Trained in Renaissance art traditions, Moreau helped to open the way for modern art, and was especially fascinating to the later Surrealists, themselves drunk on dreams. Genevieve Lacambre takes us into the heart of this man's unique creativity, exploring his life and artistic sources. More than 120 paintings, drawings, and watercolors and a wealth of documents, letters, and photographs illustrate the life and work of this singular artist."--BOOK JACKET.
We know Degas--an artist passionately devoted to the avant-garde and a driving force behind Impressionism--as the creator of lovely pictures of ballet dancers, striking views of horse races, and intimate scenes of women bathing. But what do we know of his history paintings, portraits, and landscapes? And his personal life? Degas' full story--and a new look at an enigmatic master--awaits rediscovery. Book jacket.
A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through city streets in search of adventure and fulfillment. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. In the hands of the learned White, a walk through Paris is both a tour of its lush, sometimes prurient history, and an evocation of the city's spirit. The Flaneur leads us to bookshops and boutiques, monuments and palaces, giving us a glimpse the inner human drama. Along the way we learn everything from the latest debates among French lawmakers to the juicy details of Colette's life. Originally published as part of Bloomsbury's Writer and the City series, this book has sold consistently over the years, and will find a whole new audience in paperback.
The French painter Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) strove to renew figure painting by creating an unacademic form of 'epic' art. In this book, Peter Cooke explains how Moreau effectively created pictorial Symbolism through his novel approach to the genre of history painting. In the process, the author examines the artist through a number of his major paintings, his ideology and aesthetic, and in relation to other artists of his time and of the previous generations. The narrative follows Moreau's career from his Neoclassical and academic training through his conversion to Romanticism, his studies in Italy, his experiences as an exhibitor at the Paris Salon, between 1864 and 1880, and his subsequent years as a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and as the founder of his own museum. By examining Moreau's critical reception, as well as that of his students, the book shows his controversial effect on the art world of his time, during the Second Empire and Third Republic. Drawing on unpublished manuscripts from the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris, Cooke presents insights into how Moreau's complex and original art reflects his spiritualist ideology, together with his persistent inner obsessions.
From its very inception in the late eighteenth century, Romanticism's celebration of euphoria and sublimity has been dogged by its equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime, the grotesque and the irrational. In 1930, the famous literary theorist Mario Praz named this strain in literature "Dark Romanticism," but its equivalent in art has never been thoroughly assessed in art history. This volume is the first to examine a current that runs from Goya's war etchings through Symbolism and up to Surrealism, presenting Romanticism as an intellectual position that was embraced throughout Europe and that endured into the twentieth century. Among the artists included are Henry Fuseli, William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, Victor Hugo, Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Félicien Rops, James Ensor, Max Klinger, Edvard Munch, Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst.
To what extent did mythological figures such as Circe and Medea influence the representation of the powerful 'oriental' enchantress in modern Western art? What role did the ancient gods and heroes play in the construction of the imaginary worlds of the modern fantasy genre? What is the role of undead creatures like zombies and vampires in mythological films? Looking across the millennia, from the distrust of ancient magic and oriental cults, which threatened the new-born Christian religion, to the revival and adaptation of ancient myths and religion in the arts centuries later, this book offers an original analysis of the reception of ancient magic and the supernatural, across a wide variety of different media – from comics to film, from painting to opera. Working in a variety of fields across the globe, the authors of these essays deconstruct certain scholarly traditions by proposing original interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations, showing to what extent the visual and performing arts of different periods interlink and shape cultural and social identities.
This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices. Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of “nature’s experiments”—the belief that the study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths, above all about the human mind and body—extended from the scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists’ solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a ready-made methodology for fin-de-siècle truth seekers. By using experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully strange. Focusing on the scientific, psychological, and experimental tactics of symbolism, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form demystifies the avant-garde value of experimentation and reveals new and important insights into a foundational period for the development of European modernism.
Memories of the man are shared by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Rush and Colin Smythe, who compiles a bibliography of Jeffares’s work. Terence Brown, Neil Corcoran, Warwick Gould, Joseph M. Hassett, Phillip L. Marcus, Ann Saddlemyer, Ronald Schuchard, Deirdre Toomey and Helen Vendler offer essays on such topics as Yeats and the Colours of Poetry, Yeats’s Shakespeare, Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Lacrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy, Raftery’s work on Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, Edmund Dulac’s portrait of Mrs George Yeats, The Tower as an anti-Modernist monument, with close studies of ‘Vacillation’, ‘Her Triumph’, and ‘The Cold Heaven’. Throughout, the essays are inflected with memories of Jeffares and his critical methods. The volume is rounded with further essays on A Vision by Neil Mann and Matthew de Forrest, while reviews of recent editions and studies are provided by Matthew Campbell, Wayne K. Chapman, Sandra Clark, Denis Donoghue, Nicholas Grene, Joseph M. Hassett, and K.P.S. Jochum. Yeats Annual is published by Open Book Publishers in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London.
