登入
選單
返回
Google圖書搜尋
The Joy of Life
Margaret Werth
其他書名
The Idyllic in French Art, Circa 1900
出版
University of California Press
, 2002-11-05
主題
Art / General
Art / European
Art / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)
ISBN
0520221826
9780520221826
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=kSolDQAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBook
SAMPLE
註釋
"The path of modernism, we know, meandered through idyllic fields in the years around 1900. But not until Margaret Werth's innovative study has it been possible to see just how complex and fascinating the scenery was—how it opened onto aesthetic, cultural, social, and psychological themes that are at the very center of the modernist project. This is an important book for all who are interested in the creation of modern art."—John Elderfield, author of
Henri Matisse: A Retrospective
"In a highly original study, Margaret Werth examines the complex and contradictory meanings of idyllic pastoral imagery in modern French art. Were such harmonious visions a form of nostalgia, or prediction of a golden age to come? Timeless fantasy or socially conscious political declaration? In this well-researched and beautifully illustrated book, Werth offers a probing analysis of some of the most intriguing paintings of the fin-de-siècle period, when the dream of a utopian society was matched by the quest of the avant-garde painter for a self-sufficient expression, one of the major pursuits of twentieth-century art."—John Klein, author of
Matisse Portraits
"This is a brilliant book with scholarship of the highest quality. Werth manages to cover so much historical ground yet stay in close touch with the specificities of the paintings themselves. Her investigation of the 'idyll,' a category encompassing a range of ideal, mythic, and fantasize states of individual and collective being, engages problems of narration and temporality, of spectatorship and identification, of figure and ground. Matisse, Signac, and Puvis have never been treated with such originality."—Martha Ward, author of
Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde
"
The Joy of Life
is a superb study of the idyllic in fin-de-siècle and prewar French art and culture, vividly conveying the complex and unstable fabric of artistic and social values evident in three images, by Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Signac, and Henri Matisse. By focusing closely on critical responses to each image from a broad range of speakers, Werth explores the dialogical field in which each work is produced and received. Her book contributes significantly to the current rethinking of the art of this period."—Patricia Mathews, author of
Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art
"Margaret Werth's impressively argued book is a major contribution to the study of French avant-garde painting. The book investigates the reinvention of the idyll as a subject for ambitious painting in the decades leading up to World War I. Werth demonstrates how the idyllic tradition as renovated by its most accomplished practitioners (she focuses in particular on Puvis de Chavannnes, Paul Signac, and Henri Matisse) was accompanied by a cunning for strangeness—and why artists' representations of figures at leisure in the landscape generated deeply contradictory responses from viewers."—John O'Brian, author of
Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse
"There have been many excellent studies of major modernists, such as Matisse, and more recently, numerous studies of their most important contemporaries, such as Puvis de Chavannes. Margaret Werth's
Joy of Life
links these diverse artists, emphasizing their common interest in notions of idyll and utopia and showing what their careers now teach us about pressing issues of race, gender, and national identity."—Richard Shiff, author of
Cézanne and the End of Impressionism
