Книги по живописи

Pleasantly plump

With whimsical irony and a style reminiscent of the old masters, Fernando Botero (b.1932) began painting caricatured animals and corpulent bodies with disproportionate heads at a time when his contemporaries were fervently rejecting figurative work in favor of abstraction. More recently he has expanded into sculpture, creating delightful large-scale bronze works portraying the same sorts of voluminous figures he so loved to paint. Like the writings of Gabriel García Márquez or the music of Astor Piazzola, Botero’s work has come to represent modern Latin American culture.

About the Series:
TASCHEN portfolios feature high quality prints that beg to be framed. Tucked in each portfolio are 14 large-format reproductions, each with a brief description. Guaranteed to brighten any day, they also make great gifts for art lovers!

Flemish painting flourished from the early 15th century until the 17th century to Belgium and Holland. Flanders delivered the leading painters in Northern Europe and attracted many promising young painters from neighbouring countries. The most famous painters of the period were from Flanders and their influence went across all of Europe.

The first major survey of artist Katherine Bradford, renowned for her wholly personal paintings of swimmers, bathers, and superheroes.

Known for her vibrant palette and eccentric compositions, Katherine Bradford came to prominence late in life, when her unique style of painting finally garnered critical acclaim in the art world. The artist’s paintings are populated by a wide-ranging cast of characters—from swimmers to superheroes to, most recently, mothers—who anchor and connect her work across time and media. Her figures, who often defy society’s expectations of women (and other gender norms), thus serve as surrogates for a mother, painter, and lesbian coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century. Featuring more than twenty years of her work, Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford considers the artist’s many themes, her ongoing exploration of different painterly modes, and her lifelong fascination with color.

About the Author:

Jaime DeSimone is the Robert and Elizabeth Nanovic Curator of Contemporary Art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. Nancy Princenthal is a New York–based art writer.

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Пролистать книгу Flying Woman: The Paintings of Katherine Bradford

Concepts in space. Artworks as visual explanations of ideas

Italian artist Lucio Fontana tore apart the modern art establishment — literally. Trained initially as a sculptor, Fontana (1899-1968) blurred the lines between painting and sculpture by creating works that combined both form and color in a spatial context, most famously exemplified by his slashed canvases of the 1950s and 60s. Fontana`s work was truly conceptual, in that the ideas he wanted to express were more important than the actual work itself; with titles like Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept) and Scultura Spaziale (Spatial Sculpture), his pieces served as visual explanations of his ideas. From his early work in collaborating with architects through his years in Buenos Aires (where, in the mid-1940s, he published the famous "White Manifesto" and "Technical Manifesto of Spatialism," among others), his experimental light installations of the early 1950s, and his later experiments with various media, this book covers the entire career of Italy`s pioneering abstract artist.

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

The author:
Barbara Hess (b. 1964) is an art historian, critic and translator, resident in Cologne. Her numerous articles on contemporary art have featured in Camera Austria, Flash Art, Kunst-Bulletin and Texte zur Kunst. She co-curated the touring exhibition Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum/videogalerie schum at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Her TASCHEN titles include a monograph on Willem de Kooning.

Guido di Petro was born in 1387 in Tuscany, near Fiesole. While still very young, he joined the Observant Dominican order, making the vow of absolute poverty and obedience. His talent soon proved useful as he began to paint miniatures for missals and other religious books.

In 1436, along with several other friars, he moved to the convent of San Marco in Florence. There he painted frescos in the cloister and in the chapel. His move to Florence established a fundamental change for him, as he was plunged into the effervescence of a major artistic centre under the protection of Medici family – the most influential patrons of the arts of the time.

He was among the first to use the techniques of perspective proposed by Leon Battista Alberti. His method of depicting movement, as well as his use of colour and facial expressions to highlight grace and emotion, place him among the major painters of European Gothic and early Renaissance, with such brilliant works as the Annunciation, and The Last Judgement. Gentile da Fabriano may have been one of his students.

By the end of his life, he was an archpriest in Florence and died in 1455 in Rome. Called “Blessed Angelico for a long time (Vasari dates this name back to 1469), he was not officially beatified until 1984 by Pope John Paul II.

Through a series of magnificent illustrations, combined with artistic and biographical analysis, Etienne Beissel unravels the talent of this unique artist, who alone knew how to paint a Christian soul, and whom André Malraux considered to be the painter who marked the severance between the sacred art of the Middle Ages and the new art born with the Renaissance.

The power and magnitude of his lifes work are vividly conveyed by this thorough evaluation written by Hugh Davies, director of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, and art historian Sally Yard. Born in Dublin, as a teenager Bacon moved to London, where he worked as an interior designer and taught himself to paint. Responding to influences as diverse as Michelangelo and the photographer Muybridge, he has created a motion-filled style uniquely his own. Fascinated by the challenge of capturing what he calls "the mysteries of appearance," Bacon confronts us with emotional images that demand an emotional response.

Francis Bacon and the Masters presents more than twenty of the artist’s paintings, the majority coming from the extraordinary collection assembled by Bacon’s patrons, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, over the course of the artist’s lifetime and now in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

Along with other landmark paintings from the Tate Collection and other major public and private collections, these are placed in the context of masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg: Egyptian mummy masks, Roman and Renaissance sculpture, and a number of the museum’s most famous paintings such as Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Man, Matisse’s Nymph and Satyr and Picasso’s A Young Lady. These remarkable works, brought together for a ground-breaking exhibition at the Hermitage and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, are given further context by items and photographs from Bacon’s own studio archive, now in Dublin.

The exhibition is guest curated in both venues by Dr Thierry Morel, and co-curated by Amanda Geitner and Calvin Winner from SCVA. The contributing authors are Dr Thierry Morel, Professor Paul Joannides (Cambridge University), Amanda Geitner (SCVA), Calvin Winner (SCVA) and Margarita Cappock (Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane).

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was one of the great figurative painters of the twentieth century.

This book, newly available in paperback, provides a thorough account of the life and work of this complex and conflicted artist, whose paintings retain their visceral impact and relevance today. Essays by international scholars provide new insights into Bacon's art and life, and some fifty art works from every decade of his career from the pensive and shocking works of the 1940's to the exuberantly coloured and visceral large paintings of the 1970s and 80's show Bacon' unique representations of the human body through his mastery of paint.

Over 150 additional illustrations portray his studio, friends and lovers, and reveal the diversity of his source materials, from Velázquez to the motion photos of Eadweard Muybridge.

The exhibition and the catalog will show for the first time in Spain a selection of around 80 paintings and drawings by the Czech artist, all from the Centre Georges Pompidou, and documents from the collection of Pierre Brulle, a leading expert on Kupka, who was considered the first painter to explore the concept of abstract act. The splendid collection of works from the Centre Georges Pompidou, mostly donated by the artist's widow in 1963, shows very clearly the development of Kupka's art from his early Symbolist paintings to his final years. Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) began his artistic career at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he learned an academic style. Later on, in Vienna, he began to take an interest in Symbolism and allegorical art. After moving to Paris in 1896, Kupka worked as a press and advertising illustrator while at the same time making contact with the early avant-garde movements such as Fauvism and Cubism, though maintaining his independence and his own personal language. His interest in Futurist writings meant that around 1910 his work started to become increasingly abstract, with the idea of reflecting movement and studying the effects of colour and the relationship between music and painting. This led to the publication of the book La Creation dans les arts plastiques in 1913. Despite his links to the "isms" of the period, Kupka always felt himself to be a lone experimenter.

Frida Kahlo - painter of pictures expressing the burdens that weighed upon her soul

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is one of the most important 20th-century painters, and one of the few Latin American artists to have achieved a global reputation. In 1983 her work was declared the property of the Mexican state.

Kahlo was one of the daughters of an immigrant German photographer and a Mexican woman of Indian origin. Her life and work were more inextricably interwoven than in almost any other artist's case. Two events in her life were of crucial importance. When she was eighteen, a bus accident put her in hospital for a year with a smashed spinal column and fractured pelvis. It was in her sick bed that she first started to paint. Then, aged twenty-one, she married the world-famous Mexican mural artist Diego Rivera. She was to suffer the effects of the accident her whole life long, and was particularly pained by her inability to have children.

Kahlo's arresting pictures, most of them small format self-portraits, express the burdens that weighed upon her soul: her unbearable physical pain, the grief that Rivera's occasional affairs prompted, the sorrow her childlessness caused her, her homesickness when living abroad and her longing to feel that she had put down roots, profound loneliness. But they also declare her passionate love for her husband, her pronounced sensuousness, and her unwavering survival instinct.

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

The author:
Andrea Kettenmann (born in 1959) studied art history in Gießen, Göttingen and Heidelberg before joining the art history department of the University of Hamburg. In 1986 she visited Mexico on a fellowship, and now lives there, working as a freelance art historian. She has now worked on a number of exhibitions and catalogues, including the catalogue for the retrospective on Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo’s husband, in Detroit.

Pain and passion. The original and intimate art of Mexico’s most famous female painter

The arresting pictures of Frida Kahlo (1907–54) were in many ways expressions of trauma. Through a near-fatal road accident at the age of 18, failing health, a turbulent marriage, miscarriage and childlessness, she transformed the afflictions into revolutionary art.

In literal or metaphorical self-portraiture, Kahlo looks out at the viewer with an audacious glare, rejecting her destiny as a passive victim and rather intertwining expressions of her experience into a hybrid surreal-real language of living: hair, roots, veins, vines, tendrils and fallopian tubes. Many of her works also explore the Communist political ideals which Kahlo shared with her husband Diego Rivera. The artist described her paintings as “the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.”

This book introduces a rich body of Kahlo’s work to explore her unremitting determination as an artist, and her significance as a painter, feminist icon, and a pioneer of Latin American culture.

 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

They met in 1928, Frida Kahlo was then 21 years old and Diego Rivera was twice her age. He was already an international reference, she only aspired to become one.
An intense artistic creation, along with pain and suffering, was generated by this tormented union, in particular for Frida. Constantly in the shadow of her husband, bearing his unfaithfulness and her jealousy, Frida exorcised the pain on canvas, and won progressively the public’s interest. On both continents, America and Europe, these commited artists proclaimed their freedom and left behind them the traces of their exceptional talent.
In this book, Gerry Souter brings together both biographies and underlines with passion the link which existed between the two greatest mexican artists of the 20th century.

42 selected master works by legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. A special bargain in first-class Schirmer/Mosel quality.

This companion volume to an ambitious retrospective holds a mirror up to the iconic artist whose work so strongly reflected her life.

The life and work of Frida Kahlo were inextricably intertwined. This beautiful monograph celebrates the artist while exploring the lesser-known aspects of her story. Reproductions of Kahlo's paintings are accompanied by a series of illuminating essays that explore the artist’s private writings and the intense public interest in her life, the role of physical and mental suffering in the creative process, and the coded and double meanings hidden in so much of Kahlo’s work. In addition, a photographic essay compiled by her grandniece, Cristina Kahlo, features images from the family’s private collection. As an icon of female strength and suffering, Frida Kahlo has become something of an art world myth. This scholarly yet profoundly moving illustrated tribute to her life and work offers a measured perspective that rises above the noise of celebrity to discover the true artist and the truth of her art.

About the authors:

Peter von Becker is a writer, was head of the cultural section of the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and continues to write regularly for this section.
Ingried Brugger is Director of the Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna.
Salomon Grimberg is a psychiatrist for children in Dallas and co-editor of the catalogue raisonné of Frida Kahlo's work.
Cristina Kahlo is a photographer in Mexico City and Frida Kahlo's grandniece. She is curator for the photography section of the exhibition in which family-owned photographs will be shown.
Arnaldo Kraus is a physician in Mexico City.
Helga Prignitz-Poda is an art historian and specialist in Latin American studies and lives in Istanbul and Berlin. She is a co-editor of the catalogue raisonné of Frida Kahlo's work and curator of the exhibition.
Francisco Reyes Palma is a historian, critic, and curator of Mexican art in Mexico City.
Florian Steininger is a curator of the Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna.
Jeanette Zwingenberger is an art historian in Paris.