The Painting of Modern Life
by Timothy J. Clark
from Princeton University Press
The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was supposedly a brand-new city, equipped with boulevards, cafés, parks, and suburban pleasure grounds--the birthplace of those habits of commerce and leisure that constitute "modern life." Questioning those who view Impressionism solely in terms of artistic technique, T. J. Clark describes the painting of Manet, Degas, Seurat, and others as an attempt to give form to that modernity and seek out its typical representatives--be they bar-maids, boaters, prostitutes, sightseers, or petits bourgeois lunching on the grass. The central question of The Painting of Modern Life is this: did modern painting as it came into being celebrate the consumer-oriented culture of the Paris of Napoleon III, or open it to critical scrutiny? The revised edition of this classic book includes a new preface by the author.
Manet and the Painters of Contemporary Life (World of Art)
by Alan Krell
from Thames & Hudson
Edouard Manet, 1832-1883: The First of the Moderns (Taschen Basic Art)
by Gilles Neret
from Taschen
Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model & Her Own Desire
by Eunice Lipton
from Cornell University Press
Eunice Lipton was a fledging art historian when she first became intrigued by Victorine Meurent, the nineteenth-century model who appeared in Edouard Manet's most famous paintings, only to vanish from history in a haze of degrading hearsay. But had this bold and spirited beauty really descended into prostitution, drunkenness, and early death--or did her life, hidden from history, take a different course altogether? Eunice Lipton's search for the answer combines the suspense of a detective story with the revelatory power of art, peeling off layers of lies to reveal startling truths about Victorine Meurent--and about Lipton herself.
Manet: A Visionary Impressionist
by Henri Lallemand
from New Line Books
Twelve (12) Views of Manet's Bar
from Princeton University Press
Bradford Collins has assembled here a collection of twelve essays that demonstrates, through the interpretation of a single work of art, the abundance and complexity of methodological approaches now available to art historians. Focusing on Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, each contributor applies to it a different methodology, ranging from the more traditional to the newer, including feminism, Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and semiotics. By demonstrating the ways that individual practitioners actually apply the various methodological insights that inform their research, Twelve Views of Manet's "Bar" serves as an excellent introduction to critical methodology as well as a provocative overview for those already familiar with the current discourse of art history. In the process of gaining new insight into Manet's work, and into the discourse of methodology, one discovers that it is not only the individual painting but art history itself that is under investigation. An introduction by Richard Shiff sets the background with a brief history of Manet scholarship and suggestions as to why today's accounts have taken certain distinct directions. The contributors, selected to provide a broad and balanced range of methodological approaches, include: Carol Armstrong, Albert Boime, David Carrier, Kermit Champa, Bradford R. Collins, Michael Paul Driskel, Jack Flam, Tag Gronberg, James D. Herbert, John House, Steven Z. Levine, and Griselda Pollock.
Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt
by Jeffrey Meyers
from Harcourt
Portraying them as individuals and as fellow conspirators in a new way of seeing and representing the world, Jeffrey Meyers brings to life this most popular and influential group of painters in the entire history of art. The result is an accessible and wonderfully illuminating book that offers readers a fresh way of looking at these artists and the priceless, timeless masterpieces they created.
Manet:The Influence of the Modern
by Francoise Cachin
from Harry N. Abrams
Masters & Pupils: The Artistic Succession from Perugino to Manet 1480-1880 (Hogarth Arts)
by Gert-Rudolf Flick
from Paul Holberton Publishing
This book is about a family tree: the line of descent that can be traced from Perugino in Italy in the fifteenth century to Edouard Manet in France in the nineteenth. It is not the usual kind of genealogy, of those connected by blood, more that of an "apostolic succession," following the way in which art in Europe was taught, from one generation to the next, from 1480 to 1880.
The book reveals how the nature and methods of artistic instruction changed over the centuries, from the guild system and the individual workshop to the academy, to the establishment of state institutions dedicated to the purpose, as exemplified in France.
The sequence that connects Perugino with Manet is made up of just eighteen artists. Some are household names such as Raphael and David, while others, such as Horace Le Blanc and Louis Boullogne, have fallen into obscurity. All are connected by a common bond: the belief that art could be taught and learned, and that those lessons would, in the nature of things, be passed on from an older artist to a younger, as generation succeeded generation. With Manet, the succession came to a halt, marking the end of a great tradition but also the beginning of the modern art world, in which the very desirability of teaching art has been thrown into question.
Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet
+++
