Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Best known for Arcadian mural paintings peopled by somnambulist figures inhabiting a mysterious, classicized landscape, French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98) had a liberating influence on Gauguin, Seurat, Rodin, Denis and Picasso. This valuable, beautiful catalog of a retrospective at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam allows one to understand why Puvis's impact was so great. Though his murals are notably absent from the exhibit, this volume, featuring 98 color and 102 black-and-white plates, highlights his brooding, sensitive portraits, myth-laden fantasies, delicate watercolors, powerful religious dramas, wry caricatures, nude sketches, allegories and other easel paintings that evoke a sense of solitude, longing and alienation. Guest curator Price ably delineates the development of Puvis's mural esthetic, detects repercussions of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune in his work, and tracks his pictorial idiom to classical, Byzantine and Pre-Raphaelite sources. (Sept.)