Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. Very light tan to page edges but faces and plates are bright and vivid. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> It is a curious fact that the word ‘Post-Impressionism’ would not have been recognized by any of the major artists to whom it is now generally applied. When the art critic Roger Fry invented what he called this ‘somewhat negative label’? in 1910 C?zanne Gauguin. Van Gogh and Seurat were all long since dead and the younger artists who showed with them in the two Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 had already accepted such other labels as ‘Fauve’ and ‘Cubist’. albeit reluctantly and not of their own invention. Almost 60 years later we have agreed that ‘Post-Impressionism’ can now be meaningfully applied to the later work of other great Impressionists – notably Degas Monet. Renoir and Pissarro who were specifically excluded by Fry: and more widely still to painting in France and western Europe which reflects an awareness of Impressionism and seeks to move away from and beyond it. Admittedly the Post-Impressionist net has been spread rather wider than before in the present exhibition but the need to broaden the context in which we look at the paintings of the great Post-Impressionist masters has been felt by all associated with the exhibition and with its catalogue. It is important to know how a neologism occurs when it describes a new tendency in art or letters. ‘Post- Impressionism’ is unusual not only because it was invented 25 years after the art it describes but because it was the suggestion of an English critic arranging an exhibition of modern French art. That exhibition was put together in a hurry to fill a gap in the Grafton Galleries programme and its public success astonished all those concerned with it not least the very young and inexperienced secretary of the exhibition Desmond MacCarthy. (MP)