Книги по живописи

To his contemporaries in late 16th-century Venice, El Greco (1541­–1614) was a contrary fellow, an innate artist blessed with extraordinary talent, but stubborn in the pursuit of his own path. Throughout his career, as he progressed from Crete to Venice, to Rome and ultimately Toledo, Spain, “The Greek” stood apart from his peers, merging different Western art traditions to create a unique pictorial language.

El Greco’s single-minded style rejected naturalism and rejected accessibility. Works such as The Disrobing of Christ (1577–79), The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–88), and The Vision of St John (1608–14) reveal elongated, twisted figures; unreal colours; and an experimental rendering of space — all resistant to easy viewing and intent, instead, on an art of epic grandeur and intellectual beauty.

Frequently regarded with suspicion and criticism during his lifetime, El Greco was revived by a troop of ardent modern admirers, including Pablo Picasso, Roger Fry, and Der Blaue Reiter pioneer Franz Marc. Today, the artist belongs to the privileged group of great old master painters, as much an anomaly of his age, as a reference point across the centuries.

This essential introduction from TASCHEN Basic Art 2.0 explores the influences and the ingredients of El Greco’s radical and singular vision, from the symbolic world of Byzantine icons and the humanistic values of the Renaissance to the nascent beginnings of conceptual practice.

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

Catalogue on the sensational exhibition featuring about 40 of El Greco’s works

The sensational oeuvre of El Greco (1541-1614) was first introduced to a broader German audience in 1910 through Julius Meier-Graefe’s journal, The Spanish Journey. Numerous artists subsequently caught “Greco fever” when they first saw larger groups of his works in exhibitions in Munich in 1911 and Düsseldorf in 1912. Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer, Ludwig Meidner, and especially members of the Blaue Reiter - August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and others - recognized in El Greco a father figure for the Modernist movement, mentioning him in the same breath as Paul Cézanne.

This volume presents a general selection of over forty paintings by El Greco from the most famous museums around the world. At the same time, the young artists’ exploration of the paintings and visual spheres of the exceptional Spanish painter are discussed, opening up a fascinating view of the battle for Modernism.

The paintings of Willem van Aelst (1627–1683) are known for their fine finish, innovative compositions, sumptuous subject matter, and rich, jewel-toned palette. Published on the occasion of an unprecedented traveling exhibition, this book celebrates Van Aelst’s achievements and his significant impact on Dutch still-life painting. 

Van Aelst masterfully depicted arrangements of fresh fruit and flowers, displays of dead game, and evocations of the forest floor, as well as elegant objects such as nautilus cups, distinctive silver vessels, and Venetian glassware. This book features twenty-five paintings from throughout his career. Catalog entries and a biographical essay are provided by Tanya Paul, James Clifton writes about the Medici court, Julie Berger Hochstrasser analyzes Van Aelst’s choice of subject matter, Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. discusses Van Aelst’s time in Amsterdam, and a team of conservators reveals his technical process.

About the Author

Tanya Paul is the Ruth G. Hardman Curator of European Art at the Philbrook Museum of Art, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. James Clifton is director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and curator of Renaissance and Baroque painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Julie Berger Hochstrasser is associate professor of art history at the University of Iowa. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., is curator of Dutch and Flemish paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Although Emil Nolde is famous for his dramatic ocean views and colorful flower gardens, his love of the fantastical and grotesque has received less attention to date. Yet, it is clear from his autobiography and many letters that they had a significant impact on his artistic work. Besides his first oil painting, the Bergriesen (Mountain giants, 1895/96), his alpine postcards from before 1900 also display his fascination with the imaginary: here, the Swiss mountains appear as bizarre human physiognomies. His turning away from reality in favor of a grotesque, alternative world can be seen throughout his oeuvre, from its beginnings, to the Grotesken (1905) and watercolors from 1918/1919, to the years when he was forbidden to practice his profession under the Nazis.

The exhibition catalogue, which presents works of art never before shown, is also the first to discover a fascinating side of the great painter and water colorist.Exhibition: 30.4.-9.7.2017, Internationale Tage Ingelheim at Museum Wiesbaden; 23.7.-15.10.2017, Buchheim Museum der Phantasie, Bernried am Starnberger See

This exhibition catalog takes readers inside the world of early 16th-century Europe, where Maximilian I (1459–1519), known as the "Last Knight", helped launch the German Renaissance.

One of Maximilian’s most important legacies is the work created in his honor by some of the greatest artists of his time, most notably Albrecht Dürer. Today many of these works reside in the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and they are featured in this elegant volume.

In addition to works by Dürer, the book includes reproductions of the extraordinary "Triumphal Procession" of Albrecht Altdorfer and his workshop, and the monumental woodcut "Arch of Honor".

This book explores the artistic culture of Maximilian’s era, with numerous examples from the Albertina's own collection as well as painted portraits, exquisite illuminated manuscripts, precious sculptures, and splendid tapestries from some of the world’s leading museums. Brought together in this elegant volume, these works offer valuable insight into Maximilian’s public relations machinery.

The book also features scholarly articles devoted to Maximilian’s complex artistic projects that will become key to the literature on Emperor Maximilian and the art of his time.

An Expressionist before the term was coined, James Ensor (1860–1949) was the classic insider-outsider enigma. He knew all the right art-world figures but loathed most of them. His style lurched from the Gothic fantastical to the Christian visionary. He was a cosmopolitan trailblazer of modernism, but lived reclusively in an attic room in the resort town of Ostend.

For all his elusiveness, Ensor influenced generations of artists through his vivid often gruesome paintings, prints, and drawings. He is cited in particular for his use of dark satire and allegory, his innovative lighting, and for his interest in carnival and performance, showcased in The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 as well as in his repertoire of self-portraits in which he employs masking, travesty, and role-playing to adopt such varied guises as Christ on the Cross and a gender-bending dandy.

This introduction to Ensor explores the richness and variety of his imagery through key examples of his macabre, maverick oeuvre.

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

The first retrospective look at the irreverent and boisterous artwork of painter Erik Parker

With deep roots in alternative comics, illustration, and graffiti, internationally acclaimed artist Erik Parker’s work bridges underground culture and the pop-surrealism movement. Erik Parker: Colorful Resistance presents his intense compositions, originating from word clusters, viscera-like forms, and animated figurines.

Parker’s work aggressively takes on the issues of the day through an antiauthoritarian approach to established ideologies. "[Parker’s] unpredictable forms are contained by, but also disrupt, relatively geometric framing devices whose radiating curves and bands of color bring to mind proscenium arches or movie marquees. In nearly every painting we seem to be witnessing the emergence of some extravagant freak of nature or perhaps consciousness - a hallucination of the first order." - Roberta Smith, New York Times

"Kunst ist viel mehr häßlich oder schön. Die Kusnt gestaltet das innere Leben, das unter der Oberfläche des Äußeren fließt, es ist mit Verstand und Logik überhaupt nicht faßbar. Die so gewonnene Form ist auch nie ein Abbild, sondern immer Gleichnis, das der Künstler unbewußt schafft und oft erst nach Jahren seinen Sinn versteht ..." (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 12.März 1929)

M.C. Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden (Netherlands). He received his first drawing lessons during secondary school from F.W. van der Haagen, who also taught him the block printing, thus fostering Escher's innate graphic talents.

From 1912 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita, who greatly influenced Escher's further artistic development. Between 1922 and 1934 the artist lived and worked in Italy. Afterwards, Escher spent two years in Switzerland and five in Brussels before finally moving back to Barn in Holland, where he died in 1972.

M.C. Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confrontation with the limitations of our sensory perception.

The transformation of reality

A specifically German artistic revolution

Anxious Angles. The pioneers and masterworks of “degenerate” Expressionism

Amid a frenzy of lurid colour and distortion, discover a calm, authoritative overview of German Expressionism. From the leading collectives of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter to regional schools and lesser-known artists, Dietmar Elger leads us through the protagonists and principles of this vivid 20th-century movement — its stylistic cacophony, its rage against bourgeois values, and its tussle with modern industrial reality.

German Expressionists were uneasy and angry. Emerging at the dawn of the 20th century, they railed against Christian and bourgeois values as much as rampant urban industrialization. Anti-imperialist, they were dispersed, shattered, and depleted by the horrors of the First World War, and rallied their efforts only to be officially erased by the Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937.

In this comprehensive TASCHEN collection, Head of the Gerhard Richter Archive Dietmar Elger gathers the many artists and elements of this urgent, scattered, complex movement into one authoritative overview of its protagonists, principles, and essential role in 20th-century modernism. Finding a critical calm amid the frenzy of colour and distortion, the book distils Expressionism’s leading collectives, Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, as well as its regional characteristics across its Berlin and Munich hubs, and it's North German, Rheinland, and Viennese variants.

Along the way, we compare and contrast themes and stylistic choices as this dispersed group of artists wrestled with their modern industrial reality. We find luminous streaks from Wassily Kandinsky, and the sickly hues of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the futurist facets of Franz Marc, and a partial Impressionist throwback in the gaudy dabs of Emil Nolde. We walk into seedy bars with bloated old men and then enter a claustrophobic yellow room occupied by an awkwardly posed nude. We are crushed in a cacophony of city sound and smoke and then left alone with woods, a lake, and silence.

Spanning this richness and range in Expressionist output, Elger features such well-known figures as Beckmann, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Nolde, Schiele, while taking care to present inadequately studied artists such as Conrad Felixmüller, Ludwig Meidner, and Marianne von Werefkin. The result is an expansive, inclusive, dependable digest of a vivid, often violent mode of expression, and the yearning and unease behind its frenzied paintwork.

The author:

Dietmar Elger studied art history, history, and literature at the University of Hamburg. In 1984/85, he was secretary of Gerhard Richter’s studio and between 1989 and 2006 curator for painting and sculpture at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover. He has organized numerous exhibitions on modern and contemporary art and has directed the Gerhard Richter Archive at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden since 2006. For TASCHEN he has authored the volumes Expressionism, Dadaism, and Abstract Art.

Otherworldly works

This book brings together a colorful mixture of various works focusing on themes of the fantastic and surreal, starting with Böcklin’s "Toteninsel" and including Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer`s dolls, the Australian painter Sidney Nolan, Giger’s monsters, Cattelan’s pope, and the Chapman brothers` hybrids, as well as surreal painting from Magritte and Delvaux, the mystical and sensual work of Gustav Klimt, and Frida Kahlo`s dreamlike self-portraits.

Artists featured: Balthus, Hans Bellmer, Arnold Böcklin, Fernando Botero, Maurizio Cattelan, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Peter Doig, Alfred Kubin, James Ensor, Max Ernst, Ernst Fuchs, Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, Joan Miró, Sidney Nolan, Odilon Redon, Dorothea Tanning, Franz von Stuck, Andrew Wyeth

About the Series:
Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Genre Series features:

• a detailed illustrated introduction plus a timeline of the most important political, cultural and social events that took place during that period
• a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each of which is presented on a 2-page spread with a full-page image and with an interpretation of the respective work, plus a portrait and brief biography of the artist
• approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions

The author:
Walter Schurian studied psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Based in Vienna, he has been professor of psychology at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster since 1973 and is the author and editor of numerous publications focusing mainly on Austrian contemporary art.

Посмотреть русскоязычное издание книги Fantastic Art - Фантастическое искусство

Botero has gained international fame, capturing the whimsy of life by painting corpulent and sometimes comical figures. The dilation of his subjects gives the figures an abstract, unreal, and even grotesque dimension. Studies in beauty and terror, Botero’s monumental figures can be sensual, and many are filled with pain and sorrow.

This monograph presents the paintings realized in the last thirty years and created using his own unique language, which is a distinguishing feature of his work and an extraordinary blend of Latin American tradition and European painting.