Renoir: A Retrospective
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Renoir: A Retrospective Details
From Publishers Weekly Renoir declared women artists, writers and lawyers to be freaks. The French impressionist, whose pictures brim over with charming, sensuous females, treated real women with boorish insensitivity. He was a reactionary opposed to education and railroads, a chauvinist and a child of his time in his obsessive sensuality. This scrapbook of letters, interviews, snippets from memoirs, and comments by friends, family and contemporaries gets beyond the seductive charm of the paintings. Instead of the conventional view of the spontaneous artist, we get the experimentalist who was dissatisfied with almost everything he painted. Modern critics who reject Renoir's gossamer world as an evasion of reality clash here with traditionalists who hold that his instinctual art rose to the highest levels. Some 250 reproductions (half in color) complement this enlightening compilation of opinions, memories and critiques. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Library Journal This anthology of excerpts from writings on Renoir documents the life and career of this popular Impressionist artist. More important, however, the book helps to reveal the changing critical attitudes toward Renoir's work and its relationship to the art of his time and that which came after. Many documentary photographs are included and the wealth of information in the marginal notes makes the book more useful than many of the original publications from which the excerpts are drawn. The splendid color reproductions give the book a visual beauty that glows from the pages. Highly recommended. Lynell A. Morr, John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art Lib., Sarasota, Fla.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more
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