Background
Herbert, Robert Louis was born on April 21, 1929 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States.
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( "The miracle of La Grande Jatte is its coincidence of c...)
"The miracle of La Grande Jatte is its coincidence of critical distinction and popular celebration. High, low, mass, and popular cultures meet in mutual delight, continuing to revel in the mysteries of that Parisian Sunday."—from "The Park in the Museum" by Neil Harris "Bedlam," "scandal," and "hilarity" were among the epithets used to describe the effect of what is now considered Georges Seurat's greatest work, and one of the most remarkable paintings of the nineteenth century, when it was first exhibited in Paris in 1886. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, an extensive landscape peopled with over forty figures, took the artist almost two years to complete. This sumptuous book, created to accompany a major exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, provides a fascinating, in-depth examination of the gestation, execution, and influence of Seurat's masterpiece. La Grande Jatte has been part of the Art Institute of Chicago's collection since 1926. Bringing together all known studies and drawings directly related to the painting, this volume provides a visual and contextual survey of Seurat's working methods and aesthetic priorities, as well as the evolutionary process that culminated in his singular achievement. Included are more than fifty-five preparatory works, ranging from rich conté crayon drawings to oil sketches on small wood panels to larger studies painted on canvas. In their quantity, intricacy, and variety, these works reveal a compositional process that harks back to Old Master traditions and methods, which had been largely abandoned by Seurat's immediate predecessors, the Impressionists. The many studies attest to the artist's ambitions for his masterpiece and open up a broader context for understanding the work. Seurat scholar Robert L. Herbert makes new revelations about the painting's relationship to its preparatory studies, stressing Seurat's empirical craftmanship. He compares La Grande Jatte to paintings by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Signac and analyzes the ways that twentieth-century critics, including Meyer Schapiro, T.J. Clark, and Linda Nochlin, have viewed the picture. He proposes that the enduring fascination of the famous canvas comes from Seurat's mixture of fashion and irony. Also giving new perspectives in this book, the noted cultural historian Neil Harris charts how and why La Grande Jatte attained its revered status at the Art Institute of Chicago and throughout the United States. Additionally, the exhibition's cocurators examine the painting's place in the museum's collection. Essays by Art Institute conservators show how Seurat transferred and altered figures from studies to final canvas and elucidate the exact nature of his pigments and brushwork. Color scientist Roy Berns traces the efforts to digitally recapture the original hues of Seurat's time-altered masterpiece. A landmark publication, this book provides dazzling proof of why La Grande Jatte is among the most frequently reproduced paintings in the world and why it continues to fascinate scholars and art lovers today.
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(First Printing. 7 1/2" x 10", 92 page catalog for an exhi...)
First Printing. 7 1/2" x 10", 92 page catalog for an exhibit held at The Art Institute of Chicago and MOMA in New York. This catalog is in very good condition. Tanning and dust soiling to the wrappers and spine. Rubs to the corners. The interior pages are clean. 153 works are represented inside.
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(Georges Seurat, painter of Sunday on the Island of La Gra...)
Georges Seurat, painter of Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, had a meteoric career that ended in 1891 with his death at age 31. In this generously illustrated book, the leading specialist on Seurat examines the entire range of the artist's work, focusing on individual paintings and drawings and interpreting the personal and social meanings of their subjects. Robert L. Herbert examines closely Seurat's early oil panels of rural and suburban settings, early drawings of Parisians at work and leisure, and later canvases and drawings of cafe-concerts and circuses. Showing that Seurat's work drew on classical tradition as well as on popular arts, Herbert reevaluates the artist's painting technique and argues that individual pictures reveal artistic craft and trial and error rather than a 'scientific' nature. And he demonstrates that although Seurat's drawings and paintings have striking formal structures, they are not 'abstract', but rather poetic distillations of social and psychological meanings. This collection of the most influential of Herbert's writings on Seurat, long out of print, bear out the praise he has received for 'his ability to mix a deep knowledge of paintings and drawings as physical objects with an acute awareness of the way they embody ideas and can be understood as social documents' (Jack Flam, New York Review of Books). This attractive book will appeal both to the general reader and to the student of French nineteenth-century art.
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(A volume which embodies an entire generation of scholarsh...)
A volume which embodies an entire generation of scholarship on the artist. Seurat's brief but brilliant career is traced from his early academic drawings of the 1870s to the paintings of popular entertainments and the serene landscapes of his final years.
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(In this magnificently illustrated book, Robert L. Herbert...)
In this magnificently illustrated book, Robert L. Herbert, author of the acclaimed Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society, presents a new interpretation of Monet's beautiful seascapes of the Normandy coast. Discussing more than fifty works, Herbert shows how these splendid pictures of Etretat and other resorts reflect the dialogue between the modern city and pre-modern nature that underlay tourism. Interweaving the colorful history of sea resorts, stylistic analysis, details of Monet's life, and reflections on the marketing of his art, this book offers a fascinating new perspective on some of the artist's most beloved works. Herbert points out that in early paintings at Sainte-Adresse and Trouville Monet represented vacationers and resort leisure, but when he returned to the Normandy coast in the early 1880s, he painted lonely views that eliminated all signs of tourism. He shows that generations of vacationers seeking these views had transformed fishing villages into resorts, even as they wished to preserve the illusions of a pre-modern seacoast. Monet's modernity lay in the production of neo-romantic myths, illusions of spontaneous responses to untouched nature that were welcomed by Parisian galleries and international collectors. At the same time, Herbert notes, modernity is also found in Monet's evocative brushwork and color and in his dramatic bird's-eye views, which speak to modern culture's search for personal release from the workplace.
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(Book by Herbert, Robert L.)
Book by Herbert, Robert L.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670407275/?tag=2022091-20
(In this magnificently illustrated book, Robert L. Herbert...)
In this magnificently illustrated book, Robert L. Herbert, author of the acclaimed Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society, presents a new interpretation of Monet's beautiful seascapes of the Normandy coast. Discussing more than fifty works, Herbert shows how these splendid pictures of Etretat and other resorts reflect the dialogue between the modern city and pre-modern nature that underlay tourism. Interweaving the colorful history of sea resorts, stylistic analysis, details of Monet's life, and reflections on the marketing of his art, this book offers a fascinating new perspective on some of the artist's most beloved works. Herbert points out that in early paintings at Sainte-Adresse and Trouville Monet represented vacationers and resort leisure, but when he returned to the Normandy coast in the early 1880s, he painted lonely views that eliminated all signs of tourism. He shows that generations of vacationers seeking these views had transformed fishing villages into resorts, even as they wished to preserve the illusions of a pre-modern seacoast. Monet's modernity lay in the production of neo-romantic myths, illusions of spontaneous responses to untouched nature that were welcomed by Parisian galleries and international collectors. At the same time, Herbert notes, modernity is also found in Monet's evocative brushwork and color and in his dramatic bird's-eye views, which speak to modern culture's search for personal release from the workplace.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300068816/?tag=2022091-20
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(A volume which embodies an entire generation of scholarsh...)
A volume which embodies an entire generation of scholarship on the artist. Seurat's brief but brilliant career is traced from his early academic drawings of the 1870s to the paintings of popular entertainments and the serene landscapes of his final years.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810964104/?tag=2022091-20
Herbert, Robert Louis was born on April 21, 1929 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States.
Bachelor, Wesleyan University, 1951; Master of Arts, Yale University, 1954; Doctor of Philosophy, Yale University, 1957.
Assistant instructor Yale University, New Haven, 1954—1955, acting instructor, 1955—1956, instructor, 1956-1960, assistant professor, 1960-1963, associate professor, 1963-1966, professor, 1966-1974, Robert Lehman professor history of art, since 1974, director undergraduate studies, 1962—1964, acting chairman department, 1965—1966, chairman department, 1965-1968. Professor art Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 1990—1997, Andrew W. Mellon professor of humanities, emeritus, since 1997. Slade professor Oxford University, 1978.
(Sixteen of the 20th century's leading artistic innovators...)
(Georges Seurat, painter of Sunday on the Island of La Gra...)
( "The miracle of La Grande Jatte is its coincidence of c...)
(A volume which embodies an entire generation of scholarsh...)
(A volume which embodies an entire generation of scholarsh...)
(Ruskin was the most important aesthetic arbiter of the 19...)
(In this magnificently illustrated book, Robert L. Herbert...)
(In this magnificently illustrated book, Robert L. Herbert...)
(Book by Herbert, Robert L.)
(First Printing. 7 1/2" x 10", 92 page catalog for an exhi...)
Member American Academy Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, College Art Assn (chairman sessions modern art, 1965, 1971, 1981, 1995. Frank Jewett Mather award, 1963, Distinguished Teaching of Art History award, 1982, Lifetime Achievement in Art Writing award, 2007).
Married; 3 children.
