Paul Gauguin, David Hockney & Eugene Delacroix

Paul Gauguin on Tahiti

The life of Paul Gauguin is one of the richest and most mythic in the history of Western art. A banker and Sunday painter, he left behind family and homeland and sailed to the South Seas, seeking a life in ecstasy, in peace, and for art.
Gauguin Tahiti, the first major retrospective of the artist's work in fifteen years, offers an in-depth study of the fabled Polynesian years that have so defined our image of the painter. Alongside essays by leading American and French critics on every aspect of Paul Gauguin's art, from the legendary canvases to his sculptures, ceramics, and innovative graphic works, are discussions of the Polynesian society, culture, and religion that helped shape them; an in-depth biographical narrative of the artist's life, with the many epiphanies, frustrations, and discoveries that make his time in the South Seas one of the most mythologically potent episodes in the history of Western art; and a chronicle of his changing fortunes in the century since his death.
At the center of it all is Paul Gauguin's 1897 masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, the summation and crowning glory of his mature career, presented with unprecedented depth and authority. Over one hundred years later, Paul Gauguin remains one of the most enigmatic and attractive figures of 19th-century art, the very pivot of modernism, and Paul Gauguin Tahiti finally portrays this crucial period of his life in all its color and drama. You know that I have Indian blood, Inca blood in me, and it's reflected in everything I do. It's the basis of my personality; I try to confront rotten civilization with something more natural, based on savagery.
Gauguin Tahiti by George T. M. Shackelford and Claire Freches-Thory
ISBN: 0878466665

David Hockney and his friends

Based on a candid conversation with the artist, Peter Adam's Outline leads us through David Hockney's endlessly inventive artistic development. From the perspective of his enduring fascination with the male nude, it also charts his relationships with the friends and lovers who fired his imagination and whom he portrayed, both intimately and formally, in his work - including those in London, such as W.H. Auden, Ossie Clark and Patrick Procktor, and later those in the United States, notably Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, Peter Schlesinger and Gregory Evans. It tells the story of a wonderfully engaging artistic personality, from his swinging sixties' peroxided hair and gold lame jacket, through his impatience with English prudery and censoriousness, to the present day when so many of those he has painted or drawn are no longer alive.
David Hockney: And His Friends by Peter Adam and Nick Drake
Absolute Press, 1997

The Late Work of Eugene Delacroix

This year marks the bicentennial of the birth of Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), the great French Romantic painter. A pivotal figure in the history of nineteenth-century art, Eugene Delacroix stands both at the culmination of the great painterly tradition of Titian, Veronese, Rubens, and Rembrandt and at the beginning of something quite new and modern, as witnessed by the reverence given him by artists of following generations who were so profoundly influenced by his work: Renoir, Czanne, Picasso, and Matisse.
This publication, accompanying an international exhibition that begins in Paris and travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, presents in glorious color subjects ranging from saints and warriors to mythical goddesses, from Arab hunting scenes and tigers to sumptuous bouquets of flowers.
Eugene Delacroix's late work reveals a deepening spiritual intensity and has more to do with aesthetic reflection and recollection than with the expansive narrative that characterized his grand public commissions. Focusing on the artist's last works allows further insight into this most remarkable and protean figure in the history of art.
Thames & Hudson, 1998, ISBN: 0500092753

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