Impressionism - Hardcover

Featuring 85 full-page color plates, this jewel of an album showcases one of the most brilliant impressionist exhibitions ever mounted. The fine-tuned plates recreate the incandescent chromatics in a Degas pastel of dancers, or the sparkling streaks in a Mary Cassatt portrait. There are works by celebrated impressionists--Renoir, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, etc.--and less well-known figures such as Gustave Caillebotte and Berthe Morisot. The monograph embraces neo-impressionist work such as the country- and cityscapes of Paul Signac, as well as Van Gogh's windmills, Gauguin's South Seas paradise and Pierre Bonnard's symbolic transformations of the ordinary. Facing-page commentaries by art historian Gerstein illuminate historical and personal contexts as well as impressionist modes of perception and knowing. Five museums collaborated on this show that will travel among them: Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Mo.; Saint Louis Art Museum; and Toledo Museum of Art. Literary Guild selection.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The catalog of a cooperative exhibition of 85 French artworks (including four sculptures) from the permanent collections of five museums--the St. Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Arts, and the Toledo Museum of Art--this book provides a good visual survey of Impressionism, including some major pictures and a number that deserve to be better known. Included are enough Post-Impressionists--Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec--to make one question the title. Exposition is limited to text facing the 85 plates arranged alphabetically by artist. A picture-book of no great originality but with substantial visual pleasure to feed apparently insatiable demand.
- Jack Perry Brown, Ryerson & Burnham Lib., Art Inst . of Chicago
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.