Ill. on lining papers.

From T.J. Clark comes this provocative study of the origins of modern art in the painting of Parisian life by Edouard Manet and his followers. The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was a brand-new city, recently adorned with boulevards, cafés, parks, Great Exhibitions, and suburban pleasure grounds—the birthplace of the habits of commerce and leisure that we ourselves know as "modern life." A new kind of culture quickly developed in this remade metropolis, sights and spectacles avidly appropriated by a new kind of "consumer": clerks and shopgirls, neither working class nor bourgeois, inventing their own social position in a system profoundly altered by their very existence. Emancipated and rootless, these men and women flocked to the bars and nightclubs of Paris, went boating on the Seine at Argenteuil, strolled the island of La Grande-Jatte—enacting a charade of community that was to be captured and scrutinized by Manet, Degas, and Seurat. It is Clark's cogently argued (and profusely illustrated) thesis that modern art emerged from these painters' attempts to represent this new city and its inhabitants. Concentrating on three of Manet's greatest works and Seurat's masterpiece, Clark traces the appearance and development of the artists' favorite themes and subjects, and the technical innovations that they employed to depict a way of life which, under its liberated, pleasure-seeking surface, was often awkward and anxious. Through their paintings, Manet and the Impressionists ask us, and force us to ask ourselves: Is the freedom offered by modernity a myth? Is modern life heroic or monotonous, glittering or tawdry, spectacular or dull? The Painting of Modern Life illuminates for us the ways, both forceful and subtle, in which Manet and his followers raised these questions and doubts, which are as valid for our time as for the age they portrayed.

In the 1870s, Argenteuil, located on the outskirts of Paris, was still unmarred by urban industrialization. This book explores the responses to Argenteuil of six influential painters in more than 50 of their works. Catalogue for an upcoming exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. 105 illustrations, 70 in color.

Monet was the most typical and the most individual Impressionist painter. But while the painter was faithful and persevering in the pursuit of his motifs, his personal life followed a more restless course. Parisian by birth, he discovered painting as a youth in the provinces, where one of his homes, Argenteuil, has come to represent the artistic flowering and official establishment of Impressionism as a movement.

This stunning examination of the last years of Édouard Manet's life and career is the first book to explore the transformation of his style and subject matter in the 1870s and early 1880s. The name Manet often evokes the provocative, heroically scaled pictures he painted in the 1860s for the Salon, but in the late 1870s and early 1880s the artist produced quite a different body of work: stylish portraits of actresses and demimondaines, luscious still lifes, delicate pastels, intimate watercolors, and impressionistic scenes of suburban gardens and Parisian cafés. Often dismissed as too pretty and superficial by critics, these later works reflect Manet’s elegant social world, propose a radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity, and record the artist’s unapologetic embrace of beauty and visual pleasure in the face of death. Featuring nearly three hundred illustrations and nine fascinating essays by established and emerging Manet specialists, a technical analysis of the late Salon painting Jeanne (Spring), a selection of the artist’s correspondence, a chronology, and more, Manet and Modern Beauty brings a diverse range of approaches to bear on a little-studied area of this major artist’s oeuvre.

In a delightfully different account of art and politics during the Second Empire, Friedrich sketches a landscape that encompasses Napoleon III, Flaubert, Wagner, Proust, Degas, Zola, Monet, Hugo, Manet, and many others, both famous and infamous. Photographs.

The examples convey not only these major themes but also the painters' belief in the progress of civilization through science and industry. The book thus expands the scope of Impressionist celebrations of modernity to include what might be called Impressionism's "other landscape" and proposes that in the Impressionists' effort to forge a modern landscape art, those signs of modernity defined their vision most clearly."--BOOK JACKET.

In this encounter between one of the twentieth century greatest philosophical minds and an artist fundamental to our understanding of the development of modern art, Michel Foucault explores Manet.s importance in the overthrow of traditional values in painting.

When Claude Monet exhibited his paintings for the first time in Paris, he acknowledged no teacher, intending to claim complete originality for his works. Since then, many writers have sought to corroborate his originality, latching on to statements such as What I do here will at least have the merit of not resembling anybody. Because it is simply the expression of what Ive experienced by myself (letter to Bazille, 1866). In actual fact, Monet was gregarious, passionately interested in the paintings of his predecessors and contemporaries, and he made a common political cause with his fellow impressionists, being a principal organizer of their first exhibitions. This book aims to recreate the artistic milieu of Monet and show his rapport with the unconventional non-academic currents of French art including the preceding generation of landscapists of the Fontainebleu School and the succeeding generation, including Paul Gauguin. Paintings by Claude Monet, approximately 20 in all, are grouped with the works of other artists connected to Monet to suggest the range of his experience, his influences, and the influence of his art, from his beginnings in the 1860s to the years after 1900. The artists used for comparison include greats such as Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas and Cezanne.