"During his lifetime, the French artist Jean-Franðcois Millet (1814-1875) was frequently criticized for his peasant paintings. Traditionalists objected to his raw, radical technique and the sharp social critique they perceived in his work. Shortly after his death, however, Millet was embraced as a national hero who had captured the French countryside in all its glory. The artist's fame extended from Europe to America and Russia, and his modern style and sympathetic depiction of peasant life remained a source of inspiration until well into the twentieth century. This publication sets Millet's work in the context of the figures he inspired: artists including Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Giovanni Segantini, Winslow Homer, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kazimir Malevich, Edvard Munch, and Salvador Dalâi"--

An insightful overview of how Millet influenced and inspired many modernist artists that followed him Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) was one of the most important artists of the Barbizon School. Through his publicly exhibited works and their critical reception, Millet was of crucial significance to modernist painters. Millet's modernity is evident in his varied subjects-from peasant themes to landscapes to nudes-and his anti-academic, rough paint application. He also produced highly inventive pastels and drawings. Jean-Francois Millet examines the international range of artists whom he influenced. For instance, Millet was an artistic hero for Vincent van Gogh, whose treatment of numerous motifs-including The Sower and Starry Night-was directly inspired by the older artist. Van Gogh even painted a remarkable series of 21 "copies" after Millet's work while living in the south of France in the final year of his life. Other artists on whom Millet had a profound impact include Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Winslow Homer, and, in the 20th century, most notably Edvard Munch and Salvador Dali. 00Exhibition: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (04.10.2019-12.01.2020) / Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, USA (16.02.-17.05.2020).

Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

"America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek) trains his satirical eye on Modern Art in this "masterpiece" (The Washington Post) Wolfe's style has never been more dazzling, his wit never more keen. He addresses the scope of Modern Art, from its founding days as Abstract Expressionism through its transformations to Pop, Op, Minimal, and Conceptual. The Painted Word is Tom Wolfe "at his most clever, amusing, and irreverent" (San Francisco Chronicle).