La Normandie: des bords de Seine

A Sorbonne professor and curator of a Delacroix exhibit at the Bibliothèque Nationale gives readers a new, lucid, and well-illustrated study of this painter--a familiar name who is still not widely understood or popular. Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), so very much tied to the history of his time, created vast canvases using that history as allegory. Therefore, he must suffer in appreciation today, when so few museumgoers have the cultural baggage they possessed a century and a half ago. So, huge canvases like The Death of Sardanapalus and The Murder of the Bishop of Liege must mean less to contemporary viewers, just as another painting, Tasso in the Hospital of Saint Anna, was more meaningful to a viewing public who had actually read the work of Torquato Tasso, author of Gerusalemme Liberata. However, the good reproductions in this book and Barthelmy Jobert's cogent analyses go far to underline Delacroix's inspiration from previous artists like Michelangelo, and his strong grasp of architecture. Princeton University Press has done a good production job on this title, although they are scandalously scant when it comes to crediting the translators, Terry Grabar and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren (who did a clear job of translating from the original French, but are mentioned only in minuscule print on the copyright page). Even the author must have considered this unchivalrous, for he thanked the translators in his own fine-print acknowledgements at the end of the book. Apart from this detail, Jobert's Delacroix in English is a bravura effort and a very welcome and attractive addition to any bookshelf of 19th-century European art.

Ouvrage qui englobe l'époque entière de l'impressionnisme avec ses peintres, ses écrivains, ses musiciens, ses hommes politiques, ses marchands d'oeuvre d'art, ses mécènes ... Le second volume donne les noms communs concernant la littérature et les arts, les expositions, les salons, les ventes. En annexe, une chronologie, des cartes, des signatures et plusieurs index (oeuvres d'art, personnes, lieux, oeuvres littéraires et musicales).

L'évolution de l'oeuvre de Picasso, de la période bleue à la période rose, à travers dessins et peintures.

Famed as a founder of and teacher at the Bauhaus, Swiss artist Klee (1879-1940) is noted for his explorations of color and experiments with spatial relationships. This volume spans his career and his oeuvre with about 130 illustrations (most in color) and 20 pages of introductory text.

L'hôtel " Salé ", l'un des plus prestigieux du quartier du Marais à Paris, abrite une fabuleuse collection d’œuvres de Pablo Picasso. Ce musée rend compte des multiples facettes de l'artiste, de son influence sur l'art du XXe siècle, de ses relations étroites et amicales avec nombre de créateurs de son temps et, enfin, de ses liens avec le théâtre, le ballet, la musique, la littérature, le cinéma ou encore la photographie.

Ce somptueux album, qui présente l'oeuvre de ce peintre et sculpteur français, comprend plus de 300 magnifiques reproductions (des techniques mixtes et quelques sculptures), des analyses critiques, des entretiens, une biographie chronologique de trois pages avec des photographies et une liste des expositions.