Life Studies: Stories

Average customer rating:

Captivating Portraits (possible spoilers)
Moments of intimate beauty
Sometimes good but mostly thin
Lukewarm at best
vivid

Life Studies: Stories
Susan Vreeland
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Post-Impressionism | Schools, Periods & Styles | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

United States | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0670031771
Release Date: 2004-12-16

When a disillusioned banker sees his daughter through the eyes of Renoir, his senses and zest for life are awakened. Morisot's wet nurse sacrifices her own child so another mother can paint. By modeling nude, a wife discovers her deeper, more compassionate self. In one enlightening summer, a young girl encounters Picasso and death. Together, the stories in Life Studies are a fascinating exploration of human frailty and resilience. These tales marvel at the lasting strength and meaning of art in our lives, revealing art's healing effect on the soul. Crafted with the skill of a master painter, Life Studies is a dazzling addition to Vreeland's outstanding body of work.

I had the good fortune of seeing an exhibit in Oakland, California at the museum there and got hooked on the luminous colors in the paintings. I managed to view the collections in Irvine and Laguna beach. I don't recall where I got this book, but I took it with me to Laguna Beach and held the pages next to some of the originals.

This books is the only book I have seen that comes even close to reproducing the beautiful and luminous quality of this genre of painting. For me, this book is helpful for those occasions when I struggle with picking a color in one of my own works that hits the quality of light I am trying to arrive at. Plus, it is wonderful to just sit back and say, "Wow."

I will be the first to admit that I have not read the text carefully. I just skimmed it. But the color quality and selection of images merits two thumbs up, a gold star and a California sunset.

Frank Benson's masterpiece paintings of turn-of-the-century American society, New England's ports and country, and wildlife and sporting subjects, are among the most popular American works of art. His sparkling plein air painting of young women in white dresses are widely reproduced and his etchings and sporting paintings are generally considered to be some of America's best.

This first full-scale monograph on Benson's entire career, summarizes his progress from his early promise as a young art student at the Academie Julian in Paris to his leading role as a teacher, portraitist, and painter in Boston and New England. Benson is particularly acclaimed for his splendid outdoor, sun-dappled portraits of members of his family, often in settings on the Maine coastline, as well as for his later, archetypal works of wildfowl, fishing, and hunting.

Impressionsts in Winter: Effets de Neige presents the first thorough investigation of the subject of Impressionist winter landscape. The subject of winter - clearly the most inhospitable season for plein-air painting - provides some of the most exceptional and most spellbindingly beautiful paintings in Impressionism.

No exhibition and no publications in the literature on Impressionism have been devoted to this theme before. While such a thematic approach might seem at first blush a superficial one, the subject of this exhibition goes to the heart of one of the central issues of Impressionism, a dedication to painting specific effects of weather and light that is unprecedented in the history of art.

Inspired by Alfred Sisley's Snow at Louveciennes in The Phillips Collection, this exhibition of sixty-three works presents an opportunity to consider the subject of snow in Impressionist painting in an unprecedented way. While anyone might have come across one or two of these exceptional works in various works in this country or abroad, it comes as a surprise to most to learn that the Impressionists painted hundreds of paintings of snow or effets de neige, as they came to be called.

Of all the Impressionists, three artists especially were drawn to paint effets de neige: Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro. Their shared fascination with these 'effets' led all three to repeatedly seek out opportunities to paint landscapes in snow. Yet each brought to the subject a highly individual response that we find reflected in the paintings assembled here. In addition to these three artists, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Caillebotte and Paul Gauguin also painted snowscapes, though far fewer. Renoir's characteristic interest in a social gathering of skaters in the Bois de Boulogne, Caillebotte's dramatic elevated views over Paris, and Gauguin's rare Brittany snowscapes add dimension and contrast to the dedicated pursuit of winter landscape just outside Paris of Monet, Sisley, and Pisarro. The result is a wider range of winter scenes from the bucolic French countryside to ice floes on the Seine, from the paths and roads of small villages to the boulevards and rooftops of Paris. Their common ground is an obsession with winter light.

Most of us do not think of Paris-or the surrounding countryside-covered in snow. We do not anticipate a blizzard impeding winter travel to this part of of the world nor have we ever seen the Seine frozen solid. A very different weather pattern prevailed during the late 19th century. Snowfalls, blizzards, and frost were a fairly commen winter occurrence. Two of the most severe periods of extended cold since 1840 occurred during the winters of 1879-80 and 1890-91. In order to provide a backdrop of recorded weather conditions of the period, we brought together documentation from numerous sources to describe precisely the winter weather during the years covered by this exhibition . The weather was at times described as 'wolf-like' or 'Siberian,' and once was compared to the North Pole. These vivid accounts not only have helped us to assign dates to certain undated works, but also have provided a context for appreciating the impact of weather conditions on life in France in the late nineteenth century.