Nancy Ireson

This engaging volume describes the creation and restoration of the extraordinary large-scale drawing The Temptation of Saint Anthony—a work by late 19th-century Belgian artist James Ensor (1860–1949)—on the occasion of its first public showing in more than 60 years. The piece is composed of 51 separate sheets of paper collaged into a hallucinatory social critique and artist’s manifesto. Each sheet of the nearly six-foot-high work is reproduced at actual size, revealing Ensor’s remarkable technique and fertile imagination. Here, Saint Anthony is surrounded not with nature, as customary, but with the moral decay of society. Replete with tiny scenes depicting both sexual temptation and spiritual piety, Ensor splices potent imagery from travelogues, popular science, and technology magazines into a Symbolist masterpiece. Susan M. Canning, Patrick Florizöone, and Nancy Ireson analyze the drawing’s meaning; Herwig Todts details its origins and early history; and Kimberly J. Nichols recounts the work’s restoration. Distributed for the Art Institute of ChicagoExhibition Schedule: The J. Paul Getty Museum (06/10/14–08/31/14)The Art Institute of Chicago (11/23/14–01/25/15)

The Barnes Foundation s holdings of works by the renowned Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne (1839 1906) sixty-one oils on canvas and eight works on paper are among the most significant in the world. The Barnes Foundation was established in 1922 by scientist, entrepreneur, and educator Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a passionate supporter of European modernism. His virtually unrivalled collection, which can only be viewed at the Barnes Foundation, also includes exceptional paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and many others. Beginning in 1912, Barnes acquired works by Cezanne from major Paris dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and soon ranked among the artist s most prominent collectors. At the time, this expressed a pioneering taste that Barnes shared with only a small group of enthusiasts, even though Cezanne had been posthumously hailed as a father of modern art at the turn of the twentieth century. The foundation s impressive holdings of Cezannes never before published in a single study in their entirety span every period of the artist s career and include his largest rendition of The Card Players and one of the three versions of The Large Bathers, one of his signal testaments. This lavishly illustrated landmark volume is both a work on Cezanne and his time, and an impetus for further study of an artist whose oeuvre is at once luminous, austere, challenging, and deeply confounding.

Paul Gauguin's vivid and sensuous paintings are among the most reproduced and recognisable in the history of art. Most books on the artist concentrate on one aspect of his story, whether it is the time he spent in Brittany, in Arles with his friend Vincent Van Gogh or in the South Seas.