John Singer Sargent's approach to watercolor was unconventional. His confidently bold, dense strokes and loosely defined forms startled critics and fellow practitioners alike. Enhanced by biographical and technical essays, and lavishly illustrated with 175 color reproductions, this publication introduces readers to the full sweep of Sargent's accomplishments in this medium.
With vibrant colors and imaginative backgrounds, Van Gogh's affectionate renderings of an entire family underscore his love of portraitureVincent van Gogh once wrote, "What I'm most passionate about...is the portrait, the modern portrait." This passion flourished between 1888 and '89 when, during his stay in Arles, in the South of France, the artist created a number of portraits of a neighboring family that had agreed to sit for him. The family included the local postman Joseph Roulin; his wife, Augustine; and their three children, Armand, Camille and Marcelle. Over the course of his year in Arles, the artist created an astonishing 26 painted portraits of the family members, both in groups and individually, as well as multiple drawings.Van Gogh's tender relationship with the postman and his family and his groundbreaking portrayals of them are at the heart of this book, the first dedicated to the Roulin portraits. Drawing on letters from the artist, archival material, contemporary criticism and technical studies, The Roulin Family Portraits features insightful essays on Van Gogh's practice, his beliefs about portraiture, his personal relationship with the Roulins and his admiration for his contemporaries as well as 17th-century Dutch portraitists.Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) began his painting career in his late twenties, influenced first by his work as a missionary in a mining region of Belgium, and later by his exposure to Impressionism while living in Paris. His bright signature style emerged after relocating to the South of France, where he produced more than 2,000 artworks in just over a decade.
A glorious trove of miniature art across eras and mediums-from ancient Egypt to the present, from netsuke to medieval shrinesIntricate and appealing, curious and uncanny, miniature works of art exert surprising power. Over thousands of years and across cultures, artists and artisans have created small objects for many purposes: tiny gold amulets of ancient Egyptian gods to protect the wearer; portable European medieval shrines made of precious materials to hold the relics of saints; English and American miniature painted portraits to keep loved ones close; Dutch dollhouse furnishings to display the maker's skill and the owner's social standing; pocket-size tools and globes from the age of exploration; Japanese netsuke carved in the shape of auspicious animals; and everyday objects transformed into statement jewelry by contemporary makers. Tiny Treasures looks closely at more than 75 fascinating miniature objects from across the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exploring their meaning and purpose along with their often dazzling workmanship, and showing that the human impulse to create on a small scale can produce compelling masterpieces.
"Taking a new approach to the work of the ever-popular Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), this major exhibition explores in detail his impact on other artists, both during his lifetime and beyond. Throughout a career of more than 70 years, Hokusai experimented with a wide range of styles and subjects, producing landscapes such as the instantly recognizable Great Wave and Red Fuji (both about 1830-31), nature studies known as: bird-and-flower pictures, and depictions of women, heroes, and monsters. The exhibition brings together over 90 woodblock prints, paintings, and illustrated books by Hokusai with some 170 works by his teachers, students, rivals, and admirers. These unique juxtapositions demonstrate Hokusai's influence through time and space, seen in works by, among others, his daughter Katsushika, his contemporaries Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, the 19th-century French Japonistes, and modern and contemporary artists including Loèis Mailou Jones, Yayoi Kusama, John Cederquist, and Yoshitomo Nara. Exhibition: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA (26.03.-16.07.2023)"--
Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 17-July 25, 2022.
The Rise of the Industrial Designer. How design made America modern masterpieces of furniture, metal ware and plastics from the early 20th century
A concise introduction to a premier collection of prints and drawings, from the Renaissance to todayOne of the oldest forms of artistic expression, drawing flows most directly and personally from the artistâ¿s hand. Whether quickly outlining a figure with a charcoal line or capturing the play of light and shade with watercolor, drawings allow viewers to experience the act of creation in an immediate and intimate way. Printmaking, derived from drawing, offers a wealth of visually distinctive techniques, from bold woodcuts to delicate engravings, from shadowy aquatints to brightly colored screen prints. This volume selects more than 100 examples from more than six centuries of European and American drawings and prints in the distinguished collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Presenting works by artists ranging from early masters such as Albrecht Dÿrer to contemporary printmakers such as Tara Donovan, arranged by theme and accompanied by illuminating texts, it invites readers to explore the creative range of prints and drawings, and of their makers.
Lady Murasaki's 'Tale of Genji' has delighted readers for more than 1,000 years and inspired writers to create numerous parodies. Artists have responded with a rich parallel tradition illustrating the courtly intrigues, love affairs and shifting alliances of the epic novel, as well as its retellings. This lavishly illustrated volume explores interpretations by master printmakers such as Kunisada, as well as Hiroshige, Suzuki Harunobu and Chobunsai Eishi, bringing the characters to life in dramatic woodblock prints from the peerless collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. With insightful commentary from a leading Japanese print scholar, this book invites readers to explore the colorful world of 'The Tale of Genji' and its visual afterlife.
The diverse and sometimes hidden stories of the American experience told by quilts and bedcovers from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Presents the best of the collection of early European painting and sculpture held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Highlights from one of the world's most impressive private collections of Dutch Golden Age masterpieces
This newly updated edition of the definitive guide to the MFA's most enduring masterpieces provides an enticing introduction to a collection that circles the globe and spans thousands of years. Featuring more than 500 works of art - from Native American ceramics to European silver, Egyptian funerary arts to Warhol silkscreens, alongside world-renowned paintings and sculpture, all reproduced in vibrant colour - this guide invites readers and visitors alike to experience the surprise, delight and inspiration offered by the collections of a major museum.
Born in Italy, trained in Paris and a resident of London, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) became Boston's favorite painter in the 1880s. His commissions from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to decorate its new building's grand staircase and rotunda resulted in one of Sargent's last and most ambitious works. Sargent regarded the entire space as a giant canvas and brought together all the pictorial, decorative and architectural elements with a painter's skill and vision. This compact volume offers a guide to the murals and their surroundings, elucidating their allegorical subjects drawn from classical mythology to emphasize the museum's role as the guardian of fine arts.
Among private collections of fine photography, the Lane Collection stands out as one of the most remarkable. Begun in the 1960s and still ongoing, the collection shines not only for its wealth of top-quality prints by the great modernist triumvirate of Ansel Adams, Charles Sheeler and Edward Weston (including the most important single holding of Adams' work), but also for its breadth. This volume presents 120 photographic masterpieces from the Lane Collection, ranging from William Henry Fox Talbot to the Starn twins, and including along the way work by Arbus, Brancusi, Bravo, Cunningham, Frank, Fuss, Goldin, Kertesz, Lange, Michals, Modotti, Morell, Penn, Steichen, Strand, Sudek and nearly 50 others. The keynote essay by Lyle Rexer trains an acute eye on images from the collection, defining the vision behind this magnificent grouping. But it is the images themselves that place this among the most significant photography books of the year.
Some 120 masterpieces of furniture, silver, glass, medals, and sculpture are featured, including such monuments as Paul Revere's Liberty Bowl, furniture by Charles Eames, and crafts by Sam Maloof and Judy McKie.
Sarah E. Thompson is Curator of Japanese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Erica E. Hirshler is Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has been at the forefront in presenting pre-Columbian artifacts as part of art history rather than in the context of natural history or archaeology. The artworks featured in this volume exemplify the aesthetics and supreme craftsmanship of the peoples of the ancient Americas in pictorial pottery, sumptuous gold body adornments, and luxury textiles.
The life of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) is one of the richest and most mythic in the history of Western art. Abandoning a career in banking, a family and his homeland, in the last decade of the nineteenth century he sailed from France to the South Seas to seek a life "in ecstasy, in peace and for art." During his years in Tahiti, Gauguin brought forth a wealth of astonishing paintings, culminating in this monumental meditation on what he called the "ever-present riddle" of human existence posed in the work's title. This compact introduction to Gauguin's masterpiece explores its relation to European models as well as to the artist's own companion pieces.
Karsh: A Biography in Images gives an overview of the photographer's career, from his beginnings in theater to his renowned portraits of the rich and famous.
Evocative photographs of a major archaeological expedition from the last century, conveying the effort and excitement of discovery and the austere beauty of the desert landscape. Specially trained Egyptian photographers were an integral part of the pioneering Harvard-MFA expedition during the first half of the twentieth century. Their photographs documented the excavations with thousands of images, as the riches of a great ancient civilization in northern Sudan were uncovered. The best of these photographs bring to life the dramatic landscapes of the Nile Valley, the excitement of archaeological discovery, and the artistry of the photographers who recorded it all.
An authoritative and beautifully illustrated history of the innovative, colourful and finely crafted Arts and Crafts jewelry created by a circle of artists in the first decades of the 20th century. Belief in the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, which held that art and beauty could instill morality and inspire joy, united a vibrant and active community of jewelry makers - along with artists, craftspeople, scholars and critics and patrons - at the turn of the 20th century in Boston. Frank Gardner Hale, who trained in England with founders of the movement, became the most prominent and prolific creator of works of wearable art, helping to define the 'Boston look' characterized by bold use of colored stones and brilliant enamels; refined and delicate settings; and exquisite design and craftsmanship, conceived and executed by a single craftsman. A leading figure in the community of jewelers, and an advocate for the Society of Arts and Crafts, Hale influenced many other important makers, among them Josephine Hartwell Shaw, Edward Everett Oakes, Margaret Rogers and Elizabeth Copeland. This book, the first in-depth study of the subject, reproduces dozens of ornaments in dazzling colour, accompanied by design drawings from the extensive Frank Gardner Hale archive at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. These drawings provide insight into the works' transformation from two to three dimensions and represent rare renderings of many pieces of jewelry that are now lost. The authoritative text brings together scholars of jewelry history and American design to explore how Hale and his contemporaries expressed Arts and Crafts principles in the creation of jewels of enduring allure.
A stunning stained glass window becomes a lens through which to view the career of Louis Comfort Tiffany and intersecting arcs of art and design in America. The story of the Parakeets stained glass window - from national and international recognition to years of obscurity, followed by a return to the limelight - parallels the public reception of the art of its maker, Louis Comfort Tiffany, who had one of the most recognized names in American art at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a story of artistic ambition and experimentation, of nationalist pride and promotion, and of the capricious nature of public opinion and the art market. A careful study of the fabrication, imagery, and life of the window offers an intimate look into the legacy of Tiffany, as well as the nineteenth-century revival of the lesser-known medium of stained glass, which some argue was the United States' first major contribution to the international art world.
Takashi Murakami's irreverent, pop culture-infused art has made him one of the most recognized Japanese artists today. His bright, contemporary boisterousness, however, belies his deep scholarship and engagement with traditional Japanese art. Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics presents key examples of Murakami's work alongside a rich selection of Japanese masterpieces spanning several centuries and arranged here according to concepts laid out by his mentor and foil, leading Japanese art historian Nobuo Tsuji. Beautifully illustrated with Tsuji's selections from the pre-eminent Japanese art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as some of the Murakami's best known works of painting and sculpture, the combination of old and new in this groundbreaking volume enriches our understanding of each, and ultimately shows us how contemporary art can be seen as part of a continuum or lineage.
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