Paul Delvaux was always fascinated by trains, railways and stations. In his earlier post-impressionist work, trains were already the main subject. Trains or stations are often present, hidden or not, in his better known surrealistic work. Train World organizes an exhibition with a large selection of his work in wich trains are the main theme

This monograph investigates the work of the Belgian Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux, a colleague of Rene Magritte's whose best-known works feature odd groupings of female nudes who stare into space, transfixed, while making enigmatic gestures in Surreally mismatched settings--for example while walking down an empty street, reclining in a train station or gathering in a complex of classical buildings. Sometimes these haunting muses wander through space accompanied by a skeletons; other times, they sit silently in long and sombre Puritanical dresses, as if serving out a penance.

Beneath the original Venetian glass and rosewood case at La Specola in Florence lies Clemente Susini's Anatomical Venus (c. 1790), a perfect object whose luxuriously bizarre existence challenges belief. It - or, better, she - was conceived of as a means to teach human anatomy without need for constant dissection, which was messy, ethically fraught and subject to quick decay. This life-sized wax woman is adorned with glass eyes and human hair and can be dismembered into dozens of parts revealing, at the final remove, a beatific foetus curled in her womb. Sister models soon appeared throughout Europe, where they not only instructed the specialist students, but also delighted the general public. Deftly crafted dissectable female wax models and slashed beauties of the world's anatomy museums and fairgrounds of the 18th and 19th centuries take centre stage in this disquieting volume. Since their creation in late 18th-century Florence, these wax women have seduced, intrigued and amazed. Today, they also confound, troubling the edges of our neat categorical divides: life and death, science and art, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, spectacle and education, kitsch and art. Incisive commentary and captivating imagery reveal the evolution of these enigmatic sculptures from wax effigy to fetish figure and the embodiment of the uncanny.

"This volume presents a selection from the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art of the best examples of Impressionism and its heritage, from the classically influenced but radically new works of Manet and Degas to the high Impressionism of Monet and Pissaro; from the work of Cezanne, who attempted to return to painting the weight and solidity abandoned by his colleagues, to the emotive distortions of Van Gogh's portraits and landscapes; from the exoticism of Gauguin, Redon, and Rousseau to the Expressionist visions of Soutine, Munch, Grosz, and Beckmann. Cubism- in which conventional representation began to disappear- is seen in masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, and Villon, and the emerging abstraction of the early twentieth century in works by Kandinsky and Kupka. In addition to reproducing the work of these influential artists, Modern Europe shows the continuing dialogue between the fine and applied arts, presenting an unusually broad picture of the artists and craftsmen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in some one hundred and forty works of art in every genre and medium."--Page 2 of cover.