Caravaggio and Claude Monet

One of the Impressionist eras best-loved painters, Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted every day for 60 yearsthats over 5,000 paintings! The joie de vivre expressed in his work is reflected on every page of Smart About Art: Pierre-Auguste Renoir in colorful, dynamic illustrations and 17 reproductions. With humor and insight, this title takes us through the life of an artist who at first was so unpopular that his paintings were attacked with umbrellas. Written as if it were a childs own more...

Now often cited as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu/Rules of the Game was not warmly received on its original release in 1939: audiences at its opening engagements in Paris were openly hostile, responding to the film with shouts of derision, and distributors cut the movie from 113 minutes to a mere 80. It was banned as morally perilous during the German occupation and the original negative was destroyed during WWII. It wasn't until 1956 that Renoir was able to restore...

Louis Malle's first officially credited collaboration with the ingenious Jean-Claude Carrière never sinks below the level of sheer charm and good humor. But as Carrière affirmed years later in an interview, Viva Maria! suffers slightly from over-length and an overabundance of influences (contemporary feminism, children's European fantasy adventure yarns, tall tales, anticlericalism, cabaret life and music, revolutionary politics). It may be that rare film with too many assets; at 119 minutes, the...