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Virtu Art Books

19th Century Art, Modernism to Post Modernism

From David to Ingres: Early 19th-Century French Artists
(Grove Dictionary of Art) Jane Turner
Paperback
Publisher:
St. Martin's Press

Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism
The book's flexible structure and extensive cross-referencing allow readers to plot their own course through the book and to follow any one of the many narratives that unfold through the century, whether that be the history of a medium such as photography or painting, the development of art in a particular country, the influence of a movement such as Surrealism or feminism, or the emergence of a stylistic or conceptual category like abstraction or minimalism. Boxes give further background information on some of the important figures and issues surrounding the art. In their perceptive introductions, the four authors set out and explain the different methods of art history at work in the book, providing the reader with the conceptual tools to further his or her own study. Two roundtable discussions - one at mid-century, the other at the close of the book - consider some of the questions raised by the preceding decades and look ahead to the art of the future. A glossary of terms and concepts completes this extraordinary volume

Romanticism and Art (World of Art S.)
In the age of revolutions, at the end of the 18th century, the mental and spiritual life of Europe and North America began to undergo a historic and irreversible change. The ideas of spontaneity, direct expression and natural feeling transformed the arts, encouraging artists to explore the extremes in human nature, from heroism to insanity and despair. Previously published as "Romantic Art" and now revised, William Vaughan's study analyses the achievement of the leading artists of the age - masters such as Goya, Blake, Gericault, Turner and Delacroix - and sets in context a host of fascinating figures in painting, sculpture and architecture: Palmer, Runge, Soane, Gros, Overbeck, Schinkel, Flaxman, Pugin, Bingham and many more. The result is an account of a dramatic and contradictory artistic epoch

German Romantic Painting
The early 19th century was a period in German art in which painting played a significant part in the cultural resurgence commonly known as the Romantic Movement. This Movement and some of its chief exponents are examined against a background of German literature, philosophy and music.

Caspar David Friedrich: The Spirit of Romantic Painting
This text reveals the influences and spiritual quest that formed the basis of Romanticism at the beginning of the 19th century. The selection of paintings, from Turner to Gericault and Delacroix, complement those of Friedrich.

J.M.W.Turner: Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution
A guide to the paintings of Turner, showing how he drew inspiration from the new forces of the Industrial Revolution. The author assesses the range of Turner's industrial art and the context of its creation, examining facets of Turner's concern with industrialism

The Scenic Daguerreotype: Romanticism and Early Photography
Hardcover:
Publisher:
University of Iowa Press, U.S.

All That Is Glorious Around Us: Paintings from the Hudson River School
This volume presents, through their paintings, the major artists of the Hudson River School, along with lesser-known figures. Colour illustrations of 78 works are supplemented with biographical sketches and a bibliography in a survey of the ideas, events and figures of the Hudson River School movement. The author explores the diversity of 19th-century Romantic American landscape painting. Highlighted specifically are works by well-known figures such as Thomas Cole, John F. Kensett, Sanford Gifford, Frederic Church, William Trost Richards and Worthington Whittredge, as well as examples of work by lesser-known yet signigicant artists such as Eliza Greaterex, Laura Woodward, Regis Gignoux, Ernest Lotichius and Robert Duncanson

Romantic Landscape: The Norwich School of Painters, 1803-1833
Crome and Cotman were the leaders of the school of landscape painters which flourished in Norwich in the early 19th century. This catalogue displays their work, along with that of other notable painters working around Norwich.

National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries (Modern Architecture & Cultural Identity S.)
This book provides a comprehensive examination of one of the most important modernist traditions. Offering a new interpretation of its origins, Barbara Miller Lane focuses on the movement called 'National Romanticism', which flourished in Germany and Scandinavia from about 1890 to 1920. During this period, painters, interior designers, city planners and architects created a new kind of domestic architecture and interior design, as well as monumental architecture. Drawing upon local and regional folk traditions, and encouraging a simple way of life, architects such as Eliel Saarinen, Hans Poelzig, and Martin Nyrop, looked back to medieval and even prehistoric times for their models, as they also tried to create a new architecture for the new millennium. Their buildings encouraged new kinds of social and political relationships and have had a profound influence in the architecture of Germany and Scandinavia

The Humanistic Tradition: Romanticism, Realism and the Modernist Turn Bk. 5
The penultimate volume in this series chronicles the move towards modernism, covering the arts, politics, and philosophy from the end of the 1700s to the dawn of the twentieth century. Using literary and musical excerpts to illuminate discussions, Fiero addresses important events and discoveries of the nineteenth century world. Volume five begins with the art and literature of the Romantic era, and concludes with coverage of the shifting aesthetics of the late nineteenth century. As in previous volumes, Volume Five includes a range of vivid illustrations and images throughout the text to enhance the material

Nineteenth-century Art: From Romanticism to Art Nouveau
This new title presents the highlights of this amazing collection. These include a series of paintings by the foremost masters of the Romantic era, J. A. D. Ingres and Eugene Delacroix, as well as landscapes by painters associated with the Barbizon school. Likewise, the `transportation' series of watercolours that William Walters bought from Honore Daumier in 1864 is generally recognised as the high point of nineteenth-century Realism. However, it is in the field of academic art, which dominated French art during the Second Empire (1852-70) that The Walters excels. The conflicts between the academic artists - especially Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanels - and the impressionists is demonstrated by The Walters collection. The work of Edouard Manet is presented in close proximity to that of his teacher, Thomas Couture, and the landscapes of Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley are juxtaposed with a highly idealised, poetic vision of ancient Egypt by Charles Gleyre, with whom they trained

Romanticism and the School of Nature: Nineteenth-century Paintings, Drawings and Oil Sketches from the Collection of Karen B.Cohen (Metropolitan Museum of Art S.)
Nineteenth-century French and English paintings, drawings, and oil sketches - works by such great artists as Courbet, Constable, Delacroix, Giricault, Corot, Rousseau, Couture and Daubigny - are presented in this interesting book, a documentation of some of the holdings of Karen B. Cohen, a noted New York collector. Because they have been held for so long in private hands, most of the works in this collection are little known, and many are published here for the first time

John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)
The long and stellar career of John Everett Millais (1829-1896) has been framed in terms of his rise to notoriety as an original member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood followed by a compromising descent into comfortable success as a popular painter and leading figure in the Royal Academy. But this dismissal of Millais's post-Raphaelite work overlooks more than forty years of artistic endeavour and distinction. In this book, nine scholars reexamine Millais's entire career from a variety of perspectives, arriving at a new vision of his place in the history of British art and finding that fame and recognition did not represent the end of this important Victorian artist's development

Arts and Craft Movement
Hardcover
Publisher:
Grange Books

William Morris and Morris & Co.
Morris created highly distinctive designs for wallpapers and textiles many of which are still enjoying enormous popularity today. Through his company, Morris & Co, he contributed to the transformation of interior design at the end of the 19th century and gave expression to the ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The highly accessible text looks at pattern and colour, as well as sources of inspiration such as nature, literature and legend. It also offers a fascinating insight into his working practices which were so different from those of his Victorian contemporaries. His desire to make beautiful things was at the core of his enterprise and his subtle colour schemes and evocative designs, many of which are still in production today, have a timeless appeal. Through specially commissioned photographs showing rooms using his designs in a wide variety of settings, and details of individual textile and wallpaper designs, the book provides a wealth of ideas and inspiration for contemporary home owners

The Beauty of Life: William Morris and the Art of Design
William Morris was a man of tremendous energies, his accomplishments astonishing in their range and depth. He became successively a poet, embroiderer, pattern designer, calligrapher, dyer, weaver, translator, architectural preservationist, socialist and book publisher and printer. As the head of the internationally successful Morris & Company, he devoted himself to the decorative arts. In his 1880 lecture "The Beauty of Life", Morris defined art and beauty together as integral to life itself. This book looks at the achievements of William Morris and his firm, drawing on material from the Huntington Library and Arts Collections in California. It contains studies of Morris the man, the firm he founded, its designs for stained glass and interior decoration, and Morris's adventures in fine printing, as well as an essay on his successor at Morris & Company, J.H. Dearle. It also explores attitudes to and the design legacy of Morris and his firm in the late 19th and 20th centuries on both sides of the Atlantic

William Morris Decor and Design
This practical guide by Elizabeth Wilhide shows the reader a variety
of simple and cost-effective ways o f creating a Morris style that
will complement their own m odern living space

The Gardens of William Morris
William Morris, designer, poet, socialist - nature lover. This volume focuses on Morris's vision of the garden, uncovering the principles which had such a profound effect on garden designers such as Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson. Guided by Morris and the plants which appear in his work, this book endorses gardening with indigenous plants, giving information, both historical and practical, for gardening the William Morris way

Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology
This text presents the development and the aesthetic theories of the symbolist movement in art and literature, including writings by artists, designers, architects and critics, along with Dorra's commentary. 50 photographs of symbolist works are also included

Kingdom of the Soul: Symbolist Art in Germany 1870-1920
Published to accompnay an exhibition, this volume outlines the link between the Pre-Raphaelite artists in Britain and the Expressionists on the Continent. It focuses on the crucial contribution made by artists in Germany to the European Symbolist movement as a whole

Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender and French Symbolist Art
A study of the relationship between gender and genius in late-19th-century French Symbolism. Born in an era of crisis, the Symbolist art movement was characterized by withdrawal to a mystical, anti-bourgeois world of the mind and spirit. While Symbolists idealized the "poete maudit", a creative, mad genius exhibiting an emotional state of heightened awareness and "passionate discontent", female artists displaying similar symptoms were dismissed as hysterical. Art historian Patricia Mathews traverses the artistic, social and scientific discourses of "fin-de-siecle" France in order to illuminate the Symbolist construction of a feminized aesthetic that nonetheless excluded female artists from its realm. Along the way, Mathews proffers readings of the art of such Symbolists as Gauguin, van Gogh and Moreau, as well as that of their female contemporaries Camille Claudel and Suzanne Valadon

Symbolist Generation
Beginning with the Pre-Raphaelites and those pivotal French artists (de Chavannes, Moreau, Redon and others) who assured the transition from romanticism to symbolism, this magnificent (and splendidly color-illustrated) work turns to examine Gauguin's contribution to the spread of symbolism, an international movement

French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society, 1865-1900
This book examines public reception of contemporary French painting in post-Civil War American society. Analyzed from class and regional perspectives, popular responses to Realist and Impressionist painting are shown to articulate conflicting attitudes toward equality and doubts about the fate of democracy in an industrialized society. The methods of art history, reception theory, and social history merge in this study to explain how Americans came to see themselves in foreign art, and how the public gave these images meaning independent of official art criticism and their original French contexts

Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (Getty Research Institute Texts & Documents S.)
Clayson not only illuminates the imagery of prostitution - with its contradictory connotations of disgust and fascination - but also tackles the issues and problems relevant to women and men in a patriarchal society. She discusses the conspicuous sexual commerce during this era and the resulting public panic about the deterioration of social life and civilized mores. She describes the system that evolved out of regulating prostitutes and the subsequent rise of clandestine prostitutes who escaped police regulation and who were condemned both for blurring social boundaries and for spreading sexual licentiousness among their moral and social superiors. Clayson argues that the subject of covert prostitution was especially attractive to vanguard painters because it exemplified the commercialisation and the ambiguity of modern life

Impressionist Still Life
This book will accompany an exhibition to be held at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D. C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Seventeen artists will be featured, including Cezanne, Renoir, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Monet, Manet, and Van Gogh. Still life is an increasingly popular subject for exhibitions: witness the success of the Chardin show at the Metropolitan Museum and our own Manet Still Life Paintings. With its accompanying exhibition opening in Baltimore at the end of January after a very successful run at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, it is a subject that has not been done to death, and these are beautiful and accessible works. The selection of works shown in this book is superb

Monet & Impressionists for Kid
Sabbeth provides a concise biography for each of the artists, with reproductions of their most famous and important works, along with an Art Detective section that tells you how to spot their work in terms of distinguishing characteristics. Most of the activities are specifically tied to the paintings. Off of Monet's "Regattas at Argenteuil" we learn about Painting Reflections; from the cloisonnism of Gauguin we experiment by making a Cup of Gauguin. These activities explore the uniqueness of these painters, from Cezanne's brilliant rectangles of color to the sculpture-like circles of dancers by Degas. Some of these activities are truly creative, such as constructing your own little Monet haystack to appreciate the colors and light at different times of day. I especially liked the one for Seurat Sugar Cookies, where you make your cookies sugar-sprinkled masterpieces using the artist's pointillist technique

Impressionist and Post-impressionist Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Only the Louvre boasts a more comprehensive collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings than does the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Now, in one volume, the Museum has gathered together 146 of its finest works

Degas to Matisse:
Impressionist and Modern Masterworks
Hardcover
Publisher:
Merrell Publishers Ltd

Impressionist Quartet:
The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt
Hardcover
Publisher
Harcourt

Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation:
Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Early Modern
Hardcover
Publisher:
Alfred a Knopf

Neo-impressionist Painters: A Sourcebook on Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac,
Theo Van Rysselberghe, Henri Edmond Cross, Charles Angrand, Maximilien Luce, and Albert Dubois-Pillet (Art Reference Collection)
Librarians Clement (U. of Tennessee-Knoxville) and Dubois-Pillet (Brigham Young U.) compile and organize the literature on Neo-Impressionism in general as well as the eight particular French and Belgian artists. For each, they include a biographical sketch, chronology, primary and secondary bibliographies, and exhibition lists. Librarians Clement (U. of Tennessee-Knoxville) and Dubois-Pillet (Brigham Young U.) compile and organize the literature on Neo-Impressionism in general as well as the eight particular French and Belgian artists. For each, they include a biographical sketch, chronology, primary and secondary bibliographies, and exhibition lists. They cover the whole

The Impressionist Print
Degas, Pissaro, Renoir and other impressionist painters often experimented with printmaking techniques, producing such works as black-and-white etchings, aquatints, dry points and colour lithographs. This study aims to provide an understanding of the impressionist prints

Visions of Home: American Impressionist
Images of Suburban Leisure and Country Comfort
Paperback
Publisher:
Trout Gallery

Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars (Modern Art, Practices & Debates)
The book begins by considering responses by French artists to the World War I, showing how Purism, Dada, and early Surrealism are related to the ethos of post-war reconstruction. The authors then discuss the language of construction in places as dissimilar as France, Germany and the Soviet Union; the contrasting demands of the utility and decoration of objects and paintings; and the relationship of Surrealism to questions of sexuality and gender and to Freudian theory. The book concludes by addressing the widespread debate over realism in art: whether it represents an alternative to the elitism of the avant-garde or whether avant-garde art should play a role in the development of a modern realism