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The Masterpiece (Ann Arbor Paperbacks) | 
| Author: Emile Zola
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 814397
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0472061453
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780472061457
ASIN: 0472061453
Publication Date: October 1, 1968
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Condition: Standard used condition.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This controversial novel, set in the art world of Paris, has been read as an attack on the Impressionist painters who had been Zola's friends
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
YThe Masterpiece March 9, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
An easy and enjoyable read. Vividly evokes the atmosphere of late-19th century bohemia in Paris,
Superb January 11, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Given that Zola lived through the whole period of when the Impressionists turned the Salon's on their heads this is almost a biographical piece. For the various characters Zola merely drew from his friends that he would frequent the cafes and bars with. The lead character, Claude, is primarily based on Manet and Cezanne - both of which wouldn't forgive him doing so. Zola wasn't too enamoured with the impressionist and post-impressionist movements, this attitude he uses to great effect when depicting the derision with which the artists work was met. The opening piece which Claude has displayed in the Salon is in effect Manet's "Le Dejeuner Sur l'herbe" (1963).
The book opens with Claude finding a woman drenched on his doorstep, Christine. She has just arrived in Paris and through one thing and another becomes lost and shelters from the rain in Claude's doorway. She is the impetus for the figure in his painting. The story unfolds with their romance, Claude trying to get his artwork accepted by the art intelligensia, succumbing to the desire to paint THE painting, etc.
A number of characters share the stage, again most likely based on artisans that Zola knew: architects, artists, writers, critics.
The book conveys quite well what it must have been for them all struggling to get a toehold and make an impression on the Paris art scene.
The tone of the book is somewhat bleak but Zola captures the Paris of the late 1800's well. I've never been to Paris but for those that have, the book is replete with names of various streets and districts across the city.
This was the first Zola novel I've read. Being an artist this book obviously struck a chord with me. It is well written and I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys art, particularly from this period.
 Bohemian Life during the Second Empire January 8, 2007
It is an interesting study of the painter's tormented soul. It is hardly the heredity that made Claude Launtier the way he was, because we know from the novel "l'Assomoir/the Drum Shop" where he was coming from, but rather the decadent environment of the Second Empire. The novel abounds with examples of grotesque and tasteless art trends at that time, not only in painting, but in sculpture and literature as well. An interesting thing is that this is the novel with a character whom Zola modeled after himself, namely the writer Pierre Sandoz, whose Spanish ancestry alludes to Zola's foreign (Italian-Greek) ancestry. The interesting thing happens on Claude's funeral, where only two of his relatives show up; their names are not reveiled, but one can easily figure out from the description that they were Sidonie Rougon from "La Cur(e')e/the Kill" and Octave Mouret from "Pot-Bouille/Pot Lock" and "Au Bonheur des Dammes/The Ladies' Delight". The fact that Octave, unlike Sidone, stayed throughout the funeral process of the relative he hardly knew and showed his gratitude to all the funeral presentees, who knew Claude intimately, is a vivid display of his diplomatic skills, that enabled him to become the owner of a large store.
Not quite a masterpiece, but close May 4, 2005
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
L'Oeuvre (aka The Masterpiece) tells the story of Claude Lantier, a gifted but unorthodox artist scratching out a bohemian existence in Paris. Claude's innovative painting style is years ahead of its time. It frustrates him that he is not getting the acceptance from the cultural establishment that he feels he deserves. Determined to create a masterpiece that will earn acclaim in the annual Paris salon exhibition, he becomes obsessed with his art, abandoning his friends, his family, and his sanity.
This is the 14th book in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and one of Zola's most autobiographical novels. Claude is a surrogate for Zola's childhood friend Cezanne, and Claude's best friend Pierre Sandoz stands in for the author himself. Zola vividly depicts the bohemian lifestyle of his young adulthood in Paris. Claude, Sandoz, and their gang of artist friends struggle to make their fortunes as painters, writers, sculptors. They enjoy each other's camaraderie, encouraging and challenging one another over drinks in a cafe where they debate the meaning and value of art. The reader can't help but share in the excitement of their contagious determination to change the world. As an artist myself, I found Zola's vivid description of the annual salon exhibition--the submission process, the back room politics governing the selection of works, the opening day festivities--particularly fascinating. As the young men grow up, they drift apart somewhat and begin to lead more settled, adult lives. Claude's love interest, Christine, takes on a larger role in his life, and becomes an equally prominent character in the novel. Zola delves deeply into the dynamics of Claude's marriage, and the toll his art takes on the relationship.
The least interesting scenes of the book are the extensive descriptions of the "masterpiece" itself. The specifics of the work don't add much to our understanding of the artist's obsession. Though this book engages the reader from the beginning, it falters towards the end as it becomes more and more divorced from reality. In order to prove a point about the intrinsic inseparability of art and artist, Zola exaggerates Claude's compulsion until it defies believability. Despite these few complaints, overall this is an excellent novel and a great window into the artistic world of Paris at a time when exciting changes took place. Zola fans will find it a valuable read, as will anyone interested in the art world of turn-of-the-century (last century, that is) France.
Sacrifice on the altar of canvas November 29, 2004
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
"The Masterpiece" is, on the one hand, Emile Zola's depiction of Paris's community of avant garde artists in the 1860s and 1870s, but more thematically it is the story of a man who believes passionately in his unorthodox artistic vision and gives everything he's got to realize his "masterpiece" only to get nothing, not even the self-satisfaction of completion, in return. This is the situation of Claude Lantier, Zola's protagonist, a demon of the palette who is so obsessed with the perfection of his art that his wife, who has chosen to suffer poverty with him, laments that she is only his mistress, that he is truly married to the painted women on his canvases.
Claude's temperamental, dour personality is based loosely on that of Zola's own friend Paul Cezanne, a pioneering postimpressionist who achieved a level of fame and respect nobody in Zola's time could have foreseen, one which Claude is not destined to attain. Indeed, his efforts to forge a new style of painting conflicts with the conventional sensibilities of bourgeois Paris and the eponymous Salon, apparently the sole arbiters of the city's artistic taste. He is increasingly frustrated, but ever more determined, by the ridicule directed by the public at large towards his harshly rendered paintings, displayed in the rejects' gallery. "We are the future!...the day will come when we'll kill their Salon stone dead," Claude vows to his circle of sympathetic friends.
Friends are what Claude needs. His two boyhood chums--Pierre Sandoz, a novelist supposed to represent Zola himself, and Louis Dubuche, an architecture student--become financially successful in very different ways (Sandoz by writing a popular series of Zola-esque novels about members of a Parisian family in various strata of society, Dubuche by marrying a sickly heiress), while Claude labors obscurely in an austere apartment, living on a meager stipend from a generous benefactor and making a little extra cash by selling some of his less objectionable paintings to a dealer. He has another friend who is his antithesis of a sort, a traditional painter of genteel portraits named Fagerolles, who wins the money and even the critical acclaim that Claude seeks.
One of the novel's major elements is the intense and beautifully imagined love affair between Claude and a girl named Christine whom he meets on the street one rainy night. Initially his radical art horrifies her, but she easily accustoms herself to it, even modeling for him. Their cohabitation produces a son they name Jacques, whose deformity and retardation seem grotesque implications of their neglect of him. It is not revealing too much to say that Jacques dies at twelve, for it is indicative of Claude's peculiarly callous state of mind that the sight of the dead boy inspires him to complete another canvas--the most attention he has paid to his son in years.
Zola is not the best of the great French novelists of the nineteenth century, but he is arguably the easiest to read and understand; and he is certainly original, having made a conscientious effort to set his style apart from that of his forebears Hugo and Balzac and providing the foundation for the new realism of the twentieth century as practiced by Americans like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. Zola's style, and that of his proteges, is characterized by what seems to be a necessary irony--that a writer who was so successful could be so morbidly fascinated with failure.
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