The Impressionists and Their Legacy, a joining of The Impressionists: A Retrospective and The Post-Impressionists: A Retrospective, tells the story of how the personal struggles, debates, problems and solutions that arose when new ways of painting developed quickly led in unforeseen directions and challenged the traditional means of representing the world through art.

The Impressionists and Their Legacy, a joining of The Impressionists: A Retrospective and The Post-Impressionists: A Retrospective, tells the story of how the personal struggles, debates, problems and solutions that arose when new ways of painting developed quickly led in unforeseen directions and challenged the traditional means of representing the world through art.

The documents in this book--letters and recorded comments by the artists themselves, as well as selections by notable contemporaries including Baudelaire, Zola, Valery, Mallarme, Huysman, Laforgue and Proust--show how artists and critics during and in the aftermath of Impressionism did describe themselves: how they responded to tradition, to each other and to the kaleidoscope of the contemporary scene.

The ever-expanding interpretation of Impressionism and its legacy within the changing world of twentiethcentury art and art criticism is examined through the writings of artists such as Leger, Kandinsky, Masson, Matisse, Bataille, Klee and Hofmann as well as recent critics, philosophers and art historians including Meyer Schapiro, Gaston Bachelard, Clement Greenberg, Lawrence Gowing, John Berger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Adrian Stokes. The book also includes commentaries from Rainer Maria Rilke,Virginia Woolf and W.H. Auden. Accompanying the texts are 235 colorplates of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces, and 242 black and white reproductions of historical photographs, original documents, contemporary cartoons, prints and drawings.

After attending Harvard Martha Kapos studied painting and the history of art at the Chelsea School of Art, London, where she now teaches. Her art criticism has appeared in various magazines including Artscribe, Art Monthly and Screen. A collection of her poems was published in 1989. She was the editor of The Impressionists: A Retrospective (1991) and The Post-Impressionists: A Retrospective (1993).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLOGRAPHICAL INDEX

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

BOOK I: THE IMPRESSIONISTS

BOOK II: THE POST-IMPRESSIONISTS

INDEX

PICTURE CREDITS