Tango Bar Sign, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Demetrio Carrasco

Photographic Print

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Digitally Printed on Archival Photographic Paper resulting in vivid, pure color and exceptional detail that is suitable for museum or gallery display.

Romance in Red II

Alfred Gockel

Art Print

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An offset lithography printing press gives this fine art print its vivid and sharp appearance. The standardized printing plates and proofing process guarantee that each print displays colors precisely as the artist or publisher intended. Produced on medium weight cover stock, this high-quality reproduction is coated with a silken finish that protects the inks and creates an elegant look. The versatile art print strikes a balance between quality and affordability.

Two Girls Drawing

Pierre Auguste Renoir

Giclee Print

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The last Man died, as it were, with the XVIIIth century; the Individual strove to subsist in Romanticism; and Impressionism appeared to be seized with a desire to give him his quietus, -preceded and aided by Caricature, supported clandestinely by the dissolving action of such pitiless observers as Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, who set forth man’s defects and vices. Man, in Manet’s eyes, was but an excuse for showing his wonderful skill as a painter.

In the case of Monet and Pissarro and Sisley, he was of the value of a tree-trunk, or a boat on the Seine; he played his little inglorious part as a mere touch of colour in the diffuse whole of a landscape. Nature became void of humanity, — and vegetation took on an air of ennui at being without a master and without a goal. Renoir was the only real impressionist ( Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec being of that school only through a spirit of comradeship) who kept in contact with humanity.

More than that: he interested himself in various types of humanity. The humanity of the people and that of the middle-classes. Le Cabaret de Mère Anthony, the scenes depicted at La Grenouillère, Le Moulin de la Galette, Mme Charpentier et ses Enfants, the behaviour of men in town and country, — all these, from a certain point of view, are human documents; and if these pictures, after some catastrophe, were the only remaining vestiges of society, they would suffice to reconstitute an epoch. They were of that period when Renoir was in the midst of and participating in its social life, and very naturally he came to examine his fellow-citizens very closely.

Throughout his life — and in response to his attitude of the moment — he depicted them under different aspects. He regarded the human being in his relation to nature; he examined him in his relation to his fellow-men: first of all the alliance between man and woman, then man as he is among other men, again when he is with his family, or in a restricted, intimate circle. And he was to end by seeing him merely as a creature in the midst of creation as a whole.

One may say that there is not a work by Renoir which shows indifference towards man. Whereas Pissarro, for example, effaces all trace of man, even to the very fruit of his work, Renoir, on the other hand, always reminds us of his presence: the landscape is a framework for his pleasure and his revels, an accompaniment to the beauty of his form, or an opportunity for him to bury himself amidst nature’s charms. The principal personage in Renoir’s pictures is never the Seine, or the grass; it is the boating-man standing on the bridge facing the river and the sails, or swiftly sculling on the water; we see the dancer, or the spectator; we see friend talking with friend. During the whole of Renoir’s impressionist period we find this feeling of man’s domination over nature or woman, but at the same time we note that of love: the woman and the child who make their radiant progress amidst the field of weeds and flowers are in unison with the glory of the humble plants of the meadows.

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Fishing in the Spring, Pont de Clichy

Vincent Van Gogh

Giclee Print

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The very nature of abstract art might lead us to suppose that it stands at an even further remove from Impressionism than Cubism did. The fact is, however, that by reacting against cubist rationalism and reverting to the basic forms and forces that appeal to the human instinct, abstract art has contributed to focus the attention of the younger generation of painters on the master of Giverny.

The first wave of abstractionism unleashed by Cubism was based, it is true, on a rational, intellectualized system of symbols. But it was followed by a purer form of abstraction embodying a very different conception of art. The latter, based not on the reasoning mind but on the senses, set out to give plastic expression to the blind, instinctive forces and uncontrollable pulsions that lie beneath the surface of consciousness. Since this is the prevailing trend of art today, it is only natural that the younger generation of painters should be more susceptible than their elders to a purely sensorial art; only natural, therefore, that they should see Monet’s last works in a new light.

To them the great Water Lilies recently withdrawn from the seclusion of the studio at Giverny have come as a revelation. In these canvases, executed when Monet’s eyes were clouded by cataract, they have found, as it were, the sponsorship of their own experiments in “abstract expressionism.” But the question arises: may not this apparent sponsorship be simply fortuitous, inasmuch as the works on which it is based were the result, involuntary perhaps, of failing eyesight? To this there is only one reply: after the operation which partially restored his sight, Monet preserved the canvases in question instead of destroying them, and it was his lifelong habit to destroy every canvas that failed to satisfy him.

Furthermore, the keen interest he took in these experiments in near-abstraction, in which the very shape of objects melts away in modulations of colors, is confirmed by his deliberate resumption of them after his recovery. It is easy to identify the canvases executed before his operation, when the cataract had spread an amber-colored film over the crystalline lens of his eyes: these canvases are not only woolly in outline but abnormally yellow in tone. Those painted after the operation, on the contrary, have an almost acid freshness of tone. Now some of the latter group, some of the most characteristic among them in fact (whose documented dating, moreover, is unimpugnable), nevertheless retain a haziness of outline which renders the subjects unrecognizable. These works can only be regarded as experiments in abstraction deliberately undertaken.

Among these irrefutable examples of deliberate abstraction is a Garden in Bloom, in green and acid pink, whose subject is only recognizable by reference to a second version, painted by Monet at the same time, from the same spot, but with normal eyesight. The composition, angle of vision, lighting and color scheme of the two pictures are identical. The only difference is the handling, the focus, if you will: clean-cut in one, blurred in the other. Without reference to the first, which corresponds to it in every particular, save handling, the second fails to convey any figurative impression at all; it is, purely and simply, a magnificent symphony of colors.

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The Marina at Argenteuil, 1872

Claude Monet

Giclee Print

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Argenteuil and Impressionism

The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (July 18, 1870) found Monet at Le Havre, where he remained as that fateful summer wore on. On September 2 came the German breakthrough at Sedan; Napoleon III capitulated and on September 4 the Third Republic was proclaimed. Leaving Camille and little Jean in Normandy, Monet sailed for England in September. Bazille volunteered for the Zouaves and joined a line regiment in August (he was killed in action at Beaune-la-Rolande on November 28).

Manet, as a confirmed republican, waited for the Empire to collapse and then enlisted (as did Degas) in an artillery unit of the National Guard. Pissarro, living at Louveciennes, found himself in the path of the advancing Germans and fled to England, leaving behind hundreds of his pictures together with many that Monet had stored with him. Torn from their frames and used as floor-mats and aprons by the Prussian soldiery, who turned his house into the regimental butchershop, all were destroyed — an irreparable loss, depriving us of by far the greater part of Pissarro’s pre-1870 output and a substantial part of Monet’s. To these losses, in the case of Monet, must be added the many canvases which he himself ripped to shreds in fits of despair or to prevent their being seized by his creditors.

Things went no better for him in London than in France. The English public showed complete indifference to his work. He submitted some pictures to an exhibition at the Royal Academy, but they were rejected. He had the good luck, however, to run into Daubigny, who introduced him to his own dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, also a refugee in London, who had opened a gallery at 158 Bond Street. This meeting was providential not only for Monet but also for Pissarro, who met Durand-Ruel at the same time. “Without him we’d have starved to death in London,” he wrote later. But in spite of his enthusiasm for their work and his persistence in bringing it to public notice, Durand-Ruel failed to sell a single one of their pictures in England. He nevertheless went on buying canvases from Monet and Pissarro, and thus enabled them to keep afloat.

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Red Boats, Argenteuil

Claude Monet

Giclee Print

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Series of Regattas: Sailboat at Argenteuil

In the series of Regattas, painted from his boat, slight stylistic differences are discernible from picture to picture. These reveal a rather subtle line of evolution, but a significant one.

Sailboat at Argenteuil (Bravington Collection), tacking with all sails set across the Seine, represents the next step after Pleasure Boats (May Collection). It is handled like the latter, with the paint swept on broadly in thin coats, but the strokes of the brush are no longer quite so separate and distinct as they are in Pleasure Boats; instead of being juxtaposed and contrasting with each other, planes tend to fuse and intermingle. Regatta in Fine Weather (Caillebotte Collection, Louvre) marks a further stage.

Reflections on the water are no longer rendered in molten dabs of color, but in straight, horizontal, distinctly separate brushstrokes. These strokes, however, are larger than those in Regatta in Gray Weather (Camondo Collection, Louvre). Here, in order to render choppy water ruffled by the wind, Monet dabbed on his paints in small, flickering touches that convey an effect of movement and agitation, and though motivated by circumstances (i.e. the state of the weather) they nevertheless mark a further step in his increasing concern with effects of atmospheric vibration.

In each of these pictures he never failed to adapt his technique to the nature of the scene before him. Sky, water, trees, sails, houses, no two of these things are treated in the same way. The brushstroke is adjusted in every case to the visual impression, which in turn depends not only on light conditions but on the form and texture of the object or element in question.

During the summer Monet was so completely engrossed in nautical subjects that he apparently found time for only one rural landscape: Springtime (Berlin), a masterpiece of sunny airiness, painted with the utmost simplicity in flat colors. At the approach of winter his thoughts turned again to the open country and he made some snowscapes, mostly handled in thin coats of modulated color (for example, Train in the Snow, Musée Marmottan, Paris, dated 1875), sometimes in a thick impasto, but always smoothly brushed on, without any division of color.

As a result of the severe winters of the early seventies (borne out by his snowscapes), Monet felt the pinch more than ever and, to make things worse, there seemed to be no prospect of better times ahead, for the “incomprehensible” novelty of his painting only widened the breach between him and the public. With his stout physique Monet could bear the hardships of cold and hunger, but his wife’s frail health was permanently injured. His painter friends were Monet’s only resource, but the whole group was faring badly.

All About Claude Monet

Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida

Toni Frissell

Premium Poster

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Shakira: Woman Child in the Promised Land

Colombian superstar recounts her rise to the top of pop.

She’s hot, she’s talented, and she’s one of the few people ever to use the word ‘laundry’ in an album title. But what�s it really like being Shakira? As VH1′s Being prepared to take a unique look at the Colombian crossover queen, Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll sat down to talk fame, family, and the process of learning English. As the chat demonstrates, there’s much more to this young songwriter than meets the eye.

So what’s it really like being Shakira?

Shakira: Sometimes I feel that Shakira is an old woman trapped in the body of a 24-year-old girl. Sometimes I feel that there’s a baby inside me that hasn�t grown up yet. So Shakira can be a very confusing character!

Why do you think you’re like an old woman inside a young woman’s body?

Shakira: Sometimes I feel full of theories. I don’t necessarily go through the experience of something, because I’ve already decided what the results are going to be. I don’t go out too much at night. I don’t visit too many clubs. I like to go out sometimes and just observe how people behave. When I was 15 years old I preferred dancing to watching. Now I’m on the other side.

So where do you get inspiration for your songs? By watching people?

Shakira: I’ve always been curious about the way humans react and live and behave. That’s why I like to observe others. It inspires me and [fuels] my songs. Imagination also plays an important role. All writers have a little bit of a liar or exaggerator in them. All women exaggerate, and I’m no exception. So when I write, I exaggerate a bit.

All About Shakira

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