Paul Cezanne, Hans Holbein, Jimmie Durham & Goya

Self-Portraits of Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne has long been celebrated as the founding father of modern art. But astonishly there has never been a study devoted to his self-portraits. Now, for the first time, Steven Platzman reveals the remarkable light these haunting works throw on the artist and his era.
Platzman begins with the young Paul Cezanne struggling to make his mark in the Parisian art world of the 1860s. His earliest self-portraits express all the hostility he projected at both the official Salon and the avant-garde in these years. By the early 1870s, however, he found himself deeply isolated: military defeat and revolutionary upheaval had produced a conservative backlash throughout French political and cultural life. Paul Cezanne responded by seeking rapproachement with the avant-garde, joining Camille Pissarro at Pontoise and temporarily adopting Impressionist technique. His self-portraits depict a more sober and accommodating figure, often sporting the rough-and-ready outdoor attire of the plein air Impressionist painter.
Like Rembrandt, Paul Cezanne also inserted his own image into narrative paintings, in particular a series of often luridly erotic scenes from the late 1860s and 1870s. The femme fatale makes a regular appearance in these works, threatening - but always failing - to entice him from the paths of art and virtue.
By his final years Cezanne's self-portraits communicate a quieter spirit of introspection and skepticism that was very much in tune with the Symbolist mood of the times. These works are also, finally, serene and magisterial, depicting a man who, despite the doubts that never left him, had seen his aesthetic path and was sworn to pursue it till the day he died.
Cezanne: The Self-Portraits is a study of the nineteenth century's greatest painter. Accessible, authoritative, and generously illustrated, it concludes with a definitive catalog of all Cezanne's painted and drawn self-portraits.
Cezanne: The Self-Portraits by Steven Platzman
University of California Press, 2001

Hans Holbein the Younger

A key figure in the Northern Renaissance, Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8-1543) is most remembered for his religious commissions and the portraits he created during his later years in London, such as The French Ambassadors and the many paintings and drawings made of Henry VIII and his wives. His unfailing eye, vivid use of colors, and acute sense of psychological observation gave his paintings an uncommon depth and made him one of the most important German artists of his era.
Available in over 20 languages, Taschen's Basic Art Series offers budget-minded readers quality books on the greatest artists of all time. The neat, slick format and nice price tag make Basic Art books fun to collect.
Norbert Wolf studied art history, linguistics, and medieval studies at the universities of Regensburg and Munich. He received his doctorate in art history in 1983. He has held visiting professorships in Marburg, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Düsseldorf, and Nuremberg-Erlangen, and is currently visiting professor at the University of Innsbruck. Other Taschen titles by Wolf include Diego Velázquez, Codices illustrés (with Ingo F. Walther), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Caspar David Friedrich.
Hans Holbein the Younger by Norbert Wolf
ISBN: 3822831670

Jimmie Durham

Jimmie Durham is an internationally acclaimed artist, writer and poet of Cherokee descent. His intricate sculptures and installations mimic the attributes of humans and animals, and the ways they make or are made into history. Jimmie Durham collages discarded objects and fragments of organic matter, transforming them with dazzling colour into startling, anthropomorphic configurations. His sculptures, wall-based collages and ersatz ethnographic displays deliver ironic assaults on the colonizing procedures of Western culture. An activist in the American Indian movement during the 1970s, Jimmie Durham has also published poetry, fiction and critical theory.
ISBN: 0714833487

Francisco Goya by Jose Gudiol

Francisco Goya, El Greco, Velazquez, Picasso - this is the pantheon of Spanish painters. Each was a genius, immune to convention, who rewrote the rules of painting in his time. Here, the Spanish art historian Jose Gudiol explores Francisco Goya's complex character and technique, grounding his discussion in the common vicissitudes of the artist's life - a childhood of poverty, humiliation in the face of the academic painters of Madrid, an illness that left him dead and isolated from society at mid-life.
This prodigiously productive artist, who finally attained the post of First Court Painter and created some of art's greatest portraits, plunged privately into an abyss of despair. Out of which he brought some of the most terrifying works of the nineteenth century, painting and prints evoking the disaster of war and the irrepressible voices of the subconscious.
Goya by Jose Gudiol
Harry N. Abrams, 1985

Classical Art: From Greece to Rome

The stunning masterpieces of Ancient Greece and Rome are fundamental to the story of art in Western culture and to the origins of art history. The expanding Greek world of Alexander the Great had an enormous impact on the Mediterranean superpower of Rome. Generals, rulers, and artists seized, imitated, and re-thought the stunning legacy of Greek painting and sculpture, culminating in the greatest art-collector the world had ever seen: the Roman emperor Hadrian.
This exciting new look at Classical art starts with the excavation of the buried city of Pompeii, and investigates the grandiose monuments of ancient tyrants, and the sensual beauty of Apollo and Venus. Concluding with that most influential invention of all, the human portrait, it highlights the re-discovery of classical art in the modern world, from the treasure hunts of Renaissance Rome to scientific retrieval of artworks in the twenty-first century.
Classical Art: From Greece to Rome by Mary Beard and John Henderson
Oxford, 2001