J. Paul Getty Museum

Paul Cézanne

Carol M. Armstrong

In the last years of his life, Paul Cezanne produced a stunning series of watercolours, many of them still lifes. Still Life with Blue Pot is one of these late masterpieces; it is now in the collection of the Getty Museum. In Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong places this great painting within the context of Cezanne's artistic and psychological development and of the history of the genre of still life in France. Still life - like the medium of watercolour - was traditionally considered to be low in the hierarchy of French academic painting. watercolours that contained echoes of grand landscapes and even historical paintings in the manner of Poussin - the highest of classical art forms. In so doing, he charged his still lifes with new meanings; both in terms of his own notoriously difficult personality and in the way he used the genre to explore the very process of looking at, and creating, art. Carol Armstrong's study - published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum from October 12, 2004 to January 2, 2005 - is a fascinating exploration of the brilliant watercolour paintings that brought Cezanne's career to a complex, and triumphant, conclusion. The book includes new photographic studies of the Getty's painting that allow the reader to encounter this great watercolour as never before - in its full richness and detail.

Still Life in Watercolors

Cézanne in the Studio

Michele Robecchi

Ori Gersht

Julie Joyce

Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, May 20-Sept. 4, 2011.

Lost in Time

In Odd Man Out, Carol Armstrong offers an important study of Edgar Degas's work and reputation. Armstrong grapples with contradictory portrayals of Degas as odd man out within the modernist canon: he was a realist whom realists rejected; a storyteller in pictures who did not satisfy novelist-critics; a painter of modern life who was not a modernist; a member of the impressionist group who was no impressionist. Armstrong confronts these and other paradoxes by analyzing the critical vocabularies used to describe Degas's work. By reading several groups of the artist's images through the lens of a sequence of critical texts, Armstrong shows how our critical and popular expectations of Degas are overturned and subverted. This is a reprint of the book first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1991.

Carol M. Armstrong

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