Books by Ann Dumas

Matisse, His Art and His Textiles

by Ann Dumas, Jack Flam, Remi Labrusse

A lavishly illustrated exploration of the textile works of Henri Matisse, published to coincide with a major international exhibition, considers the artist's relationship with textiles throughout his career, documenting how the art form and its materials significantly impacted many of his key works.

Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism

by Ann Dumas, Dita Amory

In the summer of 1905, the French painters Henri Matisse and André Derain changed the course of art history with their radical color experiments

During the summer of 1905, Henri Matisse and André Derain went on holiday in Collioure, a modest French fishing village fifteen miles from the Spanish border. This groundbreaking book examines how two artists, entranced by the shifting light and stunning imagery of the eastern Mediterranean, laid the groundwork for the movement known as Fauvism (from the French fauve, or “wild beast”). Featuring more than 70 paintings, watercolors, and drawings produced by Matisse and Derain during their stay, the book also brings to life their personal and artistic revelations with 21 of their letters, published here for the first time in English. Vivid and engaging texts detail their daring experiments with color, form, structure, and perspective; the scandal their paintings caused when they were exhibited several months later; and how, despite the jeering remarks from critics, these works changed the course of French painting. Emphasizing as never before the legacy of that summer, this publication shows how the two artists’ radical investigations galvanized their contemporaries, and how this strain of modernism, created almost by accident, resonates even into the present day.

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

Exhibition Schedule

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(October 13, 2023–January 21, 2024)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
(February 25–May 27, 2024)

Félix Vallotton

by Belinda Thomson, Ann Dumas, Dita Amory, Patrick McGuinness, Philippe Büttner, Katia Poletti, Christian Rümelin

Vallotton’s vivid, enigmatic and sometimes unsettling paintings and woodcuts made him a key commentator on the social mores of fin-de-siècle Paris
By the end of the 19th century, Paris was the unrivaled capital of the Western art world. Impressionism had transformed the visual arts and post-impressionism was flourishing in its wake; new boulevards and parks had modernized the city; theaters and department stores provided endless opportunities for entertainment and consumption. Artists were seen by many as the avant-garde of a new society.

Into this dynamic world arrived the 16-year-old Félix Vallotton, who became closely involved with a group of artists known as the Nabis, which included Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. Vallotton adopted their decorative painterly language, also sharing their interest in journalistic illustration and Japanese ukiyo-e prints. His paintings and woodcuts offered witty and often unsettling observations of domestic and political life, and he is now considered one of the greatest printmakers of his age. As his work evolved, the sharp realism and cool linearity of his later style made him one of the most distinctive artists of the early 20th century.

Generously illustrated throughout with the finest of his paintings and prints, this book accompanies a new presentation of Vallotton’s oeuvre in New York and London that includes works never before seen in public and aims to reevaluate his output and legacy. Texts by leading authorities on the artist look at his life, work and reception.

Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was born in Lausanne, but spent much of his working life in France. Although he produced some of his most important work in Paris in the 1890s in painting and print, his original and innovative approach persisted throughout his career.

Impressionists on Paper Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec

by Ann Dumas, Christopher Lloyd, Leïla Jarbouai, Harriet K. Stratis

Transformative works on paper by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist innovators

Best known for their superlative oils on canvas, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and their contemporaries also regularly used paper as a base for their works. They experimented with materials including watercolor, gouache, pencil, ink and the temperamental pastel. The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists often found working on paper to be a better conveyance of the fluctuating surroundings they sought to capture. Their practices transformed the status of these works from preparatory studies left in the studio to works of art in their own right. Indeed, prints and drawings were hung alongside oil paintings in all eight canonical Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886. At the last of these, Degas exclusively exhibited pastels on paper.
This sumptuous collection of some 70 works on paper, exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, includes sketches for well-known masterpieces such as George Seurat's figure of a youth for The Bathers at Asnières (1883) to scenes with no known painted counterpart such as Van Gogh's Entrance to the Pawn Bank, The Hague (1882). Insightful texts by Royal Academy curators and experts in 19th-century European art explore three topics: the artistic development of the Impressionists through their works on paper; the role of drawing in arts education; and commercial innovations to artist's materials that made paper a more popular option. The catalog is arranged chronologically from the 1860s to the 1900s, charting the rapid progress of techniques and subject matter. The bold innovations of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists challenged traditional attitudes and radically transformed the future direction of art, ultimately paving the way for later movements such as Abstract Expressionism.