Shelfology Book Pairing

Black and White

by Alice Neel

Alice Neel's remarkable drawings are intimate explorations of her personal life: her loves and her family, her friends, people she met in New York and the art world. Spontaneous and dynamic, the works on paper in Black and White provide insight into her environments, exterior and interior. In them she positions universal themes -- motherhood, death, longing -- within the sphere of her private existence and her social unconscious. While a handful of the drawings are urban cityscapes and others are domestic settings, the majority are portraits. And when Neel, the self-named Collector of Souls, composed a portrait, she never posed her sitters. Instead, she studied and spoke intimately with her subjects as they unconsciously assumed their most natural attitude, which she believed exhorted all their character and life experience. The images she created, full of distinctly innate gestures, stemmed from her succinct understanding and assembled memory, and coalesced into a unique impression of a person.

Beneath the Surface

by Paul Smith

The art of the Impressionists is beloved of experts and non-experts alike. Paul Smith reexamines this popular group of artists in light of recent scholarship on the social context of late nineteenth-century France. He begins with Edouard Manet, often seen as a forerunner of Impressionism: a sophisticated, detached, ironic observer of the social scene in Paris. He then examines various key artists of the Impressionist movement - Renoir, Degas, Morisot, Cassatt, Monet, Pissarro - to offer a lively reading of such topics as the role of women in Impressionism, the influence of industrialization, the invention of modern color theory, the social position of the artist, and the use of psychoanalytic theory in the understanding of art. The result is to make this very familiar art movement seem fresh and new. To conclude, he proposes Cezanne's art as the culmination of, and heir to, the Impressionist experiment.