Picasso began the vast, disturbing masterpiece known as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Inspired by the painting of Paul Cézanne and the inventions of African and tribal sculpture, Picasso created a work that captured the disorienting experience of modernity itself. The painting proved so shocking that even his friends assumed he’d gone mad, but over the months and years it exerted an ever greater fascination on the most advanced painters and sculptors, ultimately laying the foundation for the most innovative century in the history of art. In Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World, Miles J. Unger “combines the personal story of Picasso’s early years in Paris—his friendships, his romances, his great ambition, his fears—with the larger story of modernism and the avant-garde” (The Christian Science Monitor). This is the story of an artistic genius with a singular creative gift. It is “riveting…This engrossing book chronicles with precision and enthusiasm a painting with lasting impact in today’s art world” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), all of it played out against the backdrop of the world’s most captivating city.