Painting the dream : from the biblical dream to surrealism /

With more than 200 color illustrations and a sweeping chronological scope, scholar, curator, and critic Bergez's survey is almost like a museum exhibition between the covers of a book. It is full of rich analysis of individual works animated by sleep, reverie, nightmares, and the unconscious. Bergez asks, How can one make the invisible real?, and answers by examining different subjects (Jacob's dream, Virgil's Aeneid), themes ( Biblical Dreams, Late Nineteenth Century Dreaming Women ), and artists (Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dalí). He explores how a common topic, the dream, has yielded diverse images, from Raphael's realist allegories to René Magritte's luminous landscapes of the unconscious. The book features many of art history's usual stars (Dürer, Picasso) but also introduces less well-known figures, like Tamara de Lempicka, whose angular and sharply cropped painting of a sleeping woman offers an entrée into synthetic Cubism. In other words, Bergez delivers not only a survey of the dream in painting, from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, but also an alternate history of European art.--Maggie Taft Copyright 2018 Booklist

"The theme of the dream, perhaps more than any other, has resulted in a very wide range of artistic variations," writes Bergez, a French scholar and curator, at the start of this beautifully illustrated volume. In 200 chronological images, he discusses how portrayals of dreams have changed throughout time: French Baroque master Georges de La Tour drew inspiration for his oneiric paintings from biblical stories, whereas the 19th century English-born American Thomas Cole derived his landscapes from imagination and fantasy. Additionally, Bergez includes several artworks inspired by classic literature, such as Eugène Delacroix's depiction of a scene from Hamlet, and astutely notes the dreamlike qualities in these renditions: "The sketchlike quality of the painting... with human figures vaguely situated in space... takes on the blurry outlines of a dream." Bergez explains how works by the Surrealists, such as René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, were often connected to psychoanalysis "that almost explicitly referred to Freud." Weaving open-ended questions throughout the text ("Who is the dreamer here-the sleeping woman, or the painter who images this theme?"), Bergez allows readers to draw their own conclusions. This is a revealing, contemplative historical survey of imagination depicted in Western art. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.