Posted on Jul-01-2009
The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity
This is a very good book (for what it is), but it is quite a difficult read, with much content that has little practical value for most of us. It is a scholarly (i.e., academic) history of opinions and processes that informed Impressionist painting. It is undeniably impressive in its scholarship, its substantive weight, and its physical dimensions--this is a big book having large oversize pages full of single-spaced small print. Its research and detail are, I think, remarkable. Indeed it presents detail upon detail upon technical detail. It is both exhaustive and exhausting. It thoroughly covers many topics that I simply have no need or desire to know about. This is a book for art-history professors.
I had wanted to see this book for two reasons: I wanted to learn to paint like the Impressionists, and I hoped to see their paintings in superior reproductions. In each case, I was disappointed.
The quality of the reproductions is very good (more than adequate to illustrate the text's points), but NOT outstanding. And this definitely is not a how-to-paint lesson manual. If, from this book, you ever learn to paint like the Masters, it will only be indirectly, from inference rather than from clear instruction. And you will need to dig through some fairly thick and sometimes diffuse language to find information you might consider useful. In fact, many of the opinions and processes discussed in the book are contradictory--and (to her credit) the author does not offer her opinion about which ways and opinions were best.
Believe it or not, the foregoing is not meant to disparage the book per se, because it is excellent, FOR WHAT IT IS (and on those particular terms it deserves 4 stars). I have only meant to tell prospective buyers just what it is. This book was not very helpful to me, and I think it would not be very useful to most readers, including most painters and art aficionados.
I'm glad the book exists--it is a genuine scholarly achievement--and if someone were to give it to me as a gift, I'd gratefully recieve it (and I'd probably look at it once in a while). But I would not pay much to buy it. (Borrow it from a public library before deciding to buy.)
Product Description:
This magnificent book is the first full-scale exploration of Impressionist technique. Focusing on the easel-painted work of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, Cassatt, Morisot, Caillebotte, Sisley, and Degas in the period before 1900, it places their methods and materials in a historical perspective and evaluates their origins, novelty, and meanings within the visual formation of urban modernity.
Drawing on scientific studies of pigments and materials, artists’ treatises, colormens’ archives, and contemporary and modern accounts, Anthea Callen demonstrates how raw materials and paintings are profoundly interdependent. She analyzes the material constituents of oil painting and the complex processes of “making” entailed in all aspects of artistic production, discussing in particular oil painting methods for landscapists and the impact of plein air light on figure painting, studio practice, and display. Insisting that the meanings of paintings are constituted by and within the cultural matrices that produced them, Callen argues that the real “modernity” of the Impressionist enterprise lies in the painters’ material practices. Bold brushwork, unpolished, sketchy surfaces, and bright, “primitive” colors were combined with their subject matter—the effects of light, the individual sensation made visible—to establish the modern as visual.
Drawing on scientific studies of pigments and materials, artists’ treatises, colormens’ archives, and contemporary and modern accounts, Anthea Callen demonstrates how raw materials and paintings are profoundly interdependent. She analyzes the material constituents of oil painting and the complex processes of “making” entailed in all aspects of artistic production, discussing in particular oil painting methods for landscapists and the impact of plein air light on figure painting, studio practice, and display. Insisting that the meanings of paintings are constituted by and within the cultural matrices that produced them, Callen argues that the real “modernity” of the Impressionist enterprise lies in the painters’ material practices. Bold brushwork, unpolished, sketchy surfaces, and bright, “primitive” colors were combined with their subject matter—the effects of light, the individual sensation made visible—to establish the modern as visual.
Available at Amazon
List Price: USD 80.00
Lowest Used Price: USD 460.75
List Price: USD 80.00
Lowest Used Price: USD 460.75
