Book Description

Printmaking exploded with creative energy at the end of the nineteenth century in France. Artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon were at the forefront of the avant-garde movement to reinvigorate the applied arts through colour printmaking.Prints Abound probes the phenomenal outpouring of print publications in late nineteenth-century France. Exploring the artistic, technical, economic, commercial and cultural circumstances of 1890s Paris, Prints Abound reaches a fuller understanding of Art Nouveau, which emphasised the fusion of exquisite design with the everyday. The achievements of Bonnard are stressed and his work is represented in depth, with spirited posters, contributions to solo and collective portfolios, designs for music primers and illustrated books, and an outstanding four-panel folding screen of a fashionable street scene in fin-de-siècle Paris.Phillip Dennis Cate, Director of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, has written the introduction and a text on illustrated books; Richard Thomson, Chair of the Art History Department at the University of Edinburgh, discusses single-artist print albums; and Gale B. Murray, Chair of the Art History Department at Colorado College, considers music illustration.Prints Abound will be fascinating reading for print collectors and dealers, art historians and all those with an interest in this important period of French culture.