Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Set

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Understanding Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) is crucial to reading the history of art of the late nineteenth century and the development of modernism. Internationally heralded yet sometimes scorned, much exhibited, respected and emulated, an artist's artist of pivotal importance to the generation of post-Impressionists from Seurat and Gauguin to Matisse and Picasso, Puvis' work is not readily categorized. Often associated with classicizing imagery, he was an artist of great range, originality and radically idiosyncratic invention. He executed great mural complexes, compelling easel paintings and numerous works on paper that included lyrical watercolours, pastels and fierce caricatures. Presented in two complementary volumes - a critical study of the artist's life and art and a catalogue raisonne of his painted work - this book introduces many of his works for the first time, assesses his contribution and restores him to the pantheon of modern masters.Volume I situates Puvis and his work in his time. With a wealth of new documentation, unpublished correspondence and images, Aimee Brown Price addresses the theories, forces and events that impinged on his art, as well as examining the work of his progenitors, contemporaries and followers. She contextualizes his themes, the development of his special decorative aesthetic - and its importance in establishing a new kind of imagery - and his modernized allegorical figures; and she discusses such topics as his atelier and teaching, the marketing of his work and his role in the art establishment of the 1890s.Volume II is a complete compendium of Puvis' easel paintings and mural cycles for civic buildings throughout France as well as the for Boston Public Library. Each work is analysed in terms of its genesis, distinct iconography, and style. A revised dating of the several versions of some of Puvis' best-known paintings indicates heretofore unrecognized late reprisals and offers a new index to the evolution of his style.

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Four French Symbolists: A Sourcebook on Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Maurice Denis (Art Reference Collection)

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The first comprehensive, scholarly sourcebook/research guide/bibliography on the major French Symbolists painters, this work includes nearly 3,000 entries covering a variety of materials. Each artist receives a primary and secondary bibliography with many annotated entries. Art works, personal names, and subject indexes facilitate easy access. The volume is designed for art historians, art students, museum and gallery curators, and others interested in this major art style of the last half of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. Art museums and art libraries in both the United States and abroad were gleaned for sources. This is a unique and substantial research tool.

Symbolism is one of the most difficult art movements to define. Its primary meaning is the representation of things by symbols, by the imaginative suggestion of dreams and the subconscious through symbolic allusion and luxuriant decoration. The writings of Charles Baudelaire on the arts powerfully influenced the aesthetic theories of Symbolist artists and critics from 1860-1900, much as Baudelaire's poetics were the root of Symbolist literature. The Symbolist work, be it painting or poem, is above all personal and revelatory, precious not commonplace, reflecting and evoking a journey of the imagination. French Symbolist artists explored this style, attitude, and atmosphere from the 1880s to the early twentieth century. This sourcebook organizes biographical, historical, and critical information on four major French Symbolist artists: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), Gustave Moreau (1826-98), Odilon Redon (1840-1916), and Maurice Denis (1870-1943). The first three artists are recognized as originators of the movement. Denis is regarded as Symbolist's foremost theorist and profoundly religious practitioner. Although all four artists have been the focus of major retrospective exhibitions since 1990, no comprehensive sourcebook/bibliography exists.

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Puvis de Chavannes au musee des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (French Edition)

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Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of France

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) was a towering figure in late-19th-century France. Arguably the country's greatest public painter, he created murals that decorated museums in Amiens, Rouen and Lyons as well as major buildings in Paris - most notably the Pantheon, the Sorbonne and the city hall. Critics from the political right, left and centre, the avant-garde, the Academy, and the state all agreed on the importance of Puvis's murals. Avant-garde artists greatly admired and drew from his work. There was much controversy, however, over the meaning of these murals. This illustrated work is a full-length examination of Puvis's murals and their critical reception during the artist's lifetime. Jennifer Shaw explains that Puvis's paintings were imagined to embody a vision of France. Although his regional images, allegories of the French heritage, and evocations of the nation as an embracing motherland were all part of a grand tradition of public art, Puvis's painting style was more closely aligned with the avant-garde. Rather than providing a specific narrative or allegory of France, Puvis's murals provoked viewers to experience their own fantasies of Frenchness; rather than using the close brushwork favoured by most of his contemporaries, Puvis used large flat areas of colour to render his subjects. Shaw argues that Puvis was the only painter of the period to unite the traditions of public art and modernist form. Her analysis of Puvis's art underlines his importance to the history of modernism; and her examination of the public response to his art should illuminate debates about art, subjectivity and national identity in fin de siecle France.

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Pierre Puvis de Chavannes : a sketch

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Puvis de Chavannes and the modern tradition: [exhibition held at the] Art Gallery of Ontario, October 24-November 30, 1975

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