Professor%20Alastair%20Wright: List of publications

This book offers a new look at works by notable French artists represented in the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Color reproductions of fifty-eight works—ranging from chalk drawings by Charles François Daubigny and Edgar Degas to woodcuts by Paul Gauguin and lithographs by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—accompany important reconsiderations of well-known works and print series. Essays by five prominent scholars consider the political, social, cultural, and market conditions that governed and motivated printmaking and drawing and examine how key artists contributed to the development of the graphic arts in 19th-century France. The volume concludes with a complete checklist of works included in the accompanying exhibition.

Peintre, dessinateur, sculpteur, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) fascine toujours et encore. Le Centre Pompidou à Paris a présenté une exposition événement qui réunit un ensemble inédit de plus d'une trentaine de paires et de séries, des œuvres peintes provenant des plus grands musées du monde. Pendant près d'un demi-siècle, l'artiste dépeint de mêmes motifs à travers différentes versions, parfois opposées ou symétriques, parfois sous le mode de variations, et selon des modalités plastiques multiples - paires, triptyques, séries, transformations captées par la photographie... Grâce à cette approche originale, à la qualité des reproductions comme par les clés de compréhension qu'offrent les meilleurs spécialistes du sujet, cet ouvrage de référence permet d'entrer dans l'oeuvre de Matisse et d'en découvrir les processus de création.

Maximilien Luce's A Paris Street in 1871 (Fig. 1), exhibited for the first time at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants, has long struck me as strange. Strange because it depicts a historical moment that even in 1905 must already have seemed distant: that of the Paris Commune. Strange, too, because in depicting such an openly political subject, A Paris Street harks back to a tradition of engaged art (and, more broadly, to a set of assumptions about how painting might be politically effective) that must itself already have seemed out of date: like the Commune, a ghost from the past. Although anarchist affiliations were still the norm among the movement's most famous adherents, these ties were no longer often signalled so directly in their painting, which increasingly gravitated towards rather tamer subjects than the still volatile memory of the Commune – the sunlit southern landscapes favoured by Paul Signac, for example – and towards a pictorial experimentation far removed from Luce's dourly representational image. Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté hung just around the corner from Luce's canvas at the Indépendants, and even in 1905 it was clear which way the art-historical wind was blowing.1 Fig. 1. Maximilien Luce, A Paris Street in 1871, 1905, oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. (Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Hervé Lewandowski.) © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 It would be easy to conclude that Luce simply missed the (modernist) boat, that A Paris Street is the sign of nothing more than an artist unable to keep pace with his more adventurous – and, it should be noted, more commercially successful – colleagues. I suspect, though, that Luce was well aware that what he did here was out of time (in every sense), that his painting was deliberately retrospective (even belated), and this with three …

Edges of Empire is a timely reassessment of the history and legacy of Orientalist art and visual culture through its focus on the intersection between modernization, modernism and Orientalism.

This book is the catalogue to an exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Nouveau Muse National de Monaco.

Focusing on the period 1905-1913, this provocative and groundbreaking new book refutes the popular view of Matisse as the painter of relaxed pleasures, the master of decorative line and sensuous color. Alastair Wright discovers a darker, more complex side to Matisse: an artist whose work, caught in the uneasy space between modernism and tradition, was fundamentally engaged with the most pressing of modernity's artistic and ideological debates. Presenting a series of brilliant and highly original analyses of Matisse's most important early paintings, Wright locates the artist within a wider cultural field in which the identities of modernism--and of its viewers--were highly contested. Wright offers a penetrating examination of the public response to Matisse's work, arguing that his early-twentieth-century audience found in his painting a deeply disturbing challenge to contemporary concepts of the self, of the nation, and of the West. This sumptuously illustrated book positions the work of Matisse and a number of his contemporaries in relation to key aspects of modernity--the commodification of the individual, the dislocation of cultural identity, and the effacement of racial boundaries under the pressure of imperial expansion--and provides a compelling account of how these contradictory historical materials fused to give birth to Matisse's modernism. What emerges is a renewed sense of the rich complexity of an artistic practice suspended between the seductive potential of pure color and an always ambivalent engagement with tradition. Tracing the interplay between Matisse's painting and discourses of art and subjectivity, Wright offers a significant new reading of one of the central figures of early-twentieth-century modernism.