BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

"Paris in the Age of Impressionism captures the energy, vitality, and exhilaration of late-19th-century Paris as an explosion of new ideas made the City of Light the modern capital of the art world. Paris at that time was home not only to the Impressionists but also to radical colorists, innovative designers, and thoughtful painters who recorded modern life in painstaking detail. This lively volume, featuring highlights from the outstanding collections of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, presents Parisian culture during this fascinating period of social and artistic revolution."

"The objects are selected from the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, covering the period from 1848 to 1914-a period that included Impressionism but also a great number of other movements in the fine and decorative arts. The emphasis is French, and the media include architectural drawings, sculpture, photography, and the decorative arts among the more than 100 objects in the exhibition. Among the works pictured are Art Nouveau vases, lamps, and furniture; paintings by Cezanne, Monet, and Manet; photographs of the Eiffel Tower; and sculpture by Rodin. Essays by American and French curators outline themes such as high society, the Eiffel Tower, theaters, modernity, Art Nouveau, and the avant-garde. Both the essays and the object catalog information are brief. This picture book is suitable for general collections."

"This lavishly illustrated book" accompanied an exhibitiom at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Not Available for Shipping Outside of the United States.

From culturevulture.net:

At the end of the twentieth century, Paris’ magnificent Gare d’Orsay train station was transformed into a great museum, the Musee d’Orsay. Nearly a century before the d’Orsay was remodeled, the city of Paris was transformed by the Baron Georges Haussmann. Narrow, crowded medieval streets became today’s wide boulevards, lined with trees and monumental buildings. Taking the city’s transformation as a central theme, Paris in the Age of Impressionism exhibits paintings, drawings, photography, and ephemera from the d’Orsay, the largest collection of work ever loaned at one time by that institution.

A snapshot immediacy and spontaneity, the rejection of classical subject matter in favor of everyday life, bright colors and the abundance of light--such qualities make Impressionism accessible. They offer a sense of inclusion in the painters’ world and a sense that the beauty of this world is always available, can always be seen by certain willing eyes, even on the docks and in the bars. For the Impressionists, the artist’s vision consists not of what you see, but how you see it. In the twentieth century, art historians such as Robert L. Herbert began to show that Impressionist paintings grew from careful, intentional working and re-working, that Monet did not just set his easel down somewhere and dash off a masterpiece like the d’Orsay’s Gare Saint-Lazare.


BUZZFLASH REVIEWS