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A series that uncovers the life and times of some of the most important and influential artists of the modern world. It includes easy to follow chronological structure illustrated with colour and black and white contemporary photographs. It also features detailed timelines for quick reference, plus museum and gallery information. ... Read more

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Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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A new edition of the classic biography of artist Paul Cezanne, the most complete, fully illustrated survey of the artist's life available, containing 118 color and 152 black-and-white illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A Cezanne biography for everyone
I was looking for a good biography of Paul Cezanne and stumbled across this one.I was a bit wary because it was written by a scholar and I thought it would be overly technical and academic.To my happy surprise, Reward's book, though based on thorough scholarship (it's grounded in his dissertation research), is both readable and enjoyable.Reward's narrative style is engaging yet informative.In addition, the book is rich with high quality illustrations.If you've read bits and pieces about Cezanne--his life and work--and want to dig deeper, this is the book for you.

Beautiful book
Rewald's biography of Cezanne is a very fine piece of work.It is beautifully written with substantial information about the artist & his work.As for all reputable art books, the paper quality is very good to render lovely reproductions of the paintings.
It is very nicely presented & a pleasure to read. . . or just look at the paintings.

Gorgeous Cezanne Biography
This is a wonderful book about Cezanne.Every artist who is studying art history and esp. the impressionists and post-impressionists should own this book.

Well-Worth The Hefty Price
I have read many books on Cezanne over the past 10 years and in my opinion this is the best. For a combination of well-written text and excellent reproductions of the paintings this book cannot be beat. The text is jargon free. Mr. Rewald was a wonderful writer and he gives you a warm and sympathetic biography of a great artist and complex and difficult man. Cezanne was very neurotic. He had a fear of women and would not use nude models. His famous bather series was worked up from photographs and plaster casts, etc. He could be very anti-social: he sometimes would cross the street to avoid meeting someone he knew. He was very emotional and struggled to keep his emotions under control. This was reflected in his work. His early work was full of violence and shadows and you feel as though he barely was able to keep himself in check as he coated the canvas in a thick impasto. The later, carefully controlled and beautifully harmonized works are the more familiar to the general public. The cover gives you some indication of the beautiful reproductions which are inside this book. This is a great addition and in my opinion a must have for anyone's art library.

Bravo! Bravo!
I really enjoyed this wonderful book about a wonderfully delightful artist. I would recommend reading it if you are a Cezanne admirer, absolutely a wonderful book! ... Read more

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Introduces the life and work of Paul Cezanne, discussing his early years, life in Paris, and development as a painter. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (6)

Generally good
As usual the book arrived promptly....When I order a new hardback book, I don't expect the paper cover to be ripped and repaired with scotch tape.Shame on you Amazon.

Hiddlen in the Shadow of the Master The Model-Wives of Cezanne, Monet, & Rodin
How do you write a nonfiction book about the lives of three women who were barely recognized in their own lifetimes? Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux and Rose Beuret are not familiar historical names. Yet they were the wives of three of the most influential artists of the twentieth century: Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin.

Ruth Butler does a remarkable job of research and literary detective work to give personality and substance to these women who literally lived in the shadow of their husbands. For example, when Paul Cezanne met the woman he would marry is revealed in a letter he wrote to his sister. However, it is only through the birth certificate of their son born some three years later that we learn Hortense Fiquet's name; and she will not become Hortense Cezanne until 14 years later.

Similarly, Claude Monet and Camille Doncieux married some three years after their son was born, although their names appeared as husband and wife on Jean's birth certificate. For Auguste Rodin and Rose Beuret, their wedding did not take place until shortly before her death in 1917, though she was thought of as his wife almost from the beginning of their relationship in 1864.

All of these women began their relationships with these men as artists' models. In 1947 a discovery in some old boxes belonging to Monet indicates that Camille Doncieux had been his model for an unfinished painting much earlier than had been assumed. There are many paintings of Hortense Fiquet over many years. We find a somewhat different relationship with Rose Beuret and Auguste Rodin. Not only was she a model for many of his sculptures, but she also helped him with the art work--primarily making sure that the clay sculptures were kept moist with wet towels until he could preserve them in a plaster mold.

Hortense Fiquet and Camille Doncieux never really experienced the life of being married to a famous artist. Most of their lives were spent struggling to make ends meet. When paintings were sold, they had money; otherwise, their husbands relied on friends for support. This resulted in much moving about. On the other hand, Rose Beuret saw her husband become famous and for the most part they always had money--she was a seamstress and could help supplement their income in the early years. But, even with the money, they lived a very austere lifestyle.

These three women experienced living with men who were totally focused on their art almost to the exclusion of anything else. They all experienced living alone with their children for long periods of time. They all experienced other women in their husband's lives. And through all of this, they remained the family to whom these men returned.

As a docent who spends considerable time around art, I found this book to be fascinating. Even though Butler had to rely on second and third hand sources (letters, public records, books about their husbands, etc.), she makes each one of these women come alive and presents three distinctly different personalities who--even though they lived their lives in the shadow of their husbands--were women of substance.

by Penny Appleby
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Too much conjecture and speculation!
I agree with everything that reviewer Margaret Williams said. Ms. Butler constantly says things like, "We know nothing about Madame Monet's feelings at this point, but surely she must have felt..." or "one can imagine that she felt..."I think that this started out as an admirable project, but that after Butler started researching, she discovered there simply was no source material available on these women. So she repeats all the well-worn stuff about the artists, then tries to guess what the women in their lives must have felt.Sometimes she contradicts her own research -- emphasizing that one of these women adored her artist/lover and was "surely" happy with her lot, when other documentation which she quotes indicates otherwise.And some things are just downright silly.She claims, optimistically, that Camille Monet "loved posing" for her husband; how can she possibly know that?And to say that Camille made an important contribution to her husband's paintings just because she chose the outfits she posed in?Any art lover -- let alone an art history prof like Butler! -- knows that an artist will paint his sitters however he sees fit, regardless of what they actually look like or what they're wearing!
Another problem -- not necessarily the author's fault -- is that there aren't nearly enough illustrations.For every five artworks that Butler references, maybe one is reproduced -- and usually in a small black & white photo.
I, too, wonder why Yale published this.It's very telling, too, that the NY Times book review did not publish an actual review, but rather an interview with Ms. Butler -- presumably because an honest review would have revealed that there are serious problems with the book. Ms. Butler must have friends in high places who don't want to hurt her.

Ambitious and commendable, but...
Ruth Butler has set herself an ambitious and commendable task in "Hidden in the Shadow of the Master," namely, to pluck from oblivion the histories of three women who shared the lives of three remarkable artists - Monet, Rodin, and Cezanne - sometimes happily and sometimes in utter misery. Butler asks good questions: Why have these women never figured in traditional biographies of these artists? Did they feel cast aside in their own time, as their husbands pursued extramarital affairs and devoted, almost always, more attention to matters of art than of family? Did their roles as the principle models for their husbands' figurative work constitute an important contribution to art history?

Unfortunately, Butler isn't really in much of a position to answer these questions. Researching the lives of obscure people is undoubtedly very difficult: to pull off her project successfully, Butler would have needed to get extremely lucky in uncovering previously unknown documents, like correspondence and diaries - as, for instance, Gail Levinson did in researching the life of Edward Hopper's wife, Jo, who is brought vividly and poignantly to life in Levinson's "Edward Hopper." Butler however has not hit upon many revelatory documents, and one tends to doubt that she tried very hard to find any. Ninety-five percent of the sources she cites are war-horses of the traditional history of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, which she creatively reinterprets to place the "model-wives" front and center. The result is a lot of rhetorical questions: "What must Madame Cezanne have felt like" in her difficult marital circumstances, etc.

The first sign of trouble comes in Butler's introduction where she says, "The story I tell depends both on fact and on imagination." To my mind, that statement makes this book a very suspect addition to the academic literature, and I am frankly surprised that Yale University Press would have published it. Most disturbing, to fill in the gaping blanks in her narrative, Butler engages in highly speculative biographical interpretations of paintings and sculptures - often presuming to intuit the feelings of both sitter and artist. This is precisely the sort of thing that one would expect of undergraduates writing on art for the first time, and one would caution them against it because of the methodological speciousness of the approach.

In sum, high-minded intentions cannot make up for a lack of rigorous research and ground-breaking discoveries. Despite Butler's best efforts, all three of the women about whom she writes in "Hidden in the Shadow of the Master" remain, as far as I can see, unrevealed in this very ambitious though questionable book.

Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cezanne, Monet, and Rodin
This book was very informative about the way these artists lived and treated their wives. It showed the very human side to Cezanne, Monet, and Rodin and made me think that genius comes with a price. Their wives/models didn't have easy lives living with them which was in a way surprising to me after seeing all the beautiful portraits they did of their wives. Those portraits made me fantasize about how wonderful it must have been to be married to these artists. This book opened me up to reality! ... Read more

Product Description
In the last years of his life, Paul Cezanne produced a stunning series of watercolours, many of them still lifes. Still Life with Blue Pot is one of these late masterpieces; it is now in the collection of the Getty Museum. In Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong places this great painting within the context of Cezanne's artistic and psychological development and of the history of the genre of still life in France. Still life - like the medium of watercolour - was traditionally considered to be "low" in the hierarchy of French academic painting. Cezanne chose to ignore this hierarchy, creating monumental still-life watercolours that contained echoes of grand landscapes and even historical paintings in the manner of Poussin - the "highest" of classical art forms. In so doing, he charged his still lifes with new meanings; both in terms of his own notoriously difficult personality and in the way he used the genre to explore the very process of looking at, and creating, art.Carol Armstrong's study - published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum from October 12, 2004 to January 2, 2005 - is a fascinating exploration of the brilliant watercolour paintings that brought Cezanne's career to a complex, and triumphant, conclusion. The book includes new photographic studies of the Getty's painting that allow the reader to encounter this great watercolour as never before - in its full richness and detail. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

amazing...
... bought this at the Getty's museum and paid full price so amazon's is a real deal. Was not crazy about Cezanne's oil, but his watercolors are beautiful and style is wonderful - i learnt a lot by reading this book.Totally changed my view on Cezanne.This is the next best thing if you missed the exhibit at the Getty's. ... Read more

Product Description
Another title from The Crown Art Library, the most useful monographs available on a wide range of significant artists. Each volume is written by an internationally recognized authority and is generously illustrated with full-color reproductions of the artist's paintings and two-color reproductions of sketches and line drawings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Beautiful Book!
Highly professional effort printed on high resolution clay faced photographic paper using real photo offset for the reproductions. Many full page prints in this beautiful folio containing 84 illustrations! 6 stars out of five; especially considering the low price. ... Read more

Product Description
A volume on the life and work of Paul Cezanne (1836-1906), a painter whose innovative ideas of representation set him apart from his contemporaries and led the way for a new school of art. The book combines the artist's correspondence and the memoirs of his friends with a sweeping selection of reproductions of his works. One of the most influential of 19th-century artists, Cezanne exhibited in his work a concern with form and structure that presaged the development of Modernism. It was this aspect of his work that led a subsequent generation of art historians to dub him the first "post-Impressionist". Despite his artistic achievements and education, however, Cezanne was ill at ease in the cafes and salons of the Paris art world. The book aims to show show the paradoxes and contradictions of Cezanne's personality through his own writings and the reminiscences of his contemporaries, and it provides evidence of his friendships and family life. ... Read more