Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Early Modern

Both familiar and surprising, the paintings reproduced in this glorious album include celebrated pictures like Cezanne's Card Players as well as less well-known works by Renoir, Braque, Matisse, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Monet, Seurat, Manet, Chaim Soutine and others. Cataloguing an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the volume presents some 100 masterpieces from the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa. Highlights include Picasso's Acrobat and Young Harlequin , Gauguin's strong exotic portrait of a child, M. Loulou, and Henri Rousseau's Unpleasant Surprise, an allegory depicting a hunter shooting a bear. In the introductory essays Wattenmaker, an art historian with the Smithsonian, and other scholars pay homage to farsighted collector Albert Barnes (1872-1951), who exhibited European works alongside their African, Islamic and Native Amerian inspirations, thereby anticipating multiculturalism. BOMC alternate. (May)