This title charts the story of the French artists who took refuge in London during and after the devastating Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. Following these traumatic events there was a creative flourishing in London as the exiles responded to British culture and social life - regattas, processions, parks, and of course the Thames.
Published to accompany the exhibition Paul Duran-Ruel: Le Pari de l'Impressionnisme, Musaee de Luxembourg, Pais (Saenat), October 9, 2014 - February 8, 2015; Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market, The National Gallery, London, March 4 - May 31, 2015; Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting, Philadelphia Museum of Art, June 24 - September 13, 2015.
Late in his career, Claude Monet returned to London to paint the fog that had entranced him years before. The resulting sequence of pictures represents some of the fascination that French painters felt for Britain. Similarly, many British collectors and young painters embraced and were influenced by the work of the French Impressionists. This book describes the activities of the French Impressionist painters on their visits to Britain, considers the dissemination of Impressionist painting through British dealers and collectors, explores the response of artists from Britain and Ireland to the Impressionist movement, and sets all of these against the backdrop of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. McConkey and Robins describe the work of Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and other Impressionists working in London, showing how this art influenced the community of young British painters disenchanted with British art schools and art exhibiting standards. The authors investigate the role played by two innovative painters who were American expatriates, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent. And they explain how such artists as William Orpen, George Clausen, Stanhope Forbes, Henry La Thangue, Walter Sickert, and Philip Wilson Steer sought out new and radical approaches to picture making, formed new secessionist art societies, and articulated new concepts of the role of art, rejecting historical pageants and fashionable aestheticism and focusing on modern rural and urban conditions. The book is the catalogue of an exhibition that will be at the Barbican Art Gallery in London from January to March 1995, and then move to Dublin.
"Inspiring Impressionism" explores links between Impressionists and the major European art-historical movements that came before them, demonstrating how often beneath the Impressionists' commitment to capturing contemporary life there lay a deep exploration of the art of the past. Presents Impressionist works by artists including Manet, Monet, Degas, Bazille, Cassatt, and Cezanne alongside those of Raphael, El Greco, Rubens, Velazquez, and others.
Impressionism has captured the imagination of people the world over since its first exhibition in Paris in 1874. People have long sought to understand how and why the Impressionists created their paintings and how their techniques might be replicated. Susie Hodge reveals the answers to these questions by assessing the techniques and styles of the great masters of Impressionism and showing how artists today can use their methods. An informative introduction explains how the Impressionist movement came about, explores its historical context, and defines the style and inspiration of the artists involved. The heart of the book, however, focuses on eight major Impressionist painters -- Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cassatt, Degas, Cezanne, Seurat and Van Gogh -- revealing how they worked and analyzing their well-known paintings. Each case includes step-by-step demonstrations that show the reader exactly how to re-create Impressionist painting details in appropriate style.
In 1910 the critic Roger Fry organized an exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, London, of avant-garde painting which included works by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse. This exhibition became as important a landmark in the official histories of modern art as the subsequent Armory Show in America. These artists did not belong to a single unified movement defined or recognized at the time, and Fry, in a quandary as to what to call the exhibition, and losing patience at the last minute, said, "Oh, let's just call them Post-Impressionists; at any rate, they came after the Impressionists". In this way one of the important critical categories, one of the "isms" of modern art, was born. But "Post-Impressionism" was not a name which Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat or Cezanne or any artists of the period would have applied to themselves. The documents in this book, many of which appear in English for the first time, show how artists and critics in the aftermath of Impressionism did describe themselves: how they responded to tradition, to each other and to the kaleidoscope of the contemporary scene. This was a period of reconsideration, of moving on from aspects of Impressionism, and of coming to grips with the isolation that avant-garde art had imposed on the individual artist. It was a period in which the emphasis within Impressionism on the construction of painting purely by means of color had left artists with the question of how the power of this basic form related to their own feelings and to nature. New ideas were coming from poetry as well as painting that laid the basis for modernism. These issues and the personal struggles of the artists themselves are revealed in their letters, and inthe writings of friends and critics, many of whom, such as Mallarme, Laforgue, Huysmans, and Proust were novelists and poets. This book also includes commentaries from Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, and W. H. Auden as well as modern critics, artists, philosophers and art historians: Georges Bataille, Paul Klee, and Meyer Schapiro on Van Gogh; John Berger on Bonnard; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Clement Greenberg, Adrian Stokes and Lawrence Gowing on Cezanne. The text is illustrated with 119 colorplates and 125 black and white reproductions of contemporary photographs, cartoons, documents, prints and drawings.
