Modern Art (Dedalus European Classics) - Softcover

Huysmans, J.-K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910213993 ISBN 13: 9781910213995

Publisher: Dedalus Limited, 2020

Synopsis

First published in 1883, but never before translated into English, this collection of J.-K. Huysmans’ art criticism reveals the author of Against Nature to be as combative in his aesthetic opinions as he was in his literary ones. At a time when the Impressionists were still being ridiculed, or worse still ignored, Huysmans defiantly proclaimed Degas to be the best painter in France. He filled his pages with analyses of the works of artists whose genius and popularity have been confirmed by time: Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Gauguin, Mary Cassatt, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau.

Huysmans intersperses his reviews of these independent artists with those of the annual Official Salon, whose conventional and dryly academic works he lambasts with his customary gusto and invective.

This is the first complete translation of L’Art moderne, and includes 200 black and white illustrations, notes and a glossary of artists.

About this title

About the Author

J.-K. Huysmans (1847-1907) changed from being an obscure author and art critic to one of the most famous authors of his day with the publication of A Rebours (Against Nature) in 1884. A Rebours is a ground-breaking novel which captures the decadent spirit of the day and marks his final break with Zola and naturalism. Dedalus have published 11 books by J.-K. Huysmans, 9 in new translations by Brendan King; Marthe, Parisian Sketches, The Vatard Sisters, Stranded (En Rade), Drifting, Against Nature, Las Bas, Modern Art and The Cathedral. In addition to En Route and The Oblate of St Benedict.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

An extract from the chapter: Exhibition of the Independents in 1880

It now only remains for me – before coming to the work of M. Degas who I’ve saved until last – to say a few words about the two female painters of the group: Mlle. Cassatt and Mme. Berthe Morisot.

A student of Degas – I see his influence in that charming painting in which the back of a redheaded woman, dressed in yellow, is reflected in a mirror on the crimson backdrop of a theatre box – Mlle. Cassatt is clearly also a student of the English painters, because her excellent canvas, two ladies taking tea in an interior, makes me think of certain works exhibited in 1878, in the English section of the Exposition Universelle.

Here, we’re still with the middle class, but it’s not that of M. Caillebotte; it’s a world that’s equally comfortably off, but more refined, more elegant. In spite of her personality, which still hasn’t completely emerged yet, Mlle. Cassatt nevertheless has a curious quality that is especially attractive, because there’s a frisson of nervous female tension in her painting that is more balanced, more tranquil, more intelligent than that of Mme. Morisot, a student of M. Manet.

Left in the unfinished state of sketches, the works exhibited by this artist are a chic jumble of white and pink. They’re like Manet-esque Chaplins, with the turbulence of nervous agitation and strain added in. The women Mme. Morisot shows us at their toilette smell of ‘New Mown Hay’25 and frangipani; one divines silk stockings beneath their dresses, which seem to be designed by dressmakers of renown. A heady, fashionable elegance escapes from these morbid sketches, these astonishing improvisations, which might justly, perhaps, be qualified by the epithet ‘hysterical’.

I now pass in front of the soft, whitish painting by Mme. Bracquemond, in front also of the portrait of Edmond de Goncourt executed by M. Bracquemond, a portrait done à la Holbein though of an excessive harshness in the flesh, especially the pores which are like the grain in marble, but an interesting portrait nevertheless because it captures the writer at home in the middle of his collection of precious objets d’art; and, neglecting a series of etchings on fine China paper destined to decorate a set of dinner plates, intriguing, it’s true, but taken almost wholly from the sketchbooks of Hokusai, I finally stop in the room in which the canvases by Degas shine out.

I don’t remember ever having experienced a shock similar to that I felt.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dedalus Limited
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1910213993
• ISBN 13: 9781910213995
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 316