The Unknown Monet : Pastels and Drawings

'The Unknown Monet is a feast for the eye as well as a major addition to the art-historical literature' - CAA Reviews

A handsome book exploring Monet's pastels, drawings, and sketchbooks.

Claude Monet (1840–1926) is one of the best-known and most beloved painters in the history of art, with myriad publications and exhibitions devoted to his oeuvre. And yet there remains a previously undiscovered aspect of his career: his surprisingly significant role as a draftsman. This book is the first to focus on Monet’s pastels, drawings, and sketchbooks, offering a revolutionary new interpretation of the artist’s life and work.

Monet has long been seen as an anti-draftsman, an artist who painted his subjects directly and whose rarely seen graphic works were marginal to his artistic process. In an effort to develop his public image, Monet denied the role of drawing in his working method. In actuality, Monet began his career as a caricaturist and as a teenager developed a passion for drawing that was never extinguished. He went on to master the medium of pastel and included seven in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.

This book draws on an archive of personal papers kept by Comte Théophile Beguin Billecocq that were previously unavailable and which give detail to a time that Monet left nearly blank in his own telling of his life and overturn the accepted image of the artist. 

The Unknown Monet reveals an extensive group of graphic works created over the course of the artist’s career, many of which are unknown to the general public and to scholars: beautiful pastels, stunning black chalk drawings, and fascinating sketchbooks, which include pencil studies that relate to many of his paintings. The book also shows how Monet exploited the print media to promote his art.

The book has excellent colour reproductions and equally high-quality black-and-white plates, mostly used for drawings, prints, and photographs and the large size of the book allows for generous sizing of the pictures, with many full-page colour plates and handsome double-column page layouts. 

Gold medal winner of the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the category of Fine Art. 

Details

• Author: James A Ganz, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
• Hardcover: 3328 pages | 223 colour and 74 black and white illustrations
• Date published: March 2007
• Language: English
• Delivery: Allow 1-2 weeks
• ISBN: 978-0300118629
• Dimensions: 30.4 x 25.3 cm