Lisa Small

Ewa Juszkiewicz paints surreal oil-on-canvas portraits of women that turn genre conventions inside out. Beginning by producing a likeness of a historical European painting her sources date from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century Juszkiewicz expertly imitates the original s technique and style but replaces the subject s face with a decorative construction of her own. In some compositions, she swathes her sitter s head in folds of fabric or lush floral arrangements; in others, she redirects an elaborately plaited hairstyle to shield the subject s face from view. The results of this process narrate a history of erasure that runs throughout the Western canon of female portraiture.

Monet s Venice paintings are high points in his lifelong engagement with the interplay of water and light. Monet and Venice anchored by two masterworks from the collections of Brooklyn and San Francisco, The Doge s Palace and The Grand Canal, Venice will be the first exhibition and English-language publication dedicated to this significant suite of paintings since their Parisian debut at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1912. Monet keenly felt the burden of influence in a city that had so often been depicted and had long been an icon of waning, fragile beauty. Venice was and is a place where culture and nature are profoundly and uniquely entangled. Monet s images of Venice s buildings and canals dissolved in colorful mist and hazy light may be seen as meditations on human aesthetic interaction with a natural environment built upon for centuries. These tonally unifying atmospheres which he referred to as the enveloppe reveal Monet s essentially ecological understanding of the world in which he immersed himself. Air, light, water, and stone emerge together from a matrix of bold brushwork; buildings, reflections, and space are interconnected in luminous paintings that reinscribed and transformed the centuries-old Venetian landscape tradition. Including lush reproductions, newly commissioned texts, and maps of the artist s views, this book is an essential addition to any Monet lover s library.

The years between the Revolution of 1848 and the end of World War II were characterised by profound social, intellectual, and political change in France. The art world, centred in Paris, also witnessed remarkable transformations as artists experimented with bold, expressive styles. Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism... All emerged in and around the French capital during this period, and had profound impacts on the Western artistic canon. This splendid volume featuring 59 works from the Brooklyn Museum's renowned European collection, celebrates France as the artistic centre of international modernism from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Ranging widely in scale, subject matter, and style, these paintings and sculptures were produced by the era's leading artists, both French-born and others who studied and worked in France. The 47 artists represented include Bonnard, Caillebotte, Cezanne, Chagall, Degas, Matisse, Monet, Redon, Renoir, and Rodin. Organised into four sections, the works in this book exemplify the successive avant-garde movements that defined modern art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing a shift from naturalism to the rise of abstraction. Chapters on 'Landscape,' 'Still Life,' 'Portraits and Figures,' and 'The Nude,' invite the reader to discover comparisons and contrasts across time and mediums. Accompanies a major travelling exhibition, the venues and dates of which are: McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas: February 22 May 21, 2017; TK: June 16 October 8, 2017; Baker Museum, Naples, Florida: November 3, 2017 January 28, 2018; TK: February 23 May 20, 2018; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba, Canada: June 15 September 9, 2018; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa: October 5, 2018 January 6. 2019.