Great French Paintings From The Barnes Foundation

The pictures that made history as they traveled around the world on their only exhibition tour: more than a hundred masterpieces of modern French painting from one of the world’s fabled repositories of great art—The Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania—are here published in trade paperback for the first time.

These paintings are the crowning glory of the extraordinary collection assembled in the early twentieth century by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the bold and original collector who established the Foundation in 1922 as a school for the study of art and philosophy. Now, after six decades of limited access to visitors and a ban on color reproduction, the Barnes Foundation welcomes a wider audience both on its premises and through the publication of this magnificent volume, containing the most eagerly awaited set of reproductions in art-book history.

Manet, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rousseau, Soutine, La Fresnaye, Modigliani, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse—the list of artists gives only a hint of the splendors this book contains. Here are major landmarks of modern art, including twenty-four Renoirs encompassing the entire span of his career . . . thirty monumental Cézannes, including bather groups, landscapes, still lifes, and portraits . . . Matisse’s pivotal Bonheur de vivre, Three Sisters Triptych, and world-famous Dance mural (and eighteen other paintings and oil studies) . . . the finest of van Gogh’s six paintings of Joseph-Etienne Roulin . . . Seurat’s celebrated Models . . . The Douanier Rousseau’s strange, unsettling Unpleasant Surprise . . . the tender portrait of young M. Loulou by Gauguin . . . a spectacular cluster of seven early Picassos. And this is only a sampling of the exhilarating visual banquet offered in these pages.

To describe the paintings and relate the achievements of Dr. Barnes as a collector and educator, commentaries and essays have been provided by a dozen notable American and French art historians and curators. Together they provide the historical and aesthetic setting for these glowing jewels of modern art.

For everyone to whom the paintings in the Barnes Foundation have been a legend—unattainable—and for every devotee of great art and beautiful books, this volume will be a joy and a treasure.

With 320 illustrations, 151 in full color, and 18 pages of gatefolds.