cover image The Post-Impressionists: A Retrospective

The Post-Impressionists: A Retrospective

Martha Kapos. Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, $75 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-88363-793-7

W. H. Auden's essay on Van Gogh as a deeply religious painter, Marcel Proust's musings on Claude Monet's aesthetic and writings by Meyer Schapiro, Virginia Woolf, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Paul Klee are among the selections in this magnificently illustrated documentary chronicle of Post-Impressionism. While focusing on Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat and Matisse, Kapos, who teaches art history in London, defines Post-Impressionism to include Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Edvard Munch and Andre Derain. Using artists' letters, diary excerpts, reviews, interviews and articles spliced with 119 superb color plates and scores of photographs, prints and drawings, the author makes a good case for post-impressionism not as a reaction to impressionism, but rather as its counterpart, a second flood in the modern movement toward abstraction and the symbolic function of forms. The often astonishing directness and clarity of the post-impressionists' use of color comes across with special force in the color reproductions. (Nov.)