Accompanying an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art last fall and now at the Dahesh Museum in New York, this catalog focuses upon the French drawings in Muriel Butkin's highly specialized collection which she has promised to the Cleveland Museum. To assemble her diverse yet nicely integrated set of drawings, Butkin started buying 18th-century French drawings when they were affordable. In the mid-1970s, with the guidance of art historian Gabriel Weisberg, she expanded her collection to include 19th-century French drawings. These drawings were counter to the mainstream impressionist and postimpressionist taste of the time and focused more on academic French subject matter such as life drawings, portraits, or compositional studies. In the preface, Butkin herself reinforces her taste by saying that drawings are much more personal and spontaneous than paintings, often demonstrating the artistic process. Foster, curator of drawings at the Cleveland Museum, and other scholars present a well-researched volume that contributes new information to a very specialized field of art history. It is greatly disappointing, however, that the bulk of the reproductions are in black and white, often missing the subtly colored tones in many of the drawings. Nonetheless, this is recommended for museum and academic libraries that support graduate programs in art history. 183 b/w illustrations

Due to the technological advances of the nineteenth century, an abundance of black drawing media exploded onto the market. Charcoal, conte crayon, and fabricated black chalks and crayons; fixatives; various papers; and many lifting devices gave rise to an unprecedented amount of experimentation. Indeed, innovation became the rule, as artists developed their own unique—and often experimental—processes. The exploration of black media in drawing is inextricably bound up with the exploration of black in prints, and this volume presents an integrated study that rises above specialization in one over the other. Noir brings together such diverse artists as Francisco de Goya, Maxime Lalanne, Gustave Courbet, Odilon Redon, and Georges Seurat and explores their inventive works on paper. Sidelining labels like “conservative” or “avant-garde,” the essays in this book employ all the tools that art history and modern conservation have given us, inviting the reader to look more broadly at the artists’ methods and materials. This volume accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from February 9 to May 15, 2016.

"Using words and works of both pupils and masters of the French Academy of Beaux-Arts, this fascinating book provides a wealth of information about the environment and studio practices of French official art from 1830 to 1890. Albert Boime describes the training of new pupils in the Academic ateliers, from the time they began and were set to copy engravings and casts to their copying of the old masters in the Louvre to their work before the live model and landscape painting out-of-doors. Boime's account includes not only a history of the transition from guild-controlled arts sanctioned by the church to an academic system sponsored by the state but also a reassessment of the positive role played by the Academy's teaching program in the evolution of the independent movements of the nineteenth century"--Publisher's description.

The Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich houses one of the finest and most famous collections of drawings and prints in Germany, with holdings of around 400,000 works ranging from the fifteenth century to modernity. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, 100 Master Drawings from Munich comprises lush full-color illustrations of over one hundred of the museum's works of art. Demonstrating the impressive depth and breadth of works owned by the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, the works in this volume range from rough preparatory sketches to meticulously executed studies and encompass a variety of media, including silverpoint, chalk, ink, and aquarelle. Among the many extraordinary pieces are Old Dutch and German prints, nineteenth-century German drawings, and works by Dürer and Rembrandt. But equally not to be missed are the many compelling works of contemporary graphic art for which the museum is best known.

"In 1900 the more than five hundred gouaches and ink drawings made by James Jacques Joseph Tissot for his Life of Christ were purchased by public subscription by The Brooklyn Museum, and in 1992 a sketchbook by Tissot, related to this series, was also purchased for the collection. Over the intervening years nearly one hundred other works on paper by nineteenth-century French artists entered the collection. Many of them are by artists now considered to be the major masters of their time; but there are also works by other artists, both academic and avant-garde, less familiar to the American public today, who deserve recognition. This collection - which spans a century of creativity and a subsequent century of collecting, thus preserving a portion of our cultural and artistic heritage - is one of the significant holdings of works on paper at this great museum." "This volume is part of an ongoing series devoted to the Museum's outstanding and encyclopedic collection of works on paper. It presents ninety-three drawings, watercolors, and pastels by some fifty artists, ranging from Fragonard through Corot, Millet, Daumier, and Rodin; the Impressionists Degas, Manet, Morisot, and Pissarro; the Post-Impressionists Cezanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and van Gogh; and the modernist pioneers Picasso and Gris." "Through an examination of these works and the fascinating texts that accompany them, we can gain an understanding not only of the aesthetic attitudes of each artist and his society, but also of the history, politics, and social mores of the time and place in which each work was created. These works on paper, thanks to their intimacy and directness not found in the more formal media of oil painting and sculpture, help us to understand better the art and the artist's thoughts at the moment of creation."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Rembrandt's life and art had an almost mythic resonance in nineteenth-century France with artists, critics, and collectors alike using his artistic persona both as a benchmark and as justification for their own goals. This first in-depth study of the traditional critical reception of Rembrandt reveals the preoccupation with his perceived "authenticity," "naturalism," and "naiveté," demonstrating how the artist became an ancestral figure, a talisman with whom others aligned themselves to increase the value of their own work. And in a concluding chapter, the author looks at the playRembrandt, staged in Paris in 1898, whose production and advertising are a testament to the enduring power of the artist's myth.

More than 100 masterworks from the collection, all in full color, each with a text about the artist and drawing as well as full documentation. 105 colour illustrations