Books by Richard R. Brettell

Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890

by Richard R. Brettell

Working on site with speed and directness, impressionist artists hoped to distinguish their works with a new immediacy, yet the paintings they exhibited were almost always completed in the studio later. This beautifully illustrated book investigates for the first time the impressions, or painted sketches, that some of the best-known artists of the Impressionist movement actually finished on the spot.

Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940

by Richard R. Brettell, Stephen Brown

In many of Edouard Vuillard's (1868-1940) most famous paintings, figures are nestled in intimate settings among bold patterns and colors. As the viewer's eye adjusts to the complexity of the scene, the artist's world opens up. At a young age, Vuillard was one of a group of avant-garde painters in Paris who favored rich palettes and dreamlike imagery. He was equally a member of the literary and theatrical circles that included writers like Marcel Proust and Stéphane Mallarmé. As his career progressed into the new century, he entered the rarefied society of upper-class French families—many of them Jewish—who collected the new art, published the new poetry, and wrote the new criticism.
This beautifully illustrated book examines the master artist's work in the context of a unique circle of friends and patrons between the turn of the 20th century and World War II. Essays by leading scholars explore the artist's relationship with key members of this glamorous social circle, as well as the connections between Vuillard and Proust, two of the world's great observers of a world now lost.
A fascinating exploration of artistic culture in Paris before the war, Edouard Vuillard establishes the artist as one of the masters of the modern portrait.

On Modern Beauty Three Paintings by Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne

by Richard R. Brettell

 A thought-provoking examination of beauty using three works of art by Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne.

As the discipline of art history has moved away from connoisseurship, the notion of beauty has become increasingly problematic. Both culturally and personally subjective, the term is difficult to define and nearly universally avoided. In this insightful book, Richard R. Brettell, one of the leading authorities on Impressionism and French art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dares to confront the concept of modern beauty head-on. This is not a study of aesthetic philosophy, but rather a richly contextualized look at the ambitions of specific artists and artworks at a particular time and place.

Brettell shapes his manifesto around three masterworks from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Édouard Manet’s Jeanne (Spring), Paul Gauguin’s Arii Matamoe (The Royal End), and Paul Cézanne’s Young Italian Woman at a Table. The provocative and wide-ranging discussion reveals how each of these exceptional paintings, though depicting very different subjects—a fashionable actress, a preserved head, and a weary working woman—enacts a revolutionary, yet enduring, icon of beauty. 

American Impressionism: A New Vision, 1880–1900

by Richard R. Brettell, Katherine M. Bourguignon, Frances Fowle

A sumptuously illustrated exploration of American artists’ interpretations of Impressionist styles and themes

This lively, beautifully illustrated book focuses on a group of American artists who applied Impressionist ideas and techniques to American subjects, and in so doing, they attracted and cultivated an enthusiastic American audience. These artists, including Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Theodore Robinson, William Merritt Chase, and Childe Hassam, invented a new and highly diverse formulation of the Impressionist movement. Essays by experts in the field of Impressionism discuss the impact of Impressionism on the countryside and city paintings of Robinson and Hassam; and consider significant pictures by Cassatt, Sargent, and Whistler that demonstrate their role in the exploration of brilliant color harmonies and compositions developed from contact with French artists such as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. The book features more than 60 paintings, some well known, others less familiar, produced in Europe and America. By representing American imagery, from the Atlantic coastline to New York’s public gardens, through the most current ideas about art-making, the artists showcased here created a unique expression of an evolving national identity.

Modern Art, 1851-1929 Capitalism and Representation

by Richard R. Brettell

The period 1851 to 1929 witnessed the rise of the major European avant-garde groups: the Realists, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Symbolists, Cubists, and Surrealists. It was also a time of rapid social, economic, and political change, encompassing a revolution in communication systems and technology, and an unprecedented growth in the availability of printed images. Richard Brettell's innovative account explores the aims and achievements -- the beautiful and the bizarre -- of artists such as Monet, Gauguin, Picasso, and Dali, in relation to urban capitalism and expansion, colonialism, nationalism and internationalism, and the museum. Tracing common themes of representation, imagination, perception, and sexuality across works in a wide range of different media he presents a fresh approach to the fine art and photography of this remarkable era.