Книги по живописи

The most thorough Caspar David Friedrich retrospective in many years, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the artist's birth

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) is renowned as the Romantic painter par excellence, his works icons of an age of major social upheaval. His landscape paintings and drawings broke with traditional patterns of representation, and paved new ways of both experiencing and reflecting on the ambivalent relationship between humankind and nature.

Accompanying the most comprehensive Friedrich retrospective in many years, this catalogue re-examines the artist’s groundbreaking work in light of the urgent challenges in a time of climate crisis and postcolonial reflection. It centres on more than sixty paintings, among them many major iconic works, and about 100 drawings. Selected works by Friedrich’s colleagues, notably August Heinrich, Georg Friedrich Kersting, Ernst Ferdinand Oehme and Johann Alexander Thiele are also featured. The second part of the book focuses on the contemporary reception of his work. In contributions ranging from video and photography to installations, some twenty artists working across a variety of genres and media explore the Romantic era, its attitude to nature and the art of Caspar David Friedrich. The participants include Alex Grein, Swaantje Güntzel, Jochen Hein, Johanna Karlsson, Hiroyuki Masuyama, Loudmila Milanova, Mariele Neudecker, Ulrike Rosenbach, Susan Schuppli, Santeri Tuori and Kehinde Wiley.

About the Authors:

Markus Bertsch is Head of the 19th-Century Collection at Hamburger Kunsthalle. Johannes Grave is Professor of Modern Art History with a focus on European Romanticism at the University of Jena. He was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Preis in 2020 for his research on art in the early 1800s, early Renaissance painting and picture theory.

Divine apples and pears: Cezanne's quest for a harmony parallel to Nature. 

He was the founding father of modern art, the grandmaster who pointed painting forward on its way from Impressionism to the 20th century: Paul Cezanne (1839 - 1906). In Paris, but above all in Provence, Cezanne quested tirelessly for a harmony parallel to Nature discovering it in still lifes of apples, in bathers, or in the renowned landscapes of his beloved Montagne Sainte-Victoire. 

This book discusses this extraordinary artist s major works and his theories of painting and colour.

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

Widely regarded as the bridging link between late nineteenth-century Impressionism and Cubism, Cezanne's work is characterized by his intense study of his subjects. Overflowing with impeccably reproduced images, this book offers full-page spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details - allowing the viewer to appreciate every aspect of the artist's technique and oeuvre.

The painter as poet. A world of floating symbols

For Marc Chagall (1887–1985), painting was an intricate tapestry of dreams, tales, and traditions. His instantly recognizable visual language carved out a unique early 20th-century niche, often identified as one of the earliest expressions of psychic experience.

Chagall’s canvases are characterized by loose brushwork, deep colors, a particular fondness for blue, and a repertoire of recurring tropes including musicians, roosters, rooftops, flowers, and floating lovers. For all their ethereal charms, his compositions were often rich and complex in their references. They wove together not only colors and forms, but also his Jewish roots with his present encounters in Paris, markers of faith with gestures of love and symbols of hope with testimonies of trauma.

Across scenes of birth, love, marriage, and death, this dependable artist introduction explores the many versions of Chagall’s rich vocabulary. From visions of his native Vitebsk in modern-day Belarus to images of the Eiffel Tower, we explore the unique aesthetic of one of the most readily identifiable modern masters and one of the most influential Jewish artists of all time.

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

Featuring one hundred works from throughout Chagall’s career, this dazzling exhibition catalog focuses on the artist’s engagement with life’s most primal and universal themes.

Steeped in tradition yet alive with imagination, Chagall’s enormous body of work reflects a profound connection to cultural roots and to the boundless possibilities of creative expression. This monograph brings fresh eyes to the most relevant aspects of Chagall’s oeuvre. It traces how, over eight decades, Chagall responded to his contemporaries’ experimentations with cubism, fauvism, and surrealism by creating his own visual language.

It offers a lively examination of overarching themes ― love and romance; Jewish tradition and history; spirituality and the daily life, based on memory and nostalgia ― and the ways they are reflected through repetition and variation over the years. And it reveals how Chagall’s flexible use of symbols contributes to build a fantastic cosmos grounded on the “logic of the illogical”.

Readers will come to understand how Chagall was essentially a storyteller with an enormous gift for color and line, and a narrative artist who understood the power of symbolism in his own terms.

About the Author:

Gisela Kirpicsenko is curator at the Albertina Museum, Vienna.

This thought-provoking book re-evaluates the work of one of the most notorious, provocative and visually influential artists of the twentieth century. Robert Radford traces Salvador Dali's career from the crucial early years in Spain, to membership of the Surrealist group in 1930s Paris, and then on to New York and Hollywood, where his purposefully extravagant behaviour made him a media star. The influential figures in his life - Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Buñuel and his wife Gala - are introduced as the book explores Dali's diverse work as painter, writer, film-maker, illustrator, jewellery designer, myth-maker and performance artist.

About the Author:

Well known as a lecturer, writer and exhibition curator, Robert Radford taught Art History for many years at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

From politics to religion, psychology to nuclear physics, learn how Dalí's work embraces nearly every major historic development of the twentieth century

Although Salvador Dalí’s characteristically provocative behavior and bizarre pictorial language made him an outlier in high society, his body of work reflects his century’s most important innovations and concerns. This introduction to Dalí’s work features dozens of exquisite reproductions as it traces the artist’s development, life and career. Readers will learn how he was influenced by contemporaries Miró, Ernst, and de Chirico as well as by Raphael and Gaudí. It explores his early adoption of Surrealism, his fascination with the subconscious, and his antipathy toward war. It illustrates how Dalí’s return to the Catholic church and his interest in nuclear and atomic physics was manifested in his paintings; how he experimented in film and, later, even created holograms. By making Dalí’s often perplexing art accessible to audiences of every level, this engaging introduction helps readers understand why he remains one of the most influential―and imitated―artists of all time.

The perfect gift for Hockney fans and dog lovers everywhere, David Hockney's Dog Days, now in a gift edition, is an album devoted to two of the artist's closest friends, his dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie. This beautiful and engaging book includes almost all of Hockney's paintings and drawings of his two companions, dozens of new illustrations created specially for this book, and a text by the artist himself.

David Hockney introduces his two dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie, in this delightful collection. The result of sharp observation and affection, these paintings and drawings are lyrical studies in form and design while the text by the artist gives a glimpse of how to work with models who don't necessarily want to sit still.

From September 1993, I painted and drew my dogs. This took a certain amount of planning, since dogs are generally not interested in Art (I say generally only because I have now come across a singing dog. Food and love dominate their lives.

I make no apologies for the apparent subject matter. These two dear little creatures are my friends. They are intelligent, loving, comical and often bored. They watch me work; I notice the warm shapes they make together, their sadness and their delights. And, being Hollywood dogs, they somehow seem to know that a picture is being made. - David Hockney

About the Author:

David Hockney is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. He has produced work in almost every medium - painting, drawing, stage design, photography and printmaking - and has stretched the boundaries of all of them. Born in Bradford, England, in 1937, Hockney attended art school in London before moving to Los Angeles in the 1960s. There, he painted his famous swimming pool paintings. In a 2011 poll of more than 1,000 British artists, Hockney was voted the most influential British artist of all time. He continues to create and exhibit art.

Portrait of an Artist. A comprehensive chronicle of David Hockney’s life and work

Pop artist, painter of modern life, landscape painter, master of color, explorer of image and perception — for six decades, David Hockney has been known as an artist who always finds new ways of exploring the world and its representational possibilities. He has consistently created unforgettable images: works with graphic lines and integrated text in the Swinging Sixties in London; the famous swimming pool series as a representation of the 1970s California lifestyle; closely observed portraits and brightly colored, oversized landscapes after his eventual return to his native Yorkshire. In addition to drawings in which he transfers what he sees directly onto paper, there are multiperspective Polaroid collages that open up the space into a myriad of detailed views, and iPad drawings in which he captures light using a most modern medium — testaments to Hockney’s enduring delight in experimentation.

This special edition has been newly assembled from the two volumes of the David Hockney: A Bigger Book monograph to celebrate TASCHEN’s 40th anniversary. Hockney’s life and work is presented year by year as a dialogue between his works and voices from the time period, alongside reviews and reflections by the artist in a chronological text, supplemented by portrait photographs and exhibition views. Together they open up new perspectives, page after page, revealing how Hockney undertakes his artistic research, how his painting develops, and where he finds inspiration for his multifaceted work.

The artist:

David Hockney (born July 9, 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. He first emerged in the early 1960s during the height of British pop, then moved to Los Angeles in 1964, where he famously painted a series of swimming pools. Alongside the classic genres of portraiture and landscape, he always kept evolving his art, using technologies such as Polaroids, photocopiers and fax machines, digital video, or the iPhone and iPad as tools for his painting. Since his first big survey exhibition, which in 1970 traveled Europe from the Whitechapel Gallery in London, he has been one of the most widely shown and popular artists of our time.

The editor:

Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor specializing in contemporary art and photography. His TASCHEN publications include the Collector’s Editions Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Ai Weiwei, and the David Hockney SUMO A Bigger Book, as well as monographs like the XXL-sized Jean-Michel Basquiat.

About the series:

TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program — now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

At the beginning of 2020, just as global Covid-19 restrictions were coming into force, the artist David Hockney was at his house, studio and garden in Normandy. From there, he witnessed the arrival of spring, and recorded the blossoming of the surrounding landscape on his iPad, a medium he has been using for over a decade. Working outdoors was an antidote to the anxiety of the moment for Hockney – ‘We need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,’ he says.

This uplifting publication – produced to accompany a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts – includes 116 of his new iPad paintings and shows to full effect Hockney’s singular skill in capturing the exuberance of nature.

About the Authors:

William Boyd is the author of sixteen novels, among them A Good Man in Africa (1981), An Ice Cream War (1982), Any Human Heart (2002), Restless (2006) and Trio (2020)

Edith Devaney is Contemporary Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) is one of the most important and influential artists of the Northern Renaissance. He was a painter, printmaker and theorist and knew all the major Italian artists of his time, such as Raphael, Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci.
His enormous talent and skills as a draughtsman were already manifest at a very young age, as can be seen in the Self-Portrait he produced in silverpoint drawing in 1484, when still barely thirteen years old.
With Emperor Maximilian I his patron from 1512, Dürer realized numerous engravings, altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, watercolours and books.

His introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, secured his reputation as the most important figure of the German Renaissance.

Dürer in Detail reveals the work of the German master as never before, in breathtaking, large-format closeup. Till-Holger Borchert, the German art historian and director of the Bruges Museums, describes Dürer’s paintings, drawings, and graphic masterpieces, detail by detail, while offering original insights delivered in
clear and accessible language. The book is organized thematically and includes a biography, an annotated list of works, and a suggested reading list.

2021 marks the 500th anniversary of Albrecht Dürer’s year-long journey to the Low Countries from 1520 to 1521. Both the National Gallery in London (Spring 2021) Suermondt-Ludwig Museum in Aachen (Summer 2021) will hold Dürer exhibitions on that occasion.

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was the greatest artist of the Northern European Renaissance. Dürer's virtuoso woodcuts and engravings ensured his fame throughout the Continent during his own lifetime. Yet he also produced an extraordinary output in other media – including painting, watercolour and drawing – which encompasses riveting portraits and self-portraits, grand altarpieces and meticulous studies of animals and nature.

In this major new monograph, Jeffrey Chipps Smith examines the myths that have contributed to Dürer's legend, considering his life and career within the framework of a tumultuous epoch in European history. Taking account of the extensive scholarship on the artist, Smith provides fresh insights into many of his most notable works, uncovering the creative process behind them and their wealth of meanings and ideas. Central to Smith's focus is the historical and cultural ferment of pre- and post-Reformation Europe, as he traces Dürer's formative years in the Imperial free city of Nuremberg and his subsequent travels across Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The result is a vivid picture of the professional activity of a prolific and psychologically complex figure.

With its detailed commentary and original research, this is both an authoritive and an approachable monograph – indispensable for the student or scholar, while certain to appeal to anyone interested in this brilliant artist.

About the Author:

Jeffrey Chipps Smith holds the Kay Fortson Chair in European Art at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance (1994) and Sensuous Worship: The Jesuits and the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (2003).

A fascinating examination of Munch’s prints, which were central to his creative process and established his reputation as an artist

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is best known today as a painter, but his reputation was in fact established through his prints, which were central to his creative process. His printmaking was experimental and innovative, and he continually revisited the subjects of his paintings in striking prints, in which he evoked a wide range of emotion and mood through the use of varied techniques.

Munch’s early life in the industrial town of Kristiania (renamed Oslo in 1925) was marked by sickness and poverty. His first works centred on the expression of deep emotional experiences, specifically the deaths of his mother and teenage sister, as well as passionate yet unhappy love affairs of which his deeply religious father disapproved. Encouraged by his encounters with a Bohemian society of artists, writers and poets, he developed a visual landscape that was a radical deviation from the slick society portraits and grand Scandinavian landscapes then so much in vogue. His efforts attracted considerable attention and much criticism, and he practised with little financial success as a painter for ten years before he started to gain his reputation as a profoundly innovative printmaker.

Written by a team of experts, and with an interview by writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, this book will shed new light on the production of some of Munch’s most remarkable works.

Contents List:

Foreword by the directors of the British Museum and the Munch Museum; Sponsor’s foreword • Introduction • 1. Transfigured continent: Impressions from Munch’s Europe • 2. The inner soul of an artist: Munch’s background and the development of his Frieze of Life • 3. Munch and the world of printmaking • 4. Munch and the theatre in Paris • 5. ‘Is art influenced by too much business?’: Cultural capital and the market for Munch • 6. Plates, stones and blocks: Munch’s printing matrices • Reflections on Edvard Munch: an interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard • Checklist of works in the exhibition • Chronology; Checklist of exhibited items; Notes; Selected bibliography; Prints by Munch in UK public collections; Acknowledgments; Picture credits; List of contributors; Index

About the Authors:

Giulia Bartrum is Curator of German Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author, known for six autobiographical novels titled My Struggle.

Munch’s pictorial worlds – the initial impetus for modernism

Edvard Munch’s radical modernity in painting was a challenge for his contemporaries. This applied in particular to the art scene in Berlin around 1900 which the Norwegian Symbolist artist influenced profoundly. In return, he received support there and was able to continue to develop his work. The publication is lavishly illustrated and describes knowledgeably the story of Munch and Berlin.

In 1892 the Association of Berlin Artists invited the still-unknown Edvard Munch (1863–1944) to an exhibition. The public was shocked by the colourful, sketch-like pictures. The artist enjoyed the furore and moved to the city on the Spree, where he repeatedly sojourned until 1908. Here he learned the techniques for printed graphics and presented for the first time paintings in several continuous series which would become central to his oeuvre. In Berlin, before long, the concept of the “Magic of the North” (Stefan Zweig) was no longer associated with romantic or naturalistic fjord landscapes, but with Munch’s psychologically concentrated pictorial worlds.

About the Authors:

Thomas Köhler has been the director of the Berlinische Galerie, the State Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture in Berlin since 2010.

Stefanie Heckmann has been the head of the fine art collection at the Berlinische Galerie since 2014 and is the curator of the exhibition.
 

Edward Hopper’s world-famous paintings articulate an idiosyncratic view of modern life. With his impressive subjects, independent pictorial vocabulary, and virtuoso play of colors, Hopper continues to influence to this day the image of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. He began his career as an illustrator and became famous around the globe for his oil paintings. They testify to his great interest in the effects of color and his mastery in depicting light and shadow. The Fondation Beyeler is devoting its large exhibition in the spring of 2020 to Hopper’s iconic images of the vast American landscape. The catalogue gathers together all of the paintings, watercolors, and drawings from the 1910s to the 1960s on display in the exhibition, and supplements them with essays focused on the subject of depicting landscape.

About the Artist:

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is the master of American Realism. His paintings captured life during his era. His method of painting rapidly became the stylistic foundation of a type of American modernism. A source of inspiration for countless painters, photographers, and filmmakers, his body of work continues to be influential to this very day.