Vincent Van Gogh and the Painters of the Petit Boulevard - Hardcover

Cornelia Homburg; Elizabeth C. Childs; John House; Richard Thomson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0847823326 ISBN 13: 9780847823321

Publisher: Rizzoli, 2001

Synopsis

Dozens of reproductions highlight the work of Parisian avant-garde artists of the late 1880s and early 1890s, including Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard, and Georges Seurat, providing a fresh look at this influential generation of artists and the impact of their work on the development of modern art.

About this title

Review:

Most people think of van Gogh as a tortured loner, but the engrossing Vincent van Gogh and the Painters of the Petit Boulevard makes plain his great desire to be part of the art world of his time. Focusing on the years between 1886 (when he came to Paris) and 1890 (the year of his death), four art historians examine the competitive spirit of young radical painters who searched for ways to express their reactions to an industrialized world increasingly remote from the idealized values of peasant life. The painters (who included Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, and Émile Bernard) were vastly different from one another in style and temperament. Yet van Gogh embraced them all as "painters of the petit boulevard"--fellow unrecognized artists toiling in out-of-the-way studios and showing their work in cafés rather than in swank galleries. Dreaming of founding a colony of like-minded painters he called "The Studio of the South," van Gogh decamped to Arles in 1888. But the only artist who joined him, for two stressful months, was Gauguin. Both were loners, and differences loomed large. While van Gogh worked from nature, conveying his physical engagement with thick marks on canvas, Gauguin looked inward, abstracting objects with a thin application of paint. Even on a personal level, Gauguin's swaggering ease with the local women magnified van Gogh's insecurities. Each essay illuminates a different aspect of the complex personal, social, and artistic motivations that fueled each "petit boulevard" artist's search for a personal artistic identity. Lavishly illustrated and fluidly written, this book is the catalog for an exhibition of the same name at the St. Louis Art Museum (through May 13, 2001) and the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt (June 8-September 2, 2001). --Cathy Curtis

About the Author:

Cornelia Homburg is Chief Curator of the Saint Louis Museum of Art.

Elizabeth C. Childs is a professor of art history at Washington University, St. Louis.

John House of the Courtauld Institute, London, is the author of Monet: Nature into Art.

Richard Thomson of the University of Edinburgh, is the author of Framing France: The Representation of Landscape in France, 1870-1914.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rizzoli
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0847823326
• ISBN 13: 9780847823321
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256