Impressions of France traces the development of the French painted landscape from1860 to 1890, a period of dramatic artistic evolution. Taking as his context the Paris Salons - "the central forum for the display of contemporary art in Paris, and the focus for discussions of the state of modern art"--John House explains how the Impressionist landscapes exhibited there both reflected, and forever changed, the cultural tastes of the age.
Phillips presents spirit-lifting takes on classic style from a modern point of view, as she creates twenty-first-century comfort with lasting French flair.
In 1950, as many families were establishing lives in suburbia, Mary and Frank Littell decided to uproot their young family from the comfort of their home in the United States and move to France for a year. Now, decades later, their son John S. Littell, who was four years old at the time of their French exploration, brings his mother’s journals to life and tells the story of living in the working-class town of Montpellier from her perspective. French Impressions: The Adventures of an American Family chronicles one family’s adventures abroad, as Mary struggles to maintain a home in a new culture and to cook the local cuisine, while Frank traverses to various bars and nightly reads Great Expectations to his toddlers. These often comedic and heartening familial struggles will at once seem familiar and lost to the times gone by.
International specialists in French art and literature come together in this volume to investigate moderniteacute; through painting, sculpture, the novel, diaries, dance, poetry, criticism and theory.
"An indispensable addition to the literature, this informative publication is not only one of very few books available in English on the subject, but it also reproduces for the first time all the featured prints in full colour. Authors examine the history, marketing, and collecting of these prints, as well as the tools, techniques, and papers used in making them."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This fascinating account of a French woman's impressions of America in the late nineteenth century reveals an unusual cross-cultural journey through fin de siècle Paris, Chicago, and New York. Madame Leon Grandin's travels and extended stay in Chicago in 1893 were the result of her husband's collaboration on the fountain sculpture for the World's Columbian Exposition. Initially impressed with the city's fast pace and architectural grandeur, Grandin's attentions were soon drawn to its social and cultural customs, reflected as observations in her writing. During a ten-month interval as a resident, she was intrigued by the interactions between men and women, mothers and their children, teachers and students, and other human relationships, especially noting the comparative social freedoms of American women. After this interval of acclimatization, the young Parisian socialite had begun to view her own culture and its less liberated mores with considerable doubt. "I had tasted the fruit of independence, of intelligent activity, and was revolted at the idea of assuming once again the passive and inferior role that awaited me!" she wrote. Grandin's curiosity and interior access to Chicago's social and domestic spaces produced an unusual travel narrative that goes beyond the usual tourist reactions and provides a valuable resource for readers interested in late nineteenth-century America, Chicago, and social commentary. Significantly, her feminine views on American life are in marked contrast to parallel reflections on the culture by male visitors from abroad. It is precisely the dual narrative of this text--the simultaneous recounting of a foreigner's impressions, and the consequent questioning of her own cultural certainties--that make her book unique. This translation includes an introductory essay by Arnold Lewis that situates Grandin's account in the larger context of European visitors to Chicago in the 1890s.
Matched only by Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Paris France is a "fresh and sagacious" (The New Yorker) classic of prewar France and its unforgettable literary eminences. Celebrated for her innovative literary bravura, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) settled into a bustling Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, never again to return to her native America. While in Paris, she not only surrounded herself with—and tirelessly championed the careers of—a remarkable group of young expatriate artists but also solidified herself as "one of the most controversial figures of American letters" (New York Times). In Paris France (1940)—published here with a new introduction from Adam Gopnik—Stein unites her childhood memories of Paris with her observations about everything from art and war to love and cooking. The result is an unforgettable glimpse into a bygone era, one on the brink of revolutionary change.
