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Publishers Weekly Review

An astonishing feast of unknown masterpieces, this glorious album is a historic event that deepens our understanding of modern art. It documents an exhibition at Russia's Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, unveiling a large trove of French impressionist and post-impressionist paintings‘by Monet, Renoir, Matisse, Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, etc.‘whose existence had been a carefully guarded secret for half a century. The paintings were seized from German private collections during WWII and transferred to the Hermitage's storage rooms. Many of these works have never been exhibited before, even in prewar times. Among the 74 full-page color plates are Van Gogh's psychologically charged White House at Night, painted six weeks before his death; Degas's Interior with Two Figures, a symbolic drama of alienation between the sexes; vibrant pictures made in Tahiti by Gauguin; and canvases by Daumier, Delacroix, Edouard Vuillard, André Derain. Kostenevich, a Hermitage curator, has provided an extensive commentary on each picture. BOMC main selection. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This general-interest catalog translated from the Russian edition marks the first Russian public acknowledgment and exhibition of paintings that were surreptitiously removed from Germany at the end of WW II and stored with other looted artworks at the State Hermitage Museum. Seventy-four French paintings of the 19th and 20th centuries, all but one of which originated in private German collections, are carefully recorded and individually analyzed in chronological order by the curator of modern painting at the Hermitage. Some of the works are previously known and are of masterpiece quality, such as Daumier's The Burden, Degas's Place de la Concorde, and Seurat's View of Fort Samson. Others are of highest artistic merit but are little known or even unknown to scholars, including Corot's Rocks and Gauguin's Piti Teina (Two Sisters). More than 270 illustrations, including 99 fine colorplates, ensure the volume's usefulness and also will attract many casual readers and international admirers of French art from romanticism through fauvism. Some journalistic hyperbole mars the commentary, but this is far outweighed by the intrinsic appeal of unique art historical data. Highly recommended for most libraries. Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; professional; general. M. Hamel-Schwulst; Towson State University