Pierre Puvis de Chavannes - Hardcover

Brown Price, Aimée

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300115717 ISBN 13: 9780300115710

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2010

Synopsis

An artist of pivotal importance to the generation of post-Impressionists from Seurat and Gauguin to Matisse and Picasso, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824 - 1898) played a crucial role in the history of late-19th-century French art and the development of modernism. He was an artist of great range, originality, and idiosyncratic invention who executed mural complexes, compelling easel paintings, and numerous works on paper. These two companion volumes―a critical study of the artist's life and art, and a catalogue raisonné of his paintings―introduce many of Puvis’s works for the first time, assess his contribution, and restore him to the pantheon of modern masters.

Volume I situates Puvis and his work in his time. With a wealth of new documentation, it addresses the theories, forces, and events that impinged on his art. Volume II is a complete compendium of Puvis's easel paintings and mural cycles for civic buildings throughout France as well as for the Boston Public Library.

About this title

About the Author:

Aimée Brown Price is an independent scholar and the acknowledged authority on Puvis de Chavannes. In 1994 she organized a pioneering exhibition on his work at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. She lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

Best known for Arcadian mural paintings peopled by somnambulist figures inhabiting a mysterious, classicized landscape, French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98) had a liberating influence on Gauguin, Seurat, Rodin, Denis and Picasso. This valuable, beautiful catalog of a retrospective at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam allows one to understand why Puvis's impact was so great. Though his murals are notably absent from the exhibit, this volume, featuring 98 color and 102 black-and-white plates, highlights his brooding, sensitive portraits, myth-laden fantasies, delicate watercolors, powerful religious dramas, wry caricatures, nude sketches, allegories and other easel paintings that evoke a sense of solitude, longing and alienation. Guest curator Price ably delineates the development of Puvis's mural esthetic, detects repercussions of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune in his work, and tracks his pictorial idiom to classical, Byzantine and Pre-Raphaelite sources.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0300115717
• ISBN 13: 9780300115710
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 672