"Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, today astonishing sums are paid for their paintings. Their dazzling works are familiar to even the most casual art lovers--but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people? Sue Roe's colorful, lively, poignant, and superbly researched biography, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, follows an extraordinary group of artists into their Paris studios, down the rural...

"A dazzling portrait of Paris's forgotten artist and cabaret star, whose incandescent life asks us to see the history of modern art in new ways. In freewheeling 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse captivated as a nightclub performer, sold out gallery showings of her paintings, starred in Surrealist films, and shared drinks and ideas with the likes of Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp. Her best-selling memoir-featuring an introduction by Ernest Hemingway-made...

In the fateful year of 1913, events in New York and Paris launched a great public rivalry between the two most consequential artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The New York Armory Show art exhibition unveiled Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, a "sensation of sensations" that prompted Americans to declare Duchamp the leader of cubism, the voice of modern art. In Paris, however, the cubist revolution was reaching...

"The true story of an audacious resistance campaign undertaken by an unlikely pair: two French women -- Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe -- who drew on their skills as Parisian avant-garde artists to write and distribute wicked insults against Hitler and calls to desert, a PSYOPs tactic known as "paper bullets," designed to demoralize Nazi troops occupying their adopted home of Jersey in the British Channel Islands"--

"When Henri Matisse was a boy, he drew pictures everywhere. And when he grew up, he became a famous artist whose paintings were beloved around the world. Then late in life, a serious illness confined Henri to just his bed and a wheelchair. But amazingly, from there he created some of his finest works, the enormous and breathtaking paper cut-outs."--Jacket flap.

The story of the first European artist to paint life among the Indians and colonists in the harsh and hostile New World. Illustrated.

Introduces the life and work of Claude Monet, discussing his early years, life in London and various parts of France, and development as a painter.

This volume is a biography of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, Picasso is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. In this highly critical portrait, the author paints Picasso as a wretchedly flawed genius, sadistic and treacherous,...

Presents the life and work of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century French artist Henri Matisse, imagining his art-inspired childhood and growth into becoming one of the most admired artists in the world.