1900: Art at the Crossroads

Robert Rosenblum's "1900: Art At The Crossroads" is a gem of a book. This exhibition catalogue contains more than 300 color plates and approximately 200 additional illustrations of paintings and sculpture from a benchmark period in art history. The year nineteen hundred, the beginning of the 20th century, ushered in a period when art was truly at a crossroads. It was, at once, the beginning and the end of an era - the culmination of 19th century art and the beginning of a revolution. Salon artists, the academic realists, Rouault, Sargent, Whistler, and Homer, etc., were at their peak and their work was widely acclaimed. And painters, newly arrived on the scene, from Impressionists, Post-Impressionists to those who had yet to find a label for their work, like Cezanne, Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, Kandinsky, Klimt and Gaugin, were beginning to discover new methods, new ideas, to express what they saw and felt. They learned from tradition and sought to escape it. These artists would go on to change the way the Western world looked at art This compilation, the companion volume to a major international exhibit, provides an extraordinary visual history of that period. The quality of the reproductions, especially the color plates, is superb. Work by lesser known artists are displayed here, as well as paintings and sculptures by those whose names we recognize immediately. The book is organized into categories according to subject, i.e., bathers, nudes, self-portraits, still life and landscapes. This method of organization, similar to the concepts established by the French Academy in the 17th century, makes for some fascinating comparisons, i.e., an abstracted Degas nude alongside a classical nude by Carolus-Duran. Robert Rosenblum and Mary Anne Stevens purposely included a wide range of work completed at approximately the same time to reflect change - the wide variety of styles and techniques employed at this period by different artists. This is a beautiful book and a brilliant study of a pivotal point in European art history. There is a 70 page section of artists' biographies at the catalogue's conclusion. JANA

Robert Rosenblum is a true scholar in the world of art history. Throughout my undergraduate years, I had looked to his writings for guidance and to gain an understanding of the subject matter. While 1900, Art At The Crossroads is enjoyable and the color plates are stunning, it should be noted that it is companion piece to an exhibition and not a book for academic research. Overall, it is a fine book.

This book balances the often overpraised work of the impressionists with the reality of the Salon artists (academics) at that time and the rumblings of modernism to come. As a painter, this title is a real treat... it's always been so hard to find examples from this era, that have not been washed away from post 1920's revisionist art history. Accurately reconstructing the exhibits of that era and showing what was on the fringes speaks for itself.