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An expanded and revised edition of this elegant and definitive volume, which helped establish the ever-growing passion for American Impressionism.

With brilliant scholarship and a wealth of stunning illustrations, American Impressionism provides a vivid summary of the entire art movement, starting with its roots in earlier American art and its relationship to French Impressionism. The first edition was quickly recognized as the most authoritative and penetrating account of the movement, which has continued to grow in popularity since the book's debut. For this new edition, which features 25 additional illustrations, Professor Gerdts has added a fascinating new chapter on Impressionist themes. The volume also includes a thoroughly updated bibliography.

American Impressionism tells how the movement progressed from an avant-garde aesthetic assaulted by critics up to its years of triumph and how the movement developed in diverse ways throughout the country including regional Impressionism in the South, Midwest, and West. All of the masterworks are here, from Childe Hassam's sun-drenched gardens to John Twachtmans snow-silenced landscapes, from Edmund Tarbell's coolly elegant ladies in dim, luxurious interiors to Frederick Friesekes sun-dappled nudes.

Home is where the colors live. The painting of André Butzer

Fusing European expressionism with American popular culture, André Butzer started painting his way through the artistic and political extremes of the 20th century. With wide-ranging influences including the likes of Friedrich Hölderlin, Edvard Munch, Walt Disney, and Henry Ford, he developed a fictitious universe centered around the space colony NASAHEIM. There dwells the Peace-Siemens, a friendly head-shape that combines utopian ideas with the economical thinking of budding mass-consumerism, while a figure like the Wanderer offers romantic projections, or the Shame-Human reflections of the political past. This universe lends thematic depth to the canvases, with the characters acting as protagonists of paint, surrounding the N-House, home of all colors, in the style the artist has termed “Science-Fiction Expressionism.”

Some years into the new millennium, the colors took on a life of their own and grew into abstract paintings of lines freewheeling across the canvas. Moving closer to the limits of painting, from 2010 on Butzer explored the fundamental dimensions and potentialities of painterly expression in the seemingly black surfaces of his N-Paintings. At this point, Butzer relocated to California in 2018, painting outdoors year-round. The resulting works brim with colorful freshness, an extended family of lines and figurations with new attitudes refined by their experiences at the far edge of abstraction.

This is the first book to span the full range of Butzer’s oeuvre from 1999 to 2021, the works’ progression gaining an almost musical drive of development, return, and new beginnings. The plates are interspersed with contemporary quotes from the artist that illuminate his idiosyncratic stance as a background to the work, as well as photos from his archives. The introductory essay, written by Hans Werner Holzwarth, investigates the different work phases, and places the artist’s ideas in a wider discourse of abstraction and figuration after the end of either genre. And, most importantly, the book’s pristine, huge-format illustrations fully evidence the finesse as a colorist that place this artist among the internationally most recognized painters of his generation.

The artist:

André Butzer was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1973. For more than 25 years he has painted his way through the extremes of the 20th century, exploring art, politics, and pop culture. Paintings for him are “localizations of the greatest despair and the greatest hope,” which is exactly why “they come closest to the very joy and aid we are in dire need of.” After spending several years in California, he now lives in the southwest of Berlin and is one of the most internationally recognized painters of his generation.

Famous First Edition: First printing of 4,000 numbered copies

An extraordinary private collection of watercolours and drawings by Andrew Wyeth depicting the subjects memorialized in his legendary painting Christina's World, one of the best-known works of American art.

This book presents rarely seen watercolours and drawings Andrew Wyeth made of his friend Christina Olson, her brother Alvaro, and the weathered Maine farmstead where they lived. It features moving portraits and serene interior and exterior views of the house and the surrounding land, now memorialized in Wyeth's 1948 tempera painting Christina's World, one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art and now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Some forty-five works from the collection of the Marunuma Art Park in Japan, rarely shown before in the United States, are accompanied by works from the Farnsworth as well as by historical photographs of Wyeth, the Olsons, and the house.

Otoyo Nakamura writes about the history of this collection of Wyeth works, and Michael Komanecky addresses the place of the Olson farm in Wyeth's career over three decades, and how Christina's World and the Olson House have inspired pilgrimages for fans of Wyeth's work. Despite its isolated location and seasonal schedule, Olson House draws thousands of visitors each year from around the world. The Olson House, acquired by the Farnsworth Art Museum in 1991, has been recommended for National Landmark status.

About the Authors:

Michael K. Komanecky is Chief Curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; and former Chief Curator at the Phoenix Art Museum, and author of and contributor to numerous books, including The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain (2008), Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece Paintings on Copper, 1575-1775 (1998), The Folding Image: Screens by Western Artists of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1984), and Robert Indiana and The Star of Hope (2009).

Otoyo Nakamura is Wyeth Collection Curator at Marunuma Art Park, Asaka, Japan.

Selected and Arranged by Richard Meryman from Recorded Conversations with the Artist, 1964-2007

Richard Meryman began an enduring friendship with Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) while on the job as a Life magazine editor in 1964. For Meryman, this unique friendship yielded more than four decades of recorded conversations with Wyeth, his family, friends and neighbours in Wyeth’s homes in Pennsylvania and Maine. Meryman notes that, whether during formal interviews, shared meals, car rides or long walks, “Wyeth applied to himself the same sensitive understandings that fueled his art. A lifelong realist who swam against the art world tide of modernism, he showed himself to be fundamentally a painter of emotion – of people and objects that somehow embodied his memories and imagination, triggering feelings inexpressible in words, but recognized by viewers.” In five skillfully crafted monologues composed by Meryman around key themes in Wyeth’s work, we hear the voices of not only the artist but also his subjects, neighbors, relatives and critics. 

The book includes reproductions of the works of art discussed by Wyeth in his own words, as well as previously unpublished photographs of Wyeth’s studio taken in 2009.

Whether you're a casual admirer of Andrew Wyeth's paintings or an ardent fan, this retrospective album of his work from the 1930s to the 90s is both an outstanding introduction to the artist and a highly personal glimpse of his career.

The book presents 133 color reproductions of tempera, drybrush, and watercolor paintings and five black and white pencil sketches, and includes Distant Thunder, Green Room, Barracoon, and several paintings of Helga and of Siri Erickson. For every one of these pieces, Wyeth also offers his commentary describing the model or the scene, his mood or his technique, or all of these. 

One of Andrew Wyeth’s most important paintings, Wind from the Sea, a recent gift to the National Gallery of Art, is also the artist’s first full realization of the window as a recurring subject in his art. 

Wyeth returned to windows over the next sixty years, producing more than 250 works that explore both the formal and conceptual richness of the subject. Spare, elegant and abstract, these paintings are free of the narrative element inevitably associated with Wyeth’s better-known figural compositions. 

In 2014 the Gallery will present an exhibition of a select group of these deceptively ‘realistic’ works, window paintings that are in truth skilfully manipulated constructions engaged with the visual complexities posed by the transparency, beauty and formal structure of windows. In its exclusive focus on paintings without human subjects, this catalogue will offer a new approach to Wyeth’s work, being the first time that his non-figural compositions have been published as a group. 

The authors explore Wyeth’s fascination with windows – their formal structure and metaphorical complexity. In essays that address links with the poetry of Robert Frost and the paintings of Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and Franz Kline, the authors consider Wyeth’s statement that he was, in truth, an ‘abstract’ painter.

Prior to the 1960s, Andrew Wyeth enjoyed a stellar reputation as a rising star in the art world. Since then, critics and scholars have largely ignored him. Wyeth, however, who is age 88 at the date of publication, has continued to paint, to the delight of his admirers, collectors, and the art-loving public.

Now, in association with the High Museum exhibition, Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic takes a fresh look at the work of one of America's most beloved artists. In examining his entire oeuvre, the book celebrates the artist's ongoing love affair with everyday life-domestic, natural, and architectural. Found throughout Wyeth's work, these objects form patterns that illuminate core themes and reveal the artist wrestling with issues of memory, temporality, embodiment, and the metaphysical. Organized chronologically and thematically, the book explores how the artist's approach to these subjects was formed in his early career and has been revisited in new and surprising ways in recent years.

Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic comprises 150 tempera paintings and 50 drawings and watercolours-including his most-famous works, but also many published here for the first time. 

About the Authors:

Anne Knutson is guest curator for the exhibition Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic. Kathleen A. Foster is the Robert L. McNeill, Jr. Curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Michael R. Taylor is Associate Curator and Acting Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Christopher Crosman is Director of the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. John Wilmerding is the Christopher B. Sarofim Professor of American Art at Princeton University.

On the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of an exceptional artist: an up-to-date and comprehensive monograph of the life and works of Angelica Kauffman.

In her day, Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) was a star throughout all of Europe. Royalty, famous poets, and philosophers flocked to her to have their portraits painted. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called her a “woman of immense talent” - he reserved the word genius for men, an attitude against which the artist fought her entire life. Her self-confidence helped her succeed in a male-dominated world.

In this monograph, close to 150 key works - including self-portraits, portraits, allegories, historical paintings, and religious depictions - impressively pay homage to the life and work of Angelica Kauffman. This publication focuses on her art in the context of her personal history and the places where she spent her cosmopolitan life. Using this approach, the authors also touch on the intriguing question of the relevance of this exceptional female artist today.

In commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Anthony van Dyck, the great Flemish painter, a monumental collection of 250 reproductions of masterpieces by this genius also offers a comprehensive analysis of his work by respected scholars.

The most comprehensive volume devoted to the life and work of pioneering African American artist Robert Colescott, accompanying the largest traveling exhibition of his work ever mounted.

Robert Colescott (1925-2009) was a trailblazing artist, whose august career was as unique as his singular artistic style. Known for figurative satirical paintings that exposed the ugly ironies of race in America from the 1970s through the late 1990s, his work was profoundly influential to the generations of artists that have followed him, such as Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Henry Taylor, among many others.

This volume surveys the entirety of Colescott's body of work, with contributions by more than ten curators and writers, including a substantive essay by the show's cocurator, the renowned Lowery Stokes Sims. It provides a detailed stylistic analysis of his politically inflected oeuvre, focusing on Colescott's own consideration of his work in the context of the grand traditions of European painting and contemporary polemic. In addition, the book features reminiscences and thought pieces by a variety of family, friends, students, curators, dealers, and scholars on his work as well as a selection of writings by the artist himself. Relying on previously unpublished transcripts of lectures, reviews, and archival materials provided by institutions and individuals, the book will provide a fuller story of the artist's life and career.

About the Authors:

Raphaela Platow is the Alice & Harris Weston Director and Chief Curator of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Lowery Stokes Sims is a dedicated advocate for diversity and inclusion in the art world. She is an independant curator after working for the Museum of Arts and Design, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Matthew Weseley is an independent art historian. He is currently working on an academic monograph on the work of Robert Colescott.

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Пролистать книгу Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott

An accessible guide to the finer details of 100 masterpieces of Western art

Great works of art cannot be fully understood in a single encounter: to revisit and reconsider art again and again throughout one’s life is to be richly rewarded with an ever-deepening appreciation and insight. Similar benefits come from analysing a work of art in detail.

Art in Detail: 100 Masterpieces spotlights the finer points that even connoisseurs may miss, casting light upon minutiae that a quick glance will almost certainly fail to reveal. These include subtle internal details, such as hidden symbols. Expert commentary reveals the technical tricks employed by the artist to achieve particular effects, such as the placement of the subject, the lighting and the style of brushstrokes.

The book also looks at the themes and external and personal factors influencing the creation of an artwork – everything from the broad socio-economic context in which the artist operated, to personal, individual circumstances at the time of the work’s creation, which are often of great relevance.

The book examines 100 works of art down the ages, from Giotto’s 14th-century fresco Adoration of the Magi, to a twenty-first-century pastel by Paula Rego. It approaches each work not only, to quote Matthew Arnold, ‘as in itself it really is’, but also as part of a tradition that links the oldest work of art to the most recent, as artists pass a metaphorical baton down through the ages.

About the Author:

Susie Hodge is an art historian, author, artist and journalist with more than 100 books to her name. She has an MA in the History of Art from Birkbeck, University of London, and is a Fellow of the RSA. She has twice been named the No. 1 art writer by the Independent.

“The Devil holds the strings which move us!” (Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 1857.)

Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer… the Devil has many names and faces, all of which have always served artists as a source of inspiration. Often commissioned by religious leaders as images of fear or veneration, depending on the society, representations of the underworld served to instruct believers and lead them along the path of righteousness.

For other artists, such as Hieronymus Bosch, they provided a means of denouncing the moral decrepitude of one’s contemporaries.
In the same way, literature dealing with the Devil has long offered inspiration to artists wishing to exorcise evil through images, especially the works of Dante and Goethe.

In the 19th century, romanticism, attracted by the mysterious and expressive potential of the theme, continued to glorify the malevolent. Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, the monumental, tormented work of a lifetime, perfectly illustrates this passion for evil, but also reveals the reason for this fascination. Indeed, what could be more captivating for a man than to test his mastery by evoking the beauty of the ugly and the diabolic?

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) possessed the rare ability to transform unconscious compulsions into figurative, human-like forms that seem to evoke the raw emotions that bore them. Mixing realism and abstraction, Bacon delves deep beneath the surfaces of things, opening up the human body to reveal the chaos that lies within and struggling with all that is inexplicable. Erotic and grotesquely beautiful is the work of this legendary painter whose haunting, distorted figures have inspired entire generations of painters who seek to emulate his highly original style.

The author:
Luigi Ficacci studied Art History in Rome under Giulio Carlo Argan. He is curator at the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome and lectures at different Italian universities. The focal points of his research work are the issues raised by 17th and 18th century and contemporary Italian art.

About the Series:
Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features:

* a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist
* approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
* a concise biography

Forms of feeling. The human body in distress

Largely self-taught as an artist, Francis Bacon (1909–1992) developed a unique ability to transform interior and unconscious impulses into figurative forms and intensely claustrophobic compositions.

Emerging into notoriety in the period following World War II, Bacon took the human body as his nominal subject, but a subject ravaged, distorted, and dismembered so as to writhe and wail with intense emotional content. With flailing limbs, hollow voids, and tumurous growths, his gripping, often grotesque, portraits are as much reflections on the trials and the traumas of the human condition as they are character studies. These haunting forms were also among the first in art history to depict overtly homosexual themes.

This book introduces Bacon's erotic, unsettling, unforgettable oeuvre, a transformative body of work often emulated, much analysed, and above all felt.

About the series:

Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series features:

 - a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
 - a concise biography
 - approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Realist of the unreal

French-German painter Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908-2001), known as Balthus, shocked the Parisian art world in 1934 with his dreamy, sensual, Neo-Classical portraits of nymphets at a time when Surrealism and abstraction were de rigueur. As a provocateur, Balthus was often scorned; as an artist, he was widely embraced as a prodigy. In response to critics of his realist style, Balthus said: "The real isn’t what you think you see. One can be a realist of the unreal and a figurative painter of the invisible." His erotic, poetic paintings live on as examples of the best figurative work of the modern era.

The author:

Gilles Néret (1933–2005) was an art historian, journalist, writer and museum correspondent. He organized several art retrospectives in Japan and founded the SEIBU museum and the Wildenstein Gallery in Tokyo. He directed art reviews such as L'Œil and Connaissance des Arts and received the Elie Faure Prize in 1981 for his publications. His TASCHEN titles include Salvador Dalí: The Paintings, Matisse, and Erotica Universalis.

About the Series:

Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art Series features:

• a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
• a concise biography
• approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions