Bazille - Purity, Pose, and Painting in the 1860s

A thought-provoking analysis of Frederic Bazille that sheds new light on the origins and dilemmas of modernist painting.Studio companion of Monet and Renoir, protege of Courbet, and friend of Manet, Frederic Bazille (1841-1870) is more often remembered for the financial assistance he provided to future Impressionists than for his own vivid and often unsettling work. In this first complete book in English devoted to Bazille, Dianne Pitman seeks to situate this often overlooked artist within the complex and contradictory art world of the 1860s. In the process, she greatly refines our understanding of the modernist tradition.Pitman examines a series of major paintings and critical essays by Bazille and his contemporaries and frames them within the modernist discourse about purity, or respecting the proper limits of the medium. She stresses the problem of pose -- the way in which painted subjects seem to respond to the artist's presence and the implied presence of the beholder -- and explores his responses to the new medium of photography, the idea of painting without subject matter, the burden of tradition, and the problematic of self-portraiture. As these themes again come to the fore in much of the most controversial art and criticism of the late twentieth century, this study also represents an important contribution to the ongoing debate concerning the oppositions and continuities between modernism and postmodernism.

Summary

This study seeks to situate Bazille within the complex art world of the 1860s. It examines a series of major paintings and critical essays by Bazille and his contemporaries and frames them within the modernist discourse about purity, or respecting the proper limits of the medium.

Product details

• Authors: Dianne Pitman, Dianne W. Pitman
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 02.07.1998
• EAN: 9780271017006
• ISBN: 978-0-271-01700-6
• Dimensions: 216 mm x 279 mm x 27 mm
• Weight: 1388 g
• Illustrations: Raster,schwarz-weiss, Raster, farbig
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Plastic arts; Impressionismus, einzelne Künstler, Künstlermonografien, Malerei und Gemälde, 19. Jahrhundert (1800 bis 1899 n. Chr.), Post-Impressionismus, ART / History / General, ART / Individual Artists / Monographs, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, History of Art, Painting & paintings, Individual artists, art monographs, Impressionism, Paintings and painting, Art & design styles: Impressionism & Post-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism