Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [195]
The Artist in His Studio, Alexander Liberman (Random House, 1988). This unique book is a splendid record of Liberman’s visits to a number of artists—thirty-one of them, nearly all of whom were French or worked in France—in the 1940s after the war. He felt compelled to personally meet these artists and take photos in their studios because he feared, if he didn’t, there would be no trace of the remarkable flowering of painting and sculpture the first half of the twentieth century had witnessed. No doubt he was also moved to do so by World War II’s annihilation and destruction. Color and black-and-white photographs are paired with the text of Liberman’s conversations with each artist.
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, Roger Shattuck (Vintage, 1968). An original and thoroughly fascinating book linking playwright Alfred Jarry, painter Henri Rousseau, musician Erik Satie, and poet Guillaume Apollinaire as a group of artists representing significant aspects of la Belle Époque, or as he refers to it, “the Banquet Years.” Shattuck believes that this group best reveals the period, and in this book he explores how the avant-garde took the arts into a period of “astonishingly varied renewal and accomplishment,” which would change after the First World War.
Baudelaire’s Voyages: The Poet and His Painters, Jeffrey Coven (Bulfinch, 1993). Companion volume to an exhibit of the same name mounted at the Heckscher Museum (Huntington, New York) and the Archer M. Huntington Gallery (University of Texas Austin), this is a unique package that allows for reading Baudelaire’s poetry and viewing the art of his contemporaries together. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen, for example, Matisse’s Luxe, calme et volupté side by side with Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au voyage.” With sixty-five color and forty-nine black-and-white reproductions featuring Manet, Seurat, Rodin, Gauguin, Daumier, Delacroix, Jongkind, Goya, Munch, Whistler, and others.
Pleasures of Paris: Daumier to Picasso, Barbara Stern Shapiro (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/David R. Godine, 1991). Published to accompany an exhibit of the same name, which was organized to investigate the second half of the nineteenth century in Paris, famous as a time of frivolity and pleasure. But it was also a time of social injustice and political and military upheaval. The works of art included—by Manet, Daumier, Tissot, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Renoir, Mucha, Vuillard, Cézanne, Pissarro, Bonnard, Picasso, and others—document both the more pleasant aspects of the period as well as some of its harsher realities.
Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece, Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed, and Loss, Cynthia Saltzman (Viking, 1998). A remarkable tale tracking the journey of one very famous painting and taking us behind the scenes of the art world and market. Although Portrait of Dr. Gachet is not the only work of art to have an interesting and many layered provenance, surely it has one of the most complex. The Portrait that hangs in the Musée d’Orsay, is not, as you might expect, the subject of this book. Van Gogh’s usual practice was to paint two versions of his portraits, and as the title of the book suggests, one copy has seen quite a life of its own. The Dr. Gachet canvas at the center of this book was sold from the artist’s estate in 1897, found homes with thirteen owners (one of whom was Hermann Göring, who had it for a brief time in 1938), and was eventually bought at auction in 1990 by Ryoei Saito of Tokyo for $82.5 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art to that point. Postcript: in August 1999, it was revealed that Portrait of Dr. Gachet had left Japan and may have been sold to an American investor.
SINGLE-ARTIST BOOKS
If there are hundreds of books published on general art surveys, there are thousands published on individual artists, and so very many of them are devoted to French artists. Due to the monumental volume of works, I can be of