Книги по живописи

Certain Italian fresco cycles, notably the Brancacci Chapel in Florence by Masaccio, Masolino, and Filippino Lippi, are well known. Others, such as Piero della Francescas work in Arezzo and Benozzo Gozzolis Chapel of the Magi in Florence, have been reproduced countless times. Yet no publisher — until now — has attempted to gather together and document in extensive photographs the essential fresco cycles of the early Italian Renaissance. The list of works covers the regions of Italy, from the Alpine mountain areas to Puglia, with an emphasis on Tuscany and Florence, the artistic center that gave life to the Renaissance.

Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance opens with a concise introductory text discussing various aspects of fifteenth-century fresco painting: artists, patronage, cultural and historical conditions, technical methods, and questions of local tradition. The central section of the book examines twenty-one fresco cycles, each representing a crowning achievement in this field. A descriptive and interpretive essay introduces each cycle and is followed by a series of full-page and double-page color plates-many of them new photography of recently restored frescoes-covering the entire work. This parade of colorful masterpieces, paired with Steffi Roettgens authoritative text, makes a brilliant volume that will be treasured by scholars and art lovers alike.

The artists of the renaissance were the first to use the term "Gothic", clearly intended in a derogatory way in reference to the style initialy known as opus francigenum, meaning "made in French style": the term was used as a synonymum for "barbarian" by those who considered themselves to be the upholders of the aesthetic and technical perfection of the classical era.

In December 2003 the painter Jack Vettriano, a coalminer's son, met his parents off the train from Scotland on his way to collect an OBE. Over the last few years Vettriano has had a meteoric rise to fame -- emerging from the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields, unknown and untutored, he has become Scotland's most successful and controversial contemporary artist. Appearing on posters and cards, mugs and umbrellas, prints of his work outsell Van Gogh, Dali and Monet and his paintings have been acquired by celebrities around the world.

'The Singing Butler', Britain's most reproduced painting, fetched a record GBP744,800 at auction on April 2004.

Vettriano's images have an often mysterious narrative and are a gateway to an alluring yet sinister world. Daylight scenes of heady optimism, painted against backdrops of beaches and racetracks, are counterbalanced by more disquieting canvases of complex night-time liaisons in bars and clubs, bedrooms and ballrooms. Both sexes are clearly styled -- the men hard-edged and mysterious, the women seductive and enigmatic. Yet beneath the confident posturing, Vettriano recognizes our inherent human frailty, that there is no victor in the struggle between duplicity and desire. Men and women are ultimately trapped by the machinations of intense love and passion with little control over their destiny.

'Jack Vettriano: A Life' presents about thirty new images, as well as some recently surfaced works, plus the best of the paintings previously published in 'Lovers and Other Strangers' and 'Fallen Angels', also by Pavilion.

In December 2003 the painter Jack Vettriano, a coalminer's son, met his parents off the train from Scotland on his way to collect an OBE. Over the last few years Vettriano has had a meteoric rise to fame -- emerging from the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields, unknown and untutored, he has become Scotland's most successful and controversial contemporary artist. Appearing on posters and cards, mugs and umbrellas, prints of his work outsell Van Gogh, Dali and Monet and his paintings have been acquired by celebrities around the world.

'The Singing Butler', Britain's most reproduced painting, fetched a record GBP744,800 at auction on April 2004.

Vettriano's images have an often mysterious narrative and are a gateway to an alluring yet sinister world. Daylight scenes of heady optimism, painted against backdrops of beaches and racetracks, are counterbalanced by more disquieting canvases of complex night-time liaisons in bars and clubs, bedrooms and ballrooms. Both sexes are clearly styled -- the men hard-edged and mysterious, the women seductive and enigmatic. Yet beneath the confident posturing, Vettriano recognizes our inherent human frailty, that there is no victor in the struggle between duplicity and desire. Men and women are ultimately trapped by the machinations of intense love and passion with little control over their destiny.

'Jack Vettriano: A Life' presents about thirty new images, as well as some recently surfaced works, plus the best of the paintings previously published in 'Lovers and Other Strangers' and 'Fallen Angels', also by Pavilion. In March 2004 Melvin Bragg's The South Bank Show broadcast a programme dedicated to Jack entitled Jack Vettriano: The People's Painter.
Now reissued in smaller user-friendly format.

Jack Vettriano was born in Scotland in 1954. He left school at fifteen, became an apprentice mechanical engineer the following year and worked for five years in the Fife coalfields. He began painting in his spare time at the age of 21. In 1989 he submitted two paintings to the Royal Scottish Academy annual exhibition: both pieces were accepted, hung and sold. This exposure led to his first solo exhibition in 1992 - since then he has had exhibitions in London, South Africa and Hong Kong. He has been featured in many radio programmes, including The Usual Suspects, Home Truths, Postscript and Midweek on Radio 4. His work was featured in BBC 2's coverage of the 1995 Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh Nights.

A tragic icon of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) took influences from Picasso and Mexican surrealism and developed his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing. Though his name inevitably conjures up images of the drip paintings for which he is most famous, this technique was only developed midway through his career. The progression from his earlier work to his final "action" paintings - a veritable revolution of painting as a concept - reveals the genius of this tortured artist whom many call the greatest modern American painter.

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

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement and the most influential American painter of the twentieth century. Although he died at the age of 44, he left an unsurpassed body of work.Throughout his life, Pollock wrote very little about his own art or that of others. Nevertheless, in the few writings we do have, and in a few unpublished, undated notes – all of which are gathered together in this volume – the themes are remarkably similar. After acknowledging his initial debt to the Native American sand painters, who gave him the idea for putting the canvas on the floor and working it “in the round”, Pollock routinely referred to his interest in the unconscious as the source of modern art, as it enabled the direct expression of an “inner world,” of individual feeling and experience of the modern age. Moreover, it is clear from his statements that Pollock himself was open to the possibility of such a subjective approach to painting as an international enterprise. He never suggested that the modern world, characterized, in his words, by “the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio,” and which the modern artist had the responsibility to express, was specifically American, but rather that these were features of modern life in a much broader sense. In her in-depth essay, Nancy Jachec sketches an accurate profile of the artist and takes a closer look at his work, as well as detailing the enormous number of studies on the artist.

Woodblock Wonders. A visual history of 200 Japanese masterpieces

The Japanese woodblock print is a phenomenon with no Western equivalent, one where breathtaking landscapes exist alongside blush-inducing erotica; where demons and otherworldly creatures torment the living; and where sumo wrestlers, kabuki actors, and courtesans are rock stars. This XXL book lifts the veil on a much-loved but little-understood art, revealing the stories and people behind the 200 most exceptional prints from 1680–1938. Drawing from the finest impressions in museums and private collections around the world, it features the work of 89 artists as well as 17 fold-outs.

From Edouard Manet’s portrait of naturalist writer Émile Zola sitting among his Japanese art finds to Van Gogh’s meticulous copies of the Hiroshige prints he devotedly collected, 19th-century pioneers of European modernism made no secret of their love of Japanese art. In all its sensuality, freedom, and effervescence, the woodblock print is single-handedly credited with the wave of japonaiserie that first enthralled France and, later, all of Europe — but often remains misunderstood as an “exotic” artifact that helped inspire Western creativity.

The fact is that the Japanese woodblock print is a phenomenon of which there exists no Western equivalent. Some of the most disruptive ideas in modern art — including, as Karl Marx put it, that “all that is solid melts into air” — were invented in Japan in the 1700s and expressed like never before in the designs of such masters as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige in the early 19th century.

This book lifts the veil on a much-loved but little-understood art form by presenting the 200 most exceptional Japanese woodblock prints in their historical context. Ranging from the 17th-century development of decadent ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” to the decline and later resurgence of prints in the early 20th century, the images collected in this edition make up an unmatched record not only of a unique genre in art history, but also of the shifting mores and cultural development of Japan.

From mystical mountains to snowy passes, samurai swordsmen to sex workers in shop windows, each piece is explored as a work of art in its own right, revealing the stories and people behind the motifs. We discover the four pillars of the woodblock print — beauties, actors, landscapes, and bird-and-flower compositions — alongside depictions of sumo wrestlers, kabuki actors, or enticing courtesans — rock stars who populated the “floating world” and whose fan bases fueled the frenzied production of woodblock prints. We delve into the horrifying and the obscure in prints where demons, ghosts, man-eaters, and otherworldly creatures torment the living —stunning images that continue to influence Japanese manga, film, and video games to this day. We witness how, in their incredible breadth, from everyday scenes to erotica, the martial to the mythological, these works are united by the technical mastery and infallible eye of their creators and how, with tremendous ingenuity and tongue-in-cheek wit, publishers and artists alike fought to circumvent government censorship.

Three years in the making, this XXL edition presents reproductions of the finest extant impressions from the vaults of museums and private collections across the globe — many newly photographed, especially for this project. Some 17 stunning fold-outs invite us to study even the subtlest details, while extensive descriptions guide us through this frantic period in Japanese art history.

Features:

- The work of 89 artists, from the world-renowned to the unfamiliar
- 7 chapters organized chronologically to trace the history of the medium from 1680 to 1938
- 17 fold-outs, which had to be hand-folded due to their size and specifications
- Exclusive reproductions from museums and private collections
- An appendix listing all artists and works

The author:

Andreas Marks studied East Asian art history at the University of Bonn and obtained his PhD in Japanese studies from Leiden University with a thesis on 19th-century actor prints. From 2008 to 2013 he was director and chief curator of the Clark Center for Japanese Art in Hanford, California, and since 2013 has been the Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean Art, head of the Department of Japanese and Korean Art, and director of the Clark Center for Japanese Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Japan's impact on Western art was as immediate and almost as cataclysmic as the influence of the West on Japanese life. After Commodore Perry opened Japan's door to the outside world in 1858, a wealth of visual information from the Japanese traditions of ceramics, metalwork and architecture, as well as printmaking and painting, reached the West and brought electrifying new ideas on composition, colour and design. This is a study of how Japanese ideas have inspired artists such as Monet, Degas, Whistler and Van Gogh. Japanese conventions of symbolism underlie the use of decorative motifs in European symbolism and art nouveau, and the Zen idea of spontaneity is the ultimate source of both the apparently capricious shapes of art nouveau ware and the development of an abstract "calligraphy" in abstract expressionism.

From his early years spray painting the walls of lower Manhattan to his first solo show in 1982 and his untimely death at the age of 27 in 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat has become a symbol of the 1980s New York art scene

Now, more than a quarter-century since his death, this book considers Basquiat’s works in light of their transformative power. Exquisitely reproduced full-page color illustrations of his paintings cover the full thematic range of Basquiat’s work. From the autobiographical elements of "Untitled" (1981) and the powerful critique of racial justice that is "Irony of a Negro Policeman" to an exploration of black heroes, "Untitled" (1982) and the tongue-in-cheek social commentary of "A Panel of Experts", Basquiat’s limitless palette of observation, criticism, and cultural references endows his art with lasting and provocative power. Author Dieter Buchhart explores how Basquiat’s success paved the way for an entire generation of black artists and how street culture has spread into popular culture. Texts by curators, art dealers, and cultural critics discuss the significance of Basquiat’s oeuvre and show how his approach and subject matter continue to influence artists around the world.

This book is published by DelMonico Books in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Jean-Michel Basquiat | Xerox is the first concentrated examination of the extraordinary body of work that the artist created using Xerox copies as his principal medium and compositional focal point.

These immersive, collaged Xerox paintings epitomize Basquiat’s extraordinary capacity for visual language. Their raw, allover compositions incorporate recycled and transformed signs and markings from the artist’s everyday experiences ― including motifs from his earlier artworks. The intricate web of content in this series presages the copy-paste sampling characteristic of the subsequent Internet and post-Internet generations, positioning Basquiat as a pioneer of the pre-digital age.

The provocative art of Jeff Koons (*1955) leaves no one cold. The “king of kitsch” is skilled at manipulating the media, exploding the boundaries of all genres with his appropriations from Pop Art and popular culture, and playing the keyboard of the art market like no other. Collectors scramble for his large collages and colossal stainless-steel balloon animals. Yet, in his eye-poppingly colorful, immaculately perfect works Koons also exposes the seductive potential of the glittering world of commodities; his ready-mades and gigantic toys are amusing and thought provoking at the same time. The American artist’s once controversial work has now been recognized for its prescience. This publication presents his oeuvre in two volumes: paintings from all of the artist’s creative phases form the core of the first volume. Koons’ sculptures are the focal point of the second volume, in which objects from the Liebieghaus collection, stemming from five thousand years of cultural history, are placed in a dialogue with his works.

"Au XIXe siècle, l’aquarelle n’était pas considérée comme un art à part entière, mais plutôt comme la technique préférée des amateurs, en particulier des dames de la bonne société, ou, pour les artistes de profession, comme des ébauches préparatrices en vue de tableaux achevés dans leur atelier. Il y avait des exceptions tout à fait notoires, en particulier au sein de l’école des aquarellistes anglais, dont J.M. W. Turner était l’un des plus éminents représentants. Mais, à la fin du siècle, Sargent devint l’un des premiers peintres dont les aquarelles furent appréciées pour leurs valeurs intrinsèques. À partir de 1910, il commença à les exposer, dans des expositions spécialisées d’abord, à Londres, à la Royal Watercolour Society entre autres, puis aux États-Unis.

(…) Homer, seul aquarelliste pouvant rivaliser avec Sargent, était très prisé pour ses valeurs américaines rustiques au détriment du style de Sargent considéré jusque-là comme trop mou et raffiné, ce que l’on imputait à ses influences européennes. Mais la puissance, la nouveauté et la vigueur de son art eurent le pouvoir de confondre toute critique et firent de lui un artiste de stature égale sinon plus grande."
Gabrielle Townsend

Choix lumineux de 60 aquarelles - marines, paysages, portraits... - exécutées par John Singer Sargent (Florence, 1856 - Londres, 1925) tout au long de ses différentes pérégrinations en Italie, en France, en Angleterre, en Espagne ou encore en Égypte...

The Italian born, American painter of the late nineteenth century, John Singer Sargent was a celebrated portraitist of the wealthy and their privileged world. Renowned for his exquisite naturalism, some of his best work also shows flirtations with Impressionism, particularly in his evocations of childhood, and the light falling on the gorgeous gowns of his female sitters. This beautiful new book also offers a wide range of his most delightful landscapes, travel scenes and watercolours.

Common symbols reinterpreted

Though his work is often categorized as Pop Art for its use of popular iconography and household objects, Jasper Johns can also be described as a Neo-Dadaist. Using wax-based paint, plaster relief, collage, and even commonplace objects such as brooms and rulers in his paintings, Johns achieves a sculptural texture in his work. He is arguably most known for his flag paintings of the 1950s (the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently paid over $20 million for White Flag), though other themes, including targets, numbers, letters, and maps, are also famously recurrent. Johns is widely considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century.

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.