The Fauve Landscape

Rating:
Summary: Very, very good
Review: A lot have time was put into writing this book I can tell by the way it was written. Very good book on a hard period of art to write about.

Rating:
Summary: Very, very good
Review: A lot have time was put into writing this book I can tell by the way it was written. Very good book on a hard period of art to write about.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant discussion of an underappreciated movement
Review: This book documents what was quite possibly the largest and finest exhibition ever devoted solely to fauve painting. This brief movement, sandwiched between the towering achievements of impressionism, post-impressionism, and cubism, is a relatively overlooked one in the history of 20th century art. Concentrating on landscape painting as the heart of the fauvist view of reality, the essays are some very fine scholarly re-appraisals of the social and economic history of fauvism. The book itself is beautiful, with a superior design and extremely high standards of photographic reproduction. My only quibble is the near-total exclusion of figure-painting from the discussion (even as a point of comparison), and the authors' focus on social history leaves little space for aesthetic issues to be discussed. The essays treat these fantastically beautiful paintings as mere documents of economic relationships, a common art-historical focus nowadays, but one which does little to educate the reader in the marvelous way of seeing represented by these images.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant discussion of an underappreciated movement
Review: This book documents what was quite possibly the largest and finest exhibition ever devoted solely to fauve painting. This brief movement, sandwiched between the towering achievements of impressionism, post-impressionism, and cubism, is a relatively overlooked one in the history of 20th century art. Concentrating on landscape painting as the heart of the fauvist view of reality, the essays are some very fine scholarly re-appraisals of the social and economic history of fauvism. The book itself is beautiful, with a superior design and extremely high standards of photographic reproduction. My only quibble is the near-total exclusion of figure-painting from the discussion (even as a point of comparison), and the authors' focus on social history leaves little space for aesthetic issues to be discussed. The essays treat these fantastically beautiful paintings as mere documents of economic relationships, a common art-historical focus nowadays, but one which does little to educate the reader in the marvelous way of seeing represented by these images.