Books Artists Beats

This tenth collection of essays and reviews again throws the spotlight on Paris and some of the painters and places associated with the city. Montmartre in its heyday, the 1890s and thereabouts when Edgar Degas and Alphonse Mucha produced images of the spectacles to be seen in Paris and the leisure activities of its citizens. Some of them, at least. Neither artist was noted for painting scenes of working-class life, nor of poverty. To say that is not to condemn them for it. The same can be said of Matisse and Bonnard who largely created colourful canvases in the sun-drenched South of France. We need to appreciate artists for what they did, not accuse them for not doing what we think they should have done