An engaging and accessible introduction to one of the 20th century’s greatest and most enigmatic artists This richly illustrated publication explores the full career of the hugely influential and endlessly fascinating French-American artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). A pioneer whose creative output was predicated on a fundamental questioning of what art is, Duchamp is well known despite remaining mysterious as an artist, owing to his elusive persona and the unconventional nature of his work. Focusing on the world-renowned Duchamp collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Essential Duchamp tells the artist’s story through four key periods. The book begins with his early paintings and engagement with the avant-garde, then charts his abandonment of painting and invention of the readymade. This is followed by the creation of his alter ego Rrose Sélavy and the optical experiments of the interwar years, and, finally, by the making of Étant donnés (1946–66), the project that occupied the artist in the final two decades of his life. Shorter accompanying texts include explanations of key terms Duchamp used for his innovative ideas—readymade, precision optics, pictorial nominalism, and infrathin—as well as interviews and statements by the artist about his own art and ideas.

The Essential Duchamp

Arts & Photography

Affron, Matthew

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Fernand Lager is the only major modern artist to choose modernity itself as his subject. From his early series Contrastes de formes of 1913-14--the first fully abstract works to emerge from Cubism--through his paintings of construction workers from the late 1940s and early 1950s, his enduring subject was the pulse and dynamism of everyday life. Lager saw the 20th century environment as a "state of contrasts," a condition that he translated into art through forceful juxtaposition of shape, color, and line. His attempt to reconcile the formal concerns of artmaking with issues of social responsibility continues to be relevant to the art world of today. Accompanying texts recount Lager's experience of and interest in America and America's interest in him; explore refractions of Lager's interests in the work of more recent artists; and discuss Lager's ambition to make an art reflecting the "new visual state" of modern life. An illustrated chronology tells the story of the artist's life, focusing on his time in America, the plate section is complemented by a series of short essays tracing the formal and thematic developments in his art, and a selected bibliography and detailed exhibition history complete the book.This book was published to accompany the 1998 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fernand Leger

Hauptman, Jodi

Lanchner, Carolyn

Léger, Fernand

Individual Artists

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The first in-depth examination of Matisse’s work in the 1930s, a key decade of creative innovation and renewal for this celebrated artist\nIn 1930, as Henri Matisse (1869–1954) embarked on The Dance, a monumental mural commissioned by the American collector Albert C. Barnes, he began experimenting in ways that would permanently change the nature of his work. The use of pre-painted cut papers to lay out his compositions led to a new style of flat tones and bold shapes. He also increasingly used serial imagery to make visible his creative process, aiming to capture the flux of his own perceptions and emotions in the work of art.\nThis volume highlights and explains pivotal transformations in Matisse’s work in the 1930s across a range of media, including mural and easel painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and the illustrated book. The transatlantic contributors also look at the relationship between Matisse and the Parisian art journal Cahiers d’art, which played an outsized role in publicizing Matisse’s work during this period, and consider his exhibitions, his ongoing involvement with decorative painting, his studio as a creative laboratory, and the role of his model and muse Lydia Delectorskaya in his studio practice.\nPublished in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie\nExhibition Schedule:Philadelphia Museum of Art 
(October 20, 2022–January 29, 2023)\nMusée de l’Orangerie, Paris 
(February 28–May 29, 2023)\nMusée Matisse, Nice 
(June 23–September 24, 2023)

Matisse in the 1930s

Grammont, Claudine

Debray, Cécile

Between 1912 and 1914, Fernand Léger executed a large cycle of works known as the Contrasts of Forms. The series embraces the genres of landscape, still life, and figure, but at its core are numerous arresting compositions that sweep aside observation to focus on formal principles. The common denominator is a complex vocabulary of mingled cones, cylinders, cubes, and planes, vigorously outlined and scrubbed with color (in the paintings) or with black ink and white gouache (in the works on paper). The Contrasts of Forms are essential to two great chapters in the history of modern art in the years before the First World War: first, the development of cubism, and second, the emergence of abstract art.
Curated by Léger scholar Matthew Affron and organized by the University of Virginia Art Museum, this tightly focused exhibition unites two landmark paintings with eleven works on paper from major museums and private collections. Fernand Léger: Contrasts of Forms was presented at the University of Virginia Art Museum from January 19 to March 18, 2007, and will be at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, from April 14 to June 10, 2007.
The full-color catalogue features two essays. Affron examines the logic of the Contrasts of Forms and the importance of this cycle in shaping the character of Léger’s art. Maria Gough (Stanford University) focuses on the drawings and on Léger’s notion of abstraction.

Fernand Leger: Contrasts of Forms

University of Virginia Art Museum

Émilie Charmy (1878–1974) charted a remarkable course in the world of French modern art in the first half of the twentieth century. Her earliest works, executed around 1900, explored the legacy of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. An engagement with the avant-garde circle of Fauve painters defined her art in the years leading up to the First World War. In the ensuing interwar period, Charmy found her mature style, characterized by optical realism, an adherence to the traditional genres of portraiture, the nude, landscape, and still life, and a modernist notion of direct, vigorous paint application as a mark of artistic sincerity. This attitude found its ultimate expression in numerous renderings of the female nude, which, by virtue of Charmy’s melding of ostensibly feminine and masculine qualities, charm and seductiveness on the one hand and power and firmness on the other, confounded prevailing expectations about the nature of women’s art. These images retain their provocative force today. This publication accompanies the first U.S. retrospective of the painting of Émilie Charmy, which is organized by the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. Exhibition curator Matthew Affron surveys key phases of Charmy’s artistic career in relation to major issues in modern French painting of her era. Sarah Betzer examines two principal subjects of Charmy’s early work, the nude and the bourgeois interior, as evidence of an ambitious dialogue with avant-garde precedent. Rita Felski considers Charmy in light of recent feminist approaches to the study of the role women creators played in defining modernism.

Émilie Charmy

The Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia

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