Popular perceptions of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) frequently envision the painter working before nature in an intense frenzy, yet the artist’s method was often controlled and deliberate. Van Gogh Repetitions is the first book to focus on the artist’s “repetitions,” a term he used to describe his process of producing more than one version of a composition. Van Gogh ultimately developed a conceptual framework that distinguished his répétitions from copies, études, tableaux, and décorations, balancing modernist aspirations toward originality with the creation of copies of his existing compositions. The artist’s practice of producing repetitions was far more extensive and vital to his creative process than is commonly recognized. In this groundbreaking and beautifully illustrated book, a series of essays considers the many unresolved issues and controversies surrounding the repetitions, including their origins, development, and meaning in van Gogh’s art. Technical and analytical examinations provide new insights into the artist’s working methods and approach to the creative process.

Van Gogh Repetitions

Arts & Photography

Robinson, William H.

Rathbone, Eliza

Steele, Marcia

Steele, Elizabeth

History & Criticism

The Phillips Collection

Impressionists in Winter: Effets De Neige

Impressionsts in Winter: Effets de Neige presents the first thorough investigation of the subject of Impressionist winter landscape. The subject of winter - clearly the most inhospitable season for plein-air painting - provides some of the most exceptional and most spellbindingly beautiful paintings in Impressionism. No exhibition and no publications in the literature on Impressionism have been devoted to this theme before. While such a thematic approach might seem at first blush a superficial one, the subject of this exhibition goes to the heart of one of the central issues of Impressionism, a dedication to painting specific effects of weather and light that is unprecedented in the history of art. Inspired by Alfred Sisley's Snow at Louveciennes in The Phillips Collection, this exhibition of sixty-three works presents an opportunity to consider the subject of snow in Impressionist painting in an unprecedented way. While anyone might have come across one or two of these exceptional works in various works in this country or abroad, it comes as a surprise to most to learn that the Impressionists painted hundreds of paintings of snow or effets de neige, as they came to be called. Of all the Impressionists, three artists especially were drawn to paint effets de neige: Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro. Their shared fascination with these 'effets' led all three to repeatedly seek out opportunities to paint landscapes in snow. Yet each brought to the subject a highly individual response that we find reflected in the paintings assembled here. In addition to these three artists, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Caillebotte and Paul Gauguin also painted snowscapes, though far fewer. Renoir's characteristic interest in a social gathering of skaters in the Bois de Boulogne, Caillebotte's dramatic elevated views over Paris, and Gauguin's rare Brittany snowscapes add dimension and contrast to the dedicated pursuit of winter landscape just outside Paris of Monet, Sisley, and Pisarro. The result is a wider range of winter scenes from the bucolic French countryside to ice floes on the Seine, from the paths and roads of small villages to the boulevards and rooftops of Paris. Their common ground is an obsession with winter light. Most of us do not think of Paris-or the surrounding countryside-covered in snow. We do not anticipate a blizzard impeding winter travel to this part of of the world nor have we ever seen the Seine frozen solid. A very different weather pattern prevailed during the late 19th century. Snowfalls, blizzards, and frost were a fairly commen winter occurrence. Two of the most severe periods of extended cold since 1840 occurred during the winters of 1879-80 and 1890-91. In order to provide a backdrop of recorded weather conditions of the period, we brought together documentation from numerous sources to describe precisely the winter weather during the years covered by this exhibition . The weather was at times described as 'wolf-like' or 'Siberian,' and once was compared to the North Pole. These vivid accounts not only have helped us to assign dates to certain undated works, but also have provided a context for appreciating the impact of weather conditions on life in France in the late nineteenth century.

Impressionists in Winter: Effets de Neige

MOFFETT, Charles S.

Rothkopf, Katherine

Isaacson, Joel

Philip Wilson Publishers

Susan Rothenberg

Phillips Collections

Bruce Kurland was an American still-life painter working from the early 1960s until his death in 2013. Born in New York in 1938, Kurland was initially influenced by earlier European practitioners of the still-life genre such as Fabritius, Chardin and Morandi, whose quiet reveries he inflected with a contemporary vision of mortality derived from the visceral imagery of Francis Bacon. Today, his work can be seen as part of a singular strain of twentieth-century North American painting that includes artists such as Walter Murch and Gregory Gillespie. Kurland infused his paintings with powerful attention to, and a tangible affection for, nature "red in tooth and claw," conjuring "a little world with which I could do anything I wanted, without losing the illusion." This handsome volume, with its cloth binding and tip-on cover, includes essays by poet Lisa Jarnot, gallerist Victoria Munroe and Chief Curator at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Eliza Rathbone.

Bruce Kurland: Illusion and the Little World

Munroe, Vincent

Individual Artists

Avocet Editions

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Books by Rathbone, Eliza