Katie Hanson

A celebration of Renoir’s imagery of love in all its guises: from affection and friendship to flirtation, courtship and parenthood. More than any of his contemporaries, Renoir was committed to chronicling love and friendship. Whether on Parisian streetcorners or in sun-dappled woodlands, he understood that emotion could be as fleeting and blinding as his other great subject, sunlight itself. Focusing on the crucial period of the artist’s career from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, encompassing his early and Impressionist paintings, the catalogue traces the evolution of the imagery of love in Renoir’s art, from affection, flirtation and seduction to camaraderie and parenthood. Such themes are explored in tender and personal works, as well as beguiling multi-figure compositions of urban and suburban sociability. In the early 1880s Renoir moved away from an Impressionist style to more solid, sculptural compositions, but the theme of friendship and joy in nature remained. This publication addresses the broad topic of Renoir and love through a series of thematic essays, interspersed with in-depth entries on key artworks. It will accompany a major international touring exhibition.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, boasts one of the largest collections of the celebrated Impressionist artist Claude Monet’s work outside France. This book reproduces all thirty-five oil paintings by Monet in the MFA’s permanent collection, representing nearly the full span of Monet’s long career. An introductory essay presents a brief introduction to his acclaim in Boston during his lifetime, and entries for the thirty-five paintings provide an overview of his life and work. Monet returned time and again to his favourite locations and motifs, utilizing vivid colour and varied brushwork to dazzling effect and inviting viewers to see the world anew.

Eloquent and provocative drawings, exquisitely reproduced, provide an intimate encounter with these two daring Austrian masters. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were two of the most daring and controversial artists in Vienna during the culturally turbulent decades around the turn of the 20th century. They worked out their provocative depictions of the human body, created in a search for psychological truth as well as physical realism, in the direct and intimate medium of drawing. In Klimt’s studies, the distinctive character or unsettling emotional resonance of the person portrayed comes through in the artist’s delicate, sinuous lines. The striking presence of the individual in Schiele’s more finished drawings, often rendered with extreme frankness and bold colouration, pulses with dramatic immediacy. Although Klimt was almost thirty years Schiele’s senior, he quickly recognized and encouraged the younger artist’s extraordinary talent. The sixty important works exquisitely reproduced in large format in this volume reach from each artist’s early academic studies to more incisive and unconventional explorations of nature, psychology, sexuality and spirituality. By giving viewers access to these artists’ worlds, this album of unforgettable drawings provides a direct connection to the minds of two master draftsmen exploring the limits of representation, as well as the shock of recognition at seeing our own inner lives caught on paper.