Cezanne, Willem de Kooning, Turner, Matisse & Picasso

Paul Cezanne by Catherine Dean

This superb volume surveys the life and work of an extraordinary painter, who trod a solitary and difficult path towards his goal of an art which would combine the best of the French classical tradition of structure with the best in contemporary realism. The results are some of the most beautiful, and most popular, paintings of our time.
Cezanne by Catherine Dean
Phaidon Press, 1993

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a true "painter's painter" whose protean work continues to inspire many artists. In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s.
The first major biography of de Willem de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters and documents as well as on hundreds of interviews, this is a fresh, richly detailed, and masterful portrait. The young de Kooning overcame an unstable, impoverished, and often violent early family life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where he learned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowaway from Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to become a painter and an American, developing a passionate friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who was both a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Willem de Kooning emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championing his work, and de Willem de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New York school, just as American art began to dominate the international scene.
Dashingly handsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of downtown New York, de Willem de Kooning had a tumultuous marriage to Elaine de Kooning, herself a fascinating character of the period. At the height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful abstractions and intense, disturbing pictures of the female figure, and his nights living on the edge, drinking, womanizing, and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as Franz Kline and Frank O'Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals. In the 1980s, as Willem de Kooning slowly declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer's, he created a vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.
This is an authoritative and brilliant exploration of the art, life, and world of the American master Willem de Kooning.
De Kooning, An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
ISBN: 1400041759

Turner: The Late Seascapes by James Hamilton

The English Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) is renowned for his sublime and dramatic landscapes and seascapes. This handsome book-written by Turner expert James Hamilton and published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute-focuses primarily on the artist's spectacular seascapes dating from the 1840s, the last decade of his illustrious career. Turner: The Late Seascapes provides new and provocative insights into these powerful works, relating them to the artist's interest in poetry and drama as well as his curiosity about science, optics, and photography.
Turner's extensive travels and the relationship between Turner's paintings and seventeenth-century Dutch precedents are discussed in depth. Hamilton also examines the important role of the pendant in Turner's late art, arguing that his paired works have intentional associative narrative, stylistic, and chromatic meanings. Furthermore, Hamilton traces the evolution of Turner's famous Whaling series, offering a new source for it. Including more than one hundred examples of Turner's dramatic and lively marine pictures-sixty of which are reproduced in full color-this elegant book sheds fascinating new light on one of the world's most beloved artists.
Turner: The Late Seascapes by James Hamilton
Yale Univ Press, 2003, ISBN: 0300099002

Matisse by Pierre Schneider

Of all the artists of this century, Henri Matisse is one of the greatest and most beloved. His influence on modern art, both during his lifetime and today, has never stopped growing; in the eyes of the world, he is the French painter par excellence. Henri Matisse is all the more cherished because his work celebrates the positive aspects of life, as evidenced by the titles of many of his major paintings: Luxe, Calme et Volupté, La Joie de Vivre, La Danse, Musique, to mention but a few. His explosions and juxtapositions of color and pattern inspire pure delight in the beholder, and his mastery of line, volume, and form are perhaps unequaled in the art of our time. The vitality, energy, and life-enhancing qualities that radiate from his art represent distillation of all that is affirmative in the human condition and are given immortality through that rare and indefinable quality known as genius.
The art of Matisse describes a trajectory leading from realism to abstraction, from darkness to light, from the cold of the north to the heat of the south, a route marked off by such revolutionary innovations as the burst of color found in Fauvism or the invention of his cut-outs. Matisse was still creating at a time in his life when many artists are content to rest on their laurels. Since its original publication in 1984, this book by Pierre Schneider stands alone as the bible on the art of Matisse. The author spent fourteen years amassing a prodigious amount of information on the artist, and includes his own personal and original views on the work. Including over nine hundred illustrations, this is the most substantial reference of the works of Matisse ever published.
The reader will discover Matisse watercolorist, draftsman, ceramist, and the architect - and unquestionably one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
Matisse by Pierre Schneider
Rizzoli, 2002, ISBN: 0847805468

Pablo Picasso: From Caricature to Metamorphosis

Throughout his artistic career Pablo Picasso was fascinated by both caricature and the idea of the grotesque: light and dark representations of the distorted human figure. Picasso: From Caricature to Metamorphosis of Style, which accompanies a major exhibition at the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, is the first book to examine the distortion of the figure as a central creative force in Pablo Picasso's art and a springboard for his continual process of stylistic metamorphosis.
The journey through Picasso's work takes us from the satirical illustration and portrait caricature of the 1890s to the radical distortion of the figure in Les Demoiselles D'Avignon and later Cubist portraits; from light-hearted vignettes of Diaghilev, Bakst and Apollinaire to the monstrous, Surrealist portraits of women of the 1920s-40s; from portraits of the artist as clown to the Verve series of meditations on the painter and his model. Finally we see Pablo Picasso as caricatured by his entourage: the tables are turned.
Caricatures, monsters, puppets and grotesque figures populate the pages of this book, which is illustrated with 400 reproductions of key works by Pablo Picasso drawn from public and private collections worldwide: paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics and prints. More than 100 of the works reproduced are previously unpublished. With a series of interpretative essays by an international cast of distinguished Pablo Picasso scholars, the book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the life and work of a twentieth-century master.
Vareriano Bozal is a lecturer in the History of Art at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Picasso: From Caricature to Metamorphosis of Style by Valeriano Bozal

Pablo Picasso
ISBN: 0853318891

Alan Davie

Alan Davie's work is included in public and private collections around the world and he has for many years been an influential figure in British art. His considerable international reputation was confirmed when Alan Davie won the painting prize at the 1963 São Paulo Biennial.
This book was published to coincide with the artist's 70th birthday and was produced with the complete collaboration of the artist, who designed a cover and endpapers specially for the volume.
In his introduction, Douglas Hall (former director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) offers an analysis of the development of the work of Alan Davie, and an additional contribution by Michael Tucker explores the relationship between Alan Davie's music-making and his painting.
The documentation in this volume is thorough and comprehensive, with biography, bibliography, lists of exhibitions and public collections, and an illustrated catalogue of the major paintings of Alan Davie.
Alan Davie: by Douglas Hall
ISBN: 0853315973