"Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World: A Retrospective by Peter Galassi, Robert Delpire" is an essential purchase for anyone with more than a passing interest in photography.

As the images and essays in this retrospective of HCB's work make clear, Cartier-Bresson invented 35 mm photography as a visual form. What studying, or even browsing through this massive collection makes clear is that despite being known as a "photographer," Cartier-Bresson is not being disengeuous when he eschews that descriptive: he is not a photographer; he is an artist whose primary tool for about 50 years was a camera. But he wasn't "taking pictures," he was creating art, and happened to use a camera to do it.

A careful examination of this collection of images leaves one with the impression is that the reason HCB has had such an enormous impact on the history of photography in many different forms - including "street photography," "photojournalism," and "documentary photography," is the fact that he is one of the great artists of the 20th century.

Even if you think you know all Cartier-Bresson's work; even if you own all the books in which most of these photos originally appeared over the past 50 years, "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World: A Retrospective" is a book worth owning because of the overview it provides, and because of the insightfulness of several of the essays included.

Published by Harry N Abrams, New York, 1955 - Portfolio Edition, Large format softcover, 13" x 9.75" Part of Abrams 'Library of Great Painters' series. Contain brief authoritatve biography of the painter, some sketches, and 15 hand-tipped FULL COLOUR PLATES of the master's work, ready for removal and framing. Retain greatest fidelity to the originals.

Thid 2003 calendar is a beautiful display of Toulouse-Lautrec's works. Focusing mainly on his entertainment and theatre posters, it is a superb collection with posters suitable for framing once you finish the calendar. Highly recommended!

"Henri Langlois, First Citizen of Cinema" ( beautifully produced with an excellent translation by Lisa Nesselson) is a fascinating account of Langlois' life and a captivating history of the Cinémathèque Française. More important, it is, in many ways, the story of contemporary French cinema. The book's authors, Glenn Myrent, an American in Paris, and Georges P. Langlois, Henri's brother, give us insight into French attitudes about film and show us to what extent Langlois had an important impact on the new wave directors and the generation of filmmakers that followed. In fact, Langlois almost single handily influenced the way that the French perceive film: cinema as an art form. The 7th art.

On a personal note, this was quite clear to me as a young film student sitting in the first rows of "La Cinémathèque Française" in the mid-sixties. Not only was I surrounded by would be filmmakers but also in the audience one would often see François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Susan Schiffman to name just a few. And there in the front row would be the young Bertrand Tavernier or the teenage Patrice Lecomte or Elio Zarmati. I remember standing in line outside the Cinémathèque and seeing Henri Langlois surrounded by new wave directors and film buffs passionately talking about films and filmmakers. It reminded me how, a few years earlier as university undergraduate, I would talk with fellow students about poets and poetry or writers and books with the same passion, the same enthusiasm. At the cinémathèque, I would watch, between 3pm and midnight, anything and everything: Chinese films with Czech subtitles, silent documentaries, Chaplin and Keaton comedies, whatever. I suppose we were the last generation of filmmakers who could be truly called "les enfants de la cinémathèque" - children of the cinémathèque. Glenn Myrent, in this excellent American edition, has managed to capture the magical atmosphere of La Cinémathèque that I knew. Not an easy task.

I, like many European filmmakers of my generation, am indebted to Henri Langlois. He communicated to me his passion for the cinéma and his cinémathèque was the single most important thing that helped me decided to become a filmmaker.

In my first feature, LA NUIT DE SAINT GERMAIN DES PRES, I have a small scene in which one of the protagonists organizes a screening at his home of an old 1932 cult movie, Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack and Irving Pichel's "THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME", starring Joel McCrea and Fay Wray, for left bank film buffs. In a way, this little scene was my way of saying "merci" to Henri Langlois and a kind of secret tribute to La Cinémathèque Française. And now 25 years later, "merci" Glenn Myrent and Georges Langlois for such an informative and entertaining book. Vive la Cinémathèque!

- Bob Swaim /Paris, 9-99

This is a wonderful book. The color seems very accurate. There are many artbooks with inaccurate color reproduced. I compared several photos in this book with the real Matisse's paintings, the color is all accurate.

see above!This is the best of the BEST on Matisse,,we flew to NY just to see the show at MOMA,; with this book, I keep seeing new images and genius!

Two of Russia's richest pre-Revolution industrialists had a competitive passion for collecting French impressionists' works, playing one-upsmanship over who had the best collection. They were early and eager purchasers of the works of Picasso, Cezanne, and Matisse, among others. Then came the Revolution, and their rich collections became property of the Soviet state and are now in Russia's two leading fine arts museums.

The inside flap of this book says:
"The book presents Matisse's paintings and sculptures from two major Soviet museums, the Pushin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad. This rich and varied collection [is] one of the best in the world.... The reproductions are accompanied by detailed notes, analogies, a bibliography and a list of exhibitions prepared by research workers of the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts."

The book contains 288 illustrations, including 55 color plates. It is entirely in English.

The edition for sale was published in 1990 by Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, and printed and bound in Austria. (The first printing was in 1983.) The ISBN is 5-7300-0297-1.

Henri Rousseau has been one of my favorite painters for a long time so I was glad to see Mike Venezia finally got around to doing this book for his Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists series. Ironically, although Venezia includes seventeen Rousseau paintings in this book (which may well be a record for this particular series), my favorite is not included. Go figure. Venezia provides a basic biography of Rousseau, who always wanted to be a famous artist even though he never went to art school. Consequently it makes sense that Rousseau would be perhaps best known for his jungle paintings despite the fact he never traveled to any jungles, just to the Jardin des Plantes, a huge greenhouse filled with plants and trees from all over the world. Rousseau tended to put he mysterious and faraway lands he dreamed about into his paintings and most of his best work exhibits a compelling quirkiness, such as "The Merry Jesters," which shows monkeys playing in a jungle with a back scratcher and a milk bottle or "Tropical Landscape--An American Indian Struggling with an Ape," which shows an American Indian struggling with an ape in a tropical landscape. His most famous painting, "The Sleeping Gypsy," shows a strange meeting between a curious lion and a sleeping musician on a moonlit night. No wonder I always found Rousseau's work compelling. This particular Venezia volume gets high marks for including so many examples of Rousseau's work, along with key paintings by some of his contemporaries, who turned out to be much bigger supporters of his work than the public at large. Usually I like to see more specifics on the artist's work, because reading these books this year is a key part of my do-it-yourself art appreciation course. However, to be fair, once you cover Rousseau's use of strange images and multiple shades of green in all those jungle paintings, there is not much left to say in that regard. I was also happy to see that this time around some of the paintings reproduced were almost as big as Venezia's original cartoons depicting the artist's life. This series features great artists from Sandro Botticelli to Grant Wood, and every time I think I have almost read them all I discover another half-dozen or more I need to track down. Certainly there are other art books and other series that can provide more insights into these great artists, but Venezia does a fine job of introducing young readers to their lives and works.

Just the fact that the pages are matte and not glossy makes my day. Beautiful reproductions, lovely and dreamy story...what more could one ask? I recommend this delightful book for adults (such as myself), as well as children.

This is a beautiful book; the quality of the graphics, color-coordination, typeface, text, and organization is first-rate. It's a delightful book to browse but an even better one to study, as it's full of marvelous things.