French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin
French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin

Author: Carter E. Foster

Publisher: Hudson Hills

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 9780940717671

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Accompanying an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art last fall and now at the Dahesh Museum in New York, this catalog focuses upon the French drawings in Muriel Butkin's highly specialized collection which she has promised to the Cleveland Museum. To assemble her diverse yet nicely integrated set of drawings, Butkin started buying 18th-century French drawings when they were affordable. In the mid-1970s, with the guidance of art historian Gabriel Weisberg, she expanded her collection to include 19th-century French drawings. These drawings were counter to the mainstream impressionist and postimpressionist taste of the time and focused more on academic French subject matter such as life drawings, portraits, or compositional studies. In the preface, Butkin herself reinforces her taste by saying that drawings are much more personal and spontaneous than paintings, often demonstrating the artistic process. Foster, curator of drawings at the Cleveland Museum, and other scholars present a well-researched volume that contributes new information to a very specialized field of art history. It is greatly disappointing, however, that the bulk of the reproductions are in black and white, often missing the subtly colored tones in many of the drawings. Nonetheless, this is recommended for museum and academic libraries that support graduate programs in art history. 183 b/w illustrations

Van Dyck
Van Dyck

Author: Stijn Alsteens

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2016-01-01

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0300212054

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The first major examination of Anthony van Dyck's work as a portraitist and an essential resource on this aspect of his illustrious career This landmark volume is a comprehensive survey of the portrait drawings, paintings, and prints of Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), one of the most celebrated portraitists of all time. His supremely elegant style and ability to convey a sense of a sitter's inner life made him a favored portraitist among high-ranking figures and royalty across Europe, as well as among his fellow artists and art enthusiasts. Showcasing the full range of Van Dyck's fascinating international career with more than 100 works, this catalogue celebrates the artist's versatility, inventiveness, and influential approach to portraiture. Works include preparatory drawings and oil sketches that shed light on Van Dyck's working process, prints that allowed his work to reach a wider audience, and grand painted portraits. Some of the masterpieces are drawn from the exceptional holdings of The Frick Collection, while other works are presented here for the first time. Also included are drawings by some of Van Dyck's contemporaries--including his teacher Peter Paul Rubens--that illuminate the lineage of his working method. With insightful contributions by a team of international scholars, this unparalleled study of Van Dyck offers a compelling case for the distinctiveness and importance of the artist's work.

Paris and the Cliché of History
Paris and the Cliché of History

Author: Catherine E. Clark

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-07-19

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190681667

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This book turns a compelling new lens on thinking about the history of Paris and photography. The invention of photography changed how history could be written. But the now commonplace assumptions--that photographs capture fragments of lost time or present emotional gateways to the past--that structure today's understandings did not emerge whole cloth in 1839. Focusing on one of photography's birthplaces, Paris and the Cliché of History tells the story of how photographs came to be imagined as documents of the past. Author Catherine E. Clark analyzes photography's effects on historical interpretation by examining the formation of Paris's first photo archives at the Musée Carnavalet and the city's municipal library, their use in illustrated history books and historical exhibitions and reconstructions such as the 1951 celebration of Paris's 2000th birthday, and the public's contribution to the historical record in amateur photo contests. Despite the photograph's growing importance in these forums, it did not simply replace older forms of illustration, visual documentation, or written text. Photos worked in complex and shifting relation to other types of pictures as photographers, popular historians, and publishers built on the traditions and iconography of painting and engraving in order to both document the past scientifically and objectively and to reconstruct it romantically. In doing so, they not only influenced how Parisians thought about the city's past and how they pictured it; they also ensured that these images shaped how Parisians lived their own lives--especially in deeply charged moments such as the Liberation after World War II. This history of picturing Paris does not simply reflect the city's history: it is Parisian history.