Pierre Puvis De Chavannes [Anglais] [Relié]

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.

Revered during his lifetime, the French mural painter Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98) has been neglected since his death. His monumental murals and paintings are distinguished for their "classicizing imagery"-pale-toned, allegorical personages from ancient times set in bucolic, flattened landscapes. Published in conjunction with a recent retrospective exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this monograph features over 140 of Puvis's paintings and drawings. Exquisite figure paintings, dramatic biblical compositions, and witty caricatures should spark new interest in this complex artist. Price, an authority on Puvis and organizer of the exhibition, accompanies each illustration with detailed text, provenance, and citations. Essays contributed by two noted art historians and a chronology complete the volume. Highly recommended for all art history collections.
Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (182498) was for a long time the most celebrated painter of 19th-century France. His work was everywhere, commissioned as he was to add visual life to the Pantheon, the Sorbonne, and quite a bit of the rest of Paris as well. Time, however, turned Puvis into somewhat of a Salieri--later generations dismissed him for a lack of originality and for being, essentially, a court painter whose large allegorical murals catered to the pretensions of a rising middle-class and its attendant vulgarity. But in the spirit of everything old being new again, Puvis is garnering a second glance, most notably in an exhibition, curated by Price, at the Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh in Amsterdam, to which this volume is a companion. (200 illustrations, 98 in color) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.