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Title: The Private Lives of the Impressionists
ISBN: 0060545593
Author:
Sue Roe
Publicate Date: 2007-11-01
Publish: 2007-11-01
List Price: $17.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $5.00
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $2.45
Amazon Merchant Price: $12.21
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1: Lives of artists come alive
I found this to be an excellently researched book covering the lives of the artists known as Impressionists. It went chronologically, with stories of their work, their families, and what was going on in the world around them that affected their ability to make a living at their art. It wasn't boring in the least, and let the reader get a clear picture of the personalities and characters of those struggling artists who are so well known to us now.
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2: The Private Lives of the Impressonists
An excellent work. The author has captured the feeling of each artist and the lime they lived.A must for all those
interested in the impressionists.
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3: Gossipy, misery filled stories of starving artists.
One of the great benefits of living where I do is the opportunity to take in great art. A reasonably short train trip lands me in Manhattan and I'm able to go and gaze at the glories of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the huge draws of the Met are the galleries of paintings by the artists of nineteenth century France and the movement known as Impressionism. Filled with light and colour, these paintings caused mockery from the critics, outrage, and yet were still able to find a market -- and one that has become even more so in the modern world, where Impressionist paintings fetch prices in the millions of dollars.
In this narrative group biography, author Sue Roe explores the lives of the leaders of the Impressionist movement from 1862 to 1886, the most troubled -- and most prolific -- years that these artists shook up the rather staid art world. Each artist is given a bit of a brief biography, and some of the details of their childhood and early careers, along with the women they married and their struggles for either money or recognition or both.
She begins, naturally enough, with Edouard Manet, and his painting, Le Dejeneur sur l'Herbe first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1863, and which caused outrage. It wasn't a biblical or historical subject, or a portrait, or even a landscape. Instead, two modern Parisian men are sitting out of doors on the grass, with a naked woman. And she's being bold about it, staring out at the viewer with a frank and somewhat amused expression. His next painting, Olympia, had the same naked model, this time as a grand courtesan in a modern setting, and this time, the critics really screamed in horror. Other artists were pushing the limits with experimental work that played with light, such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne. Two women would join the Impressionist circle, Berthe Morisot (she would marry Manet's brother in time) and Mary Cassatt. Shunned by the judges of the Paris Salon, they would eventually stage their own exhibitions, with varied success.
What makes this one different is that Roe takes a look at the lives of these people outside of the art. She looks at how they met one another, their marriages and children, how the outside world treated them. Most of her attention is focused on their financial and marital world. The popular idea of an artist struggling and slowly starving in a garret, fighting the world that scorns them, probably grew out of these lives, if Roe's information is any indication. With a few exceptions, nearly every artist in this story is going broke in a big way -- there are vivid details of their private lives, the quiet frustrations of their wives trying to raise their children on nearly nothing, and especially the choice that some of them took to paint more popular paintings that would make them money, and so, survive.
It was this constant focus on the lack money and the descriptions of poverty that really struck me with this nonfiction work. Again and again Roe focuses on the subject, and seems to take delight in describing the misery, from the Franco-Prussian War and the Communard uprising that soon followed, the disputes that Cézanne and his father had over money, and the constant borrowing and pleading for cash. What with all of the whinging going on, I wonder how anyone had time to paint...
And that's the disappointment of this work. The narrative has a very gossipy tone, and Roe continually focuses on the negative aspects of life. After a while, it became rather tedious to read about, and combined with the fact that she had so many leading characters necessarily leads to everyone getting a little piece of the story, and not too much lead time. I came away with a good perspective and idea of the time range of the Impressionist movement, but I also came away with not really knowing a great deal about any of the artists. If I had not already read some fictional and nonfiction works about Manet, Morisot and Cassatt, I would be heartily confused. Too, Roe mentions various paintings and works, but then doesn't have any pictures of them in the two photographic inserts. It all comes across as very confusing in the end, and while the book does have some positive aspects, it's not one that I would recommend for casual reading.
If the reader already has some knowledge of the Impressionists, this would be a good gateway book to spur some interest in more specific artists, but it really doesn't reveal anything new. Along with the two inserts of paintings, small black and white pictures are at the start of each section, along with two maps showing Paris and the surrounding countryside during the period. Plenty of notes and a bibliography and index complete the book.
Overall, this is about a three-four star read. It's worth reading once, but it's also one that I don't think I will reread any time soon. Which is a pity. So this is not a book that I would recommend, despite giving it an overall rating of four stars.
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4: A scholarly and impressive work
It is to Sue Roe's credit that THE PRIVATE LIVES OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS is not a fun or funny book.
Ms. Roe is a serious scholar and she has written a serious work.
Writing a definitive biography of even just one person is a huge and somber undertaking...writing an anthology about an entire discrete group is almost too huge to comprehend.
Yet because PRIVATE LIVES is not fun in no way negates its worth.
Sue Roe has assembled the ultimate work on those artists who coalesced to form the movement now well-loved as "Impressionism."
She explains the history of the movement, and how reviled it had been by the establishment. In the process of this explication, she also tells a great deal about the moment in which this movement came to life, at the precise time of the transformation of Paris from a patchwork of farming communities to a cosmopolitan city.
She does as good a job of detailing the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune as I have read anywhere.
Roe has done enormous research on the personal lives of the most important of the artists, and of their joint struggle to be accepted for the type of imagery they were trying to display.
It was startling to read that the great names of Impressionism considered themselves to be cohorts and supporters of one another.
I didn't have fun reading THE PRIVATE LIVES OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS, but the time spent was worthwhile. The book was everything that I hoped it would be: A true learning experience.
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5: Private?
The title of the book is misleading. Most, like me, would believe that it is about the various affaires des coeurs of the Impressionist painters. But it is far from that. It is an insightful look into the struggles of the impressionist painters during the years of 1860-86; this was before they became famous.
The book covers the lives (intimate or otherwise) of the better-known impressionists such as Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Cézanne, and Pissarro and the not-so-well-known painters who were in their company Berthe Morisot, Frédéric Bazille, Mary Cassatt and Gustave Caillebotte. The author describes how these painters tried to break the rigid moulds of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which controlled the technique and subjects of mainstream painting in France.
The author described many of the better-known and the not-so-well-known paintings in such an anecdotal form that the reader is forced to have a look at those paintings somehow (in a coffee table book or online). She brings alive the characters who had posed for the paintings that give a greater depth to the work.
The author has researched this period well and one not only gets an insight of the lives of these painters but also of the world around them. The reader can literally visualize the gradual realization of Haussman's vision of Paris, or the soirées and evenings spent in cafés. The Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and the siege of Paris are also described in detail - it led to tremendous upheaval in the French society as also the lives of the painters - a large amount of their output was lost during this war and the sense of loss is transferred to the reader.
The author manages to intertwine the lives of the painters - the individuality of each painter is maintained even though all are presented as a collective. Despite the fact that so many characters are being biographed, the author doesn't leave the reader of being overwhelmed with the plurality of characters.
Use of exact addresses and trivial but minute details such as a `thirteen-minute stop for hot chocolate' (238) which Eugène Manet made on way to Paris from Nice. Though the use of French words was rather limited despite the fact that the setting and the painters were French. Most words can be understood from the context - However, some words (cocottes, arrière pensée) do require a bit of looking up to understand the true import of the sentence.
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