Accompanying an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art last fall and now at the Dahesh Museum in New York, this catalog focuses upon the French drawings in Muriel Butkin's highly specialized collection which she has promised to the Cleveland Museum. To assemble her diverse yet nicely integrated set of drawings, Butkin started buying 18th-century French drawings when they were affordable. In the mid-1970s, with the guidance of art historian Gabriel Weisberg, she expanded her collection to include 19th-century French drawings. These drawings were counter to the mainstream impressionist and postimpressionist taste of the time and focused more on academic French subject matter such as life drawings, portraits, or compositional studies. In the preface, Butkin herself reinforces her taste by saying that drawings are much more personal and spontaneous than paintings, often demonstrating the artistic process. Foster, curator of drawings at the Cleveland Museum, and other scholars present a well-researched volume that contributes new information to a very specialized field of art history. It is greatly disappointing, however, that the bulk of the reproductions are in black and white, often missing the subtly colored tones in many of the drawings. Nonetheless, this is recommended for museum and academic libraries that support graduate programs in art history. 183 b/w illustrations

Winner, 1990 Berkshire Conference Book Award Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style explores the shift in the locus of modernity from technological monument to private interior. It examines the political, economic, social, intellectual and artistic factors, specific to late 19th century France, that interacted in the development of art nouveau.

This volume presents 115 drawings and paintings from the holdings of collector Karen B. Cohen. The 19th-century French and English works include landscapes, portraits, figure compositions, and still lifes by great artists of the romantic period and of the Barbizon and Realist schools, beginning with Prud'hon and ending with Seurat. Among the highlights is a group of little known works by Courbet and a series of cloud studies by Constable. Ives (curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) provides documentation and commentary for each work, placing it within the context of the artist's development and connecting it to contemporary artistic trends and innovations. Curator Elizabeth E. Barker contributed entries on Constable and Bonington. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR