Wilhelm Uhde Book order

The career of Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90) as a painter was short, but his paintings revolutionized artistic practice and styles. The intensity of his vision, his wonderful sense of colour and the extraordinary boldness of his technique created masterpieces that exercised a profound influence on the art of the twentieth century. There are also enormously popular, and paintings such as The Yellow Chair, The Drawbridge and The Sower are among the most the best-loved images of our time.Wilhelm Uhde was an outstanding art critic and dealer who was born during Van Gogh’s lifetime and witnessed at first hand his rise to fame at the beginning of the twentieth century. His masterly essay was first published in 1937 and remains one of the best introductions to Van Gogh’s work. For this revised and expanded edition, the notes to the plates were added by Griselda Pollock, Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds.

The paintings of Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), particularly his astonishing jungle dreams, are now so popular that it is difficult to realize how they were originally greeted with ridicule and incomprehension. It was not until Rousseau was championed by the young avant-garde—Picasso, Delaunay, and Kandinsky, among others—that he came to be recognized at his true worth. One of the most significant of these early admirers was the dealer and art historian Wilhelm Uhde. It was Uhde who put on the first one-man show of Rousseau’s work, and the catalogue he wrote for the occasion is the basis of these Recollections. Much of what we know about Rousseau comes from these pages, which present a portrayal of a man of naivety, humor, gentleness, and total artistic commitment. Uhde returned to his text again and again, refining it and filling out telling details. The version presented here is the final, definitive text, which first appeared after World War I in a translation overseen by Uhde himself. An introduction by Nancy Ireson sets the Recollections in context, with an overview of Rousseau’s career, the ebb and flow of his reputation, and the part that this polemic and elegiac text played in the creation of a new kind of art.