Books by Belinda Thomson
Van Gogh: Artist in Focus (Artists in Focus)
The work of a man who became the poster child for the suffering artist is collected in this extraordinary collection of images, celebrating the genius behind his passionate work.
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Van Gogh Paintings: The Masterpieces
Nearly 130 years after his death, Vincent van Gogh continues to exert a powerful fascination over viewers and historians. This superb book offers readers a selection of the artist's most unforgettable canvases, as well as some lesser-known examples, many drawn from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
The volume explores the works in the context of Van Gogh's short but brilliant career, in which frequent spells of isolation were paired with lively engagement with his peers and the popular ideas of his time. Additionally, Van Gogh's continuous stream of letters written to family and friends--one of the most important archival resources of nineteenth-century art--provides a narrative thread around which this study develops. In the text, art historian Belinda Thomson considers Van Gogh as a cosmopolitan figure who combined his art experiences and native traditions absorbed in Holland and in Victorian England, and later succeeded in making his mark upon the painting scene in France at one of its richest periods.
This book will be a welcome resource for art lovers, offering a different take on one of history's most interesting artists.
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Gauguin: Maker of Myth
A sweeping reconsideration of Gauguin
This major reevaluation of Paul Gauguin presents the artist and his work in an entirely new light. The vivid, unnaturalistic colors and bold outlines of Gauguin's paintings and the strong, semiabstract quality of his woodcuts had a profound effect on the development of twentieth-century art. Here readers will discover why Gauguin was one of the most important artists behind European modernism―yet one who also challenged its very tenets. Because while modern art largely rejected narrative, for Gauguin it remained central.
Gauguin is the first book to fully examine his use of stories and myth to give powerful narrative tension to his paintings at a time when other painters thought storytelling was dead. Gauguin's life in French Polynesia is often portrayed as a quest for the other, with the artist as the romantic explorer encountering primitive cultures for the first time. In fact, he was deeply immersed in world art and a great reader of Polynesian stories and myths. This book cuts through the mystique surrounding Gauguin―one the artist himself cultivated―to show how he self-mythologized, presenting himself to the world as a suffering, Christ-like figure.
Stunningly illustrated and unprecedented in scope, Gauguin features more than 200 museum-quality reproductions of paintings, works on paper, ceramics, woodcarvings, and writings, including Gauguin's beautifully illustrated letters and books.
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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.
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