Books by High Museum of Art

After his early commitment to expressionism (the culmination of which is his famous painting, "The Scream"), the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944), under the influence of Matisse, began to paint landscapes celebrating his newly independent homeland. This book documents those later paintings.

The Art of Nellie Mae Rowe is the most substantial gathering of her work to date. Here eighty full color and ten black and white images display the artist's extraordinary intuitive color sense and the vibrancy and variety of her work. Rowe used whatever materials were at hand. When painting and drawing on paper, Styrofoam, cardboard, and wood, she favored plain and colored pencils, ink and felt tip pens, and gouache. Jewelry, lace, wigs, felt hats, and eye glasses enhanced her cloth dolls. Sculpting, she gathered found objects, marbles, and glitter and fastened them with chewing gum. In these color-saturated works, there is an exuberant and idiosyncratic self-expression.

American collectors, critics, and artists played a key role in introducing Degas's art to the United States. Featuring reproductions of well-known masterpieces and little-known treasures, Degas and America celebrates the artistic savvy of the Americans who helped make impressionism the most popular movement in modern art. Early taste for Degas in America embraced his work in all media-oils, pastels, drawings, prints, and sculpture. Essays by an impressive group of scholars explain how the early collectors of Degas's work helped to shape his career and our image of the artist.
Authorbios:
David Brenneman is the Frances B. Bunzl Family Curator of European Art at the High Museum. Ann Dumas is a freelance art historian from London. She served as guest curator of the High Museum of Art's exhibition Impressionism: Paintings Collected by European Museums. Recently, Dumas was guest curator of The Private Collection of Edgar Degas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and for Degas as Collector, at The National Gallery, London. Richard Kendall is a freelance art historian and the author of numerous books on Degas, including Degas: Beyond Impressionism. Rebecca Rabinow, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, collaborated with Ann Dumas on The Private Collection of Edgar Degas and recently contributed to the publication for the Met's Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch.

This in-depth study of the Herter Brothers, New York, the leading furniture-making and decorating firm of late-19th-century America, is the first to focus on the design, richness of materials, and splendid diversity in the work of Gustave and Christian Herter. Herter Brothers finest furniture and interiors are displayed here in 133 color and 167 black-and-white illustrations, many showing rich detail. The authors place the company in its context, international as well as domestic, and provide an absorbing narrative of the furniture industry in New York City.

The art movement called Impressionism was not always as popular as it is today. When it first emerged in France in the last decades of the 19th century, critics reacted harshly, and few paintings were acquired by museums. This book, which accompanies a traveling exhibition, presents a fascinating look at how Impressionist works made their way into European museums -- who collected them, when, and why -- and why not. Lavishly illustrated with an extraordinary selection of paintings, many seldom reproduced, Impressionism offers much new scholarly information as well as fresh anecdotes. Few nonexperts know that in 1894 the French government almost refused the first great gift of Impressionist paintings -- the Caillebotte bequest. The pivotal role played by dealer Paul Durand-Ruel is explained by his great-granddaughter, Caroline Durand-Ruel Godfroy, using previously unpublished information. The history of Impressionism's struggle for acceptance will fascinate art lovers.

Monet & Bazille: A Collaboration is the first in-depth examination of the momentous relationship between Claude Monet and Frederic Bazille. From 1864 to 1870, before Monet fully developed the sparkling, spontaneous painting style for which he is best known, and before Bazille was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, the two struggled together to develop a new style of painting that became known as Impressionism. No other publication has presented such a thorough look at this combative but extraordinarily fruitful collaboration, which was crucial to the birth of this dazzling and overwhelmingly popular artistic movement. The book includes superb colorplates as well as many details of the artists' finest works of this period.

Accompanying the first major traveling exhibition of works by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), this volume presents a complete reappraisal of one of America's most beloved artists. Contributors from a wide range of fields--including leading art historians, cultural critics, a renowned child psychiatrists, and a leading graphic designer--shed new light on the complexity of Rockwell's art and his place as a shaper of mass-media imagery.
Stunning colorplates reproduce Rockwell's paintings in crisp detail, and the essays set them in fresh contexts, discussing such themes as Rockwell's urban scenes; the reaction by both black and white Southerners to Rockwell's historic civil rights painting THE PROBLEM WE ALL LIVE WITH; AND Rockwell's role in the development of American illustration. Above all, this important volume examines Norman Rockwell's critical place in 20th-century American culture.

Commissioned in honor of the 1996 summer Olympic games in Atlanta, this volume assembles art works from around the world that represent five interlocking passions: love anguish, awe, triumph, and joy.

This richly designed book focuses on Venetian paintings from the 16th through the 18th centuries in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, and reproduces in full color 55 major works by Gentile Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Sebastiano Ricci, Tiepolo, Bellotto, and Canaletto. Treasures of Venice contains texts by several eminent scholars: Klára Garas, formerly from the Budapest Museum, discusses the formation of this collection of paintings; Philip Sohm from the University of Toronto writes on the critical reception of 17th-century Venetian painting; and George Keyes from The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, deals with the impact of the Venetian school on later styles of European painting.