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67 books match the query 'Painting' and 5 start with o

cover of Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions

Odilon Redon

Otherworldly Visions

Danielle Canter

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2026

This visually striking book provides an introduction to the mysterious and dreamlike work of the artist Odilon Redon.

Enigmatic and haunting, the work of the French Symbolist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) intrigues and entrances all who encounter it. During the first half of his career, Redon created dramatically monochromatic charcoal drawings and lithographs, dreamily dark images that plumbed the depths of his wild imagination. Eventually, however, he also turned to pastels, adopting a bold colorful palette in fantastical explorations of the natural world.

Featuring more than seventy illustrations, this publication offers an overview of Redon's career. The informative, accessible essays examine his disparate influences from the worlds of religion, mythology, literature, and music, and demonstrate why Redon’s mysterious work is an important precursor to Surrealism.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from July 14 to October 18, 2026.
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cover of On Modern Beauty: Three Paintings by Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne

On Modern Beauty

Three Paintings by Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne

Richard R. Brettell

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2019

A thought-provoking examination of beauty using three works of art by Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne. As the discipline of art history has moved away from connoisseurship, the notion of beauty has become increasingly problematic. Both culturally and personally subjective, the term is difficult to define and nearly universally avoided. In this insightful book, Richard R. Brettell, one of the leading authorities on Impressionism and French art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dares to confront the concept of modern beauty head-on. This is not a study of aesthetic philosophy, but rather a richly contextualized look at the ambitions of specific artists and artworks at a particular time and place.
 
Brettell shapes his manifesto around three masterworks from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Édouard Manet’s Jeanne (Spring), Paul Gauguin’s Arii Matamoe (The Royal End), and Paul Cézanne’s Young Italian Woman at a Table. The provocative discussion reveals how each of these exceptional paintings, though depicting very different subjects—a fashionable actress, a preserved head, and a weary working woman—enacts a revolutionary, yet enduring, icon of beauty.
 
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cover of On Painting: Courses, March-June 1981

On Painting

Courses, March-June 1981

Gilles Deleuze

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

Available for the first time in English: the complete and annotated transcripts of Deleuze’s 1981 seminars on painting

From 1970 until 1987, Gilles Deleuze held a weekly seminar at the Experimental University of Vincennes and, starting in 1980, at Saint-Denis. In the spring of 1981, he began a series of eight seminars on painting and its intersections with philosophy. The recorded sessions, newly transcribed and translated into English, are now available in their entirety for the first time. Extensively annotated by philosopher David Lapoujade, On Painting illuminates Deleuze’s thinking on artistic creation, significantly extending the lines of thought in his book Francis Bacon.

Through paintings and writing by Rembrandt, Delacroix, Turner, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Klee, Pollock, and Bacon, Deleuze explores the creative process, from chaos to the pictorial fact. The introduction and use of color feature prominently as Deleuze elaborates on artistic and philosophical concepts such as the diagram, modulation, code, and the digital and the analogical. Through this scrutiny, he raises a series of profound and stimulating questions for his students: How does a painter ward off grayness and attain color? What is a line without contour? Why paint at all?

Written and thought in a rhizomatic manner that is thoroughly Deleuzian—strange, powerful, and novel—On Painting traverses both the conception of art history and the possibility of color as a philosophical concept.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of Orientalism's Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography

Orientalism's Interlocutors

Painting, Architecture, Photography

Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds.

Duke University Press, 2002

Until now, Orientalist art—exemplified by paintings of harems, slave markets, or bazaars—has predominantly been understood to reflect Western interpretations and to perpetuate reductive, often demeaning stereotypes of the exotic East. Orientalism's Interlocutors contests the idea that Orientalist art simply expresses the politics of Western domination and argues instead that it was often produced through cross-cultural interactions. Focusing on paintings and other representations of North African and Ottoman cultures, by both local artists and westerners, the contributors contend that the stylistic similarities between indigenous and Western Orientalist art mask profound interpretive differences, which, on examination, can reveal a visual language of resistance to colonization. The essays also demonstrate how marginalized voices and viewpoints—especially women's—within Western Orientalism decentered and destabilized colonial authority.

Looking at the political significance of cross-cultural encounters refracted through the visual languages of Orientalism, the contributors engage with pressing recent debates about indigenous agency, postcolonial identity, and gendered subjectivities. The very range of artists, styles, and forms discussed in this collection broadens contemporary understandings of Orientalist art. Among the artists considered are the Algerian painters Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim; Turkish painter Osman Hamdi; British landscape painter Barbara Bodichon; and the French painter Henri Regnault. From the liminal "Third Space" created by mosques in postcolonial Britain to the ways nineteenth-century harem women negotiated their portraits by British artists, the essays in this collection force a rethinking of the Orientalist canon.

This innovative volume will appeal to those interested in art history, theories of gender, and postcolonial studies.

Contributors. Jill Beaulieu, Roger Benjamin, Zeynep Çelik, Deborah Cherry, Hollis Clayson, Mark Crinson, Mary Roberts

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cover of Otto Dix in Detail: Painting and Precarity in the Field of Weimar Culture

Otto Dix in Detail

Painting and Precarity in the Field of Weimar Culture

James A. van Dyke

University of Chicago Press, 2026

How small details in the paintings of Otto Dix materialize the realities of a modern German artist.
 
Offering a fresh look at German art during a period of extraordinary transition and precarity, James A. van Dyke focuses on overlooked but critically significant details in works completed by Otto Dix between 1919 and 1936. A small lump of paint, a monogram, an almost invisible self-portrait, the verso of a drawing, a patch of discoloration, and a web of fine cracks—van Dyke reveals such details, hidden in plain sight, as coded dialogue through which Dix addressed audiences and art-world insiders amid the combative world of cultural production in Weimar Germany. Sly, cutting, and provocative, these are the material traces of social relationships between the painter and those who represented threats to his professional ambition: an avant-garde mentor and rival, an increasingly skeptical critic, a prominent bourgeois photographer, and a local Nazi authority.
 
Proving that small things offer insight into the big picture, this book highlights Dix’s satirical, transgressive work as nuanced and polyvocal, reflecting the complex fields of power and economics in which the field of art is located.
 
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