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An original and breathtakingly beautiful perspective on how art developed through the ages, this book reveals how new materials and techniques inspired artists to create their greatest works.

The Story of Painting will completely transform your understanding and enjoyment of art. Covering a comprehensive array of topics, from the first pigments and frescos to linear perspective in Renaissance paintings, the influence of photography, Impressionism, and the birth of modern art, it follows each step in the evolution of painting over the last 25,000 years, from the first cave paintings to the abstract works of the last 100 years. Packed with lavish colour reproductions of paintings and photographs of artists at work and the materials they used, it delves into the key paintings from each period to analyse the techniques and secrets of the great masters in detail.

Immerse yourself in the pages of this stunning book and find yourself dazzled by new colours; marvel at the magic of perspective; wonder at glowing depictions of fabric and flesh; understand cubism; and embrace abstraction. You will look at paintings in a whole new light.

About the Author:

Andrew Graham Dixon is one of the leading art critics and presenters of arts television programmes in the English-speaking world. He has presented numerous landmark series on art for the BBC, including the acclaimed A History of British Art, Renaissance, and Art of Eternity, as well as numerous individual documentaries on art and artists. For more than 20 years, he has published a weekly column on art, first in the Independent and, more recently, in the Sunday Telegraph. He has written a number of books on subjects ranging from medieval painting and sculpture to contemporary art.

A celebration of the Impressionists artists, including Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, whose paintings are inextricably linked to the birth of modern art. 

Today, our passion for these artists remains, and their paintings are amongst the best-loved works in the history of art. By choosing to paint extraordinary pictures of modernity that shocked the bourgeois elite, the Impressionists challenged the academic ideals of the French Salons, rejected the past and embracing colour to portray a sense of joie de vivre. Their revolutionary use of colour, free brushstrokes and modern subject matter, painted en plain air gave rise to one of the most important and influential art movements of the nineteenth century. 

Featuring many of the most famous and important pieces by the groups’ key figures, this beautifully illustrated reference book also includes a collection of less well-known but equally important works to show the diversity of this exceptional movement.

Traces the extraordinary career of one of Scotland`s (and Britain`s) most fascinating and original artist-designers of the twentieth century. This stunning new book is illustrated with nearly 176 illustrations, designs and paintings which demonstrate Mackintosh`s technique, influences and associations.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. Their art’s romanticism, attention to detail and jewel-like colours have ensured their eternal popularity. This beautifully illustrated reference book is packed with exampes of work by the key proponent Millais, and that of his contemporaries, alongside illuminating information. Beginning with an overview of the movement it goes on to discuss the art in the context of society, place, influences, and styles and techniques. An ideal gift for art lovers or those new to the subject.

Turner, Whistler and Monet were all fascinated by the transience of light and how that alone could affect the atmostphere of a painting. They were also highly experimental for their time, rejecting the use of realism in favour of creating the impression of place instead. This is a perfect gift book for any lover of art and co-incides with the Tate exhibition of the same name.

This collection of late 16th and early 17th century love emblems was amassed around 1620 by an unknown lover, doubtless consumed by passion and fiery loins, and given to his or her lover as a token of romance and affection. Composed of mythological, allegorical, and even erotic prints, the emblems (created by printmakers such as Abraham Bloemaert, Pieter Brueghel, Agostino Carracci, and Jacob Goltzius) illustrated scenes like The Trades of Cupid, The Seven Deadly Sins, The Seven Virtues, The Muses, The Loves of the Gods, and Five Senses. Publication, or collecting and binding, of love emblems was a novel and popular pastime in the Netherlands in the early 17th century, and the particular album reproduced here is an outstanding example. Meticulously colored and heightened with gold and silver, these prints surely won the heart of their lucky receiver. Though the album’s exact provenance is unknown (due to the removal of the original insignia by a later owner), the outstanding quality, coloring, and extensive use of gold and silver suggests that it was produced for a rich, cultivated, and probably infatuated client. Since use of color was rare and albums were often one of a kind, it is likely that this copy is completely unique; its 143 folios are all reproduced here in their original size (25.3 x 18.5 cm), complete with an introduction and accompanying descriptions by author Carsten-Peter Warncke. What would the original owner have said if he or she knew the album would end up, 400 years later, warming the hearts of so many?

“Art nègre? I don’t know it.” With this provocative tone, Picasso tried to deny his relationship with art from outside of Europe. However, through hundreds of archival documents and photographs, this volume illustrates how non-European art from Africa, Oceania, the Americas, and Asia was a recurring source of inspiration for the artist.

Side-by-side comparisons illustrate the links between Picasso’s oeuvre and diverse “primitive” arts. In both, we find the same themes ― nudity, sexuality, impulses, death, and more ― along with parallel artistic expressions of those themes ― such as disfiguration or destruction of the body.

The volume is completed with a chronology of the relevant works and photographs of the artist in his studio.

The Venetian virtuoso

A leading artist in the High Renaissance, Titian (Tiziano Vecelli, 1488-1576) was the Venetian school’s greatest painter and is one of the best-loved Italian artists of all time. Titian was highly regarded during his lifetime, and his renown has not diminished in the intervening centuries; so great was his ability to manipulate color, texture, and tone that he is still considered to be one of art history’s greatest technical masters. The freedom exhibited in his pictorial compositions was unprecedented and greatly influential on later artists, notably Manet, who closely studied Titian’s work at the Louvre. This book examines Titian’s evolution, from his early years training under Giovanni Bellini to his later mature work, giving a wide perspective on the life’s work of this legendary master painter.

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:

Ian Kennedy studied art history at Cambridge and at the Courtauld Institute, London University. He worked for nearly three decades in New York at Christies and as a dealer and is now Ward Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture until 1900 at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

180 Illustrations

Not only does this book offer a studied and insightful look into the works of one of the most technically gifted of the world's painters, but it also invites the reader to discover the bustling world of the Venetian art scene in which Titian lived and worked. Its compelling narrative will please the general public while its unique cross-analysis of the 16th century Venetian painters will interest art specialists and students.
This study of Titian’s life and works relates the contemporary and historical influences of the style and colours that Titian came to master. The author reveals how Titian’s personal life, his relationships with important Venetian painters and influential European political leaders, is inextricably tied to his artistic career, as he defines style through artistic encounters and his powerful friends become his subjects. The calibre of the story and the quality of the images are rarely accompanied by such a competitively moderate price.

The Author
Writer, critic and art historian, Sir Claude Phillips was a Keeper of the Wallace Collection. He started in life as a solicitor and this occupation took him all over the world. During his numerous travels, he visited museums and art collections building up his knowledge of art. He was appointed Keeper of the Wallace Collection and while working there, he wrote on Reynolds and Titian.

Titian is acknowledged as the greatest of the sixteenth-century Venetian painters, best known for his portraits, mythological pictures and religious subjects. Yet his first great achievement as a painter, schooled in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, was to refashion the portrayal of nature in his own distinctive style by studying the work of Albrecht Durer, whose naturalistic paintings of plants, animals and landscape - for which northern European artists were renowned - had caused a sensation in Venice in the first decade of the sixteenth century.

In this short, beautifully illustrated book, Antonio Mazzotta presents this experience, together with Titian's native landscape of Pievedi Cadore, as crucial influences in the artist's early representation of nature. The recently restored Flight into Egypt (now in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg) - probably painted when Titian was still a teenager - is vivid proof of his interest in the depiction of animals, plants and figures in the landscape. The author's carefully chosen comparisons of paintings, prints, drawings and details of works by the young Titian, Durer and their contemporaries (including Sebastiano del Piombo and Giorgione) suggest that Titian was as innovative and as influential in his unique view of nature as he was in portraiture.

The Prince of Pigalle

In pursuit of pleasure in the Belle Époque

Today, the painter and graphic artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) is considered as one of the most inspired portrayers of human figures. This physically handicapped scion of the old French nobility was fascinated by life around Montmartre, whose cafes, cabarets, dance halls, and bordellos presented him with the "theater of life."

More than any other artist, Toulouse-Lautrec captured the Belle Époque’s pursuit of fleeting pleasure: directly and without flattery, his paintings, lithographs, and posters offer a masterly and timeless image of the age.

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 

In our imaginings of Paris, painter and graphic artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) has no small role to play. In his prints, posters, paintings, and drawings, the artist immortalized the city’s Belle Époque nightlife and put the northern neighbourhood of Montmartre on the global map of creative-hedonist hotspots.

The son of old French nobility, Toulouse-Lautrec seems to have been drawn early on to visions of a demimonde, centering his attention on the dance halls, cabarets, and brothels of Montmartre and adopting famed dancers and singers as his subjects, most notably Jane Avril. His works include both lively performance scenes and quiet, tender “after-hours” portraits such as The Sofa and In Bed. Stylistically, he mastered both bold graphics, as celebrated in his promotional posters of Jane Avril, and a loose yet evocative sketchwork.

Though he died aged just 36, due to complications from alcoholism and syphilis, Toulouse-Lautrec’s cultural influence was immense. This introductory book takes a walk through his world of singers, dancers, musicians, and prostitutes to reveal an artist of great humanity, striking figurative skill, and a pronounced sense for the energy and stories of a city.

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

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), scion of an ancient aristocratic family, was a crippled dwarf. His family's wealth gave him financial security, and he chose to become an artist. In Paris he was drawn to the world of the red-light district around Montmartre. In the cafés, cabarets, dance halls and brothels he observed "the theatre of life", viewing this world not from the moralising standpoint of the 19th-century bourgeoisie, but with the eyes of one for whom all inhibitions had long since vanished.

Lautrec recorded what he saw without the arrogance of a social superior, but also without "spurious pity - like a reporter with a "photographic paintbrush". He transferred his observations to paper and canvas with sensitive understanding and a sharp eye, creating the real atmosphere and live character studies of a world where middle-class morals do not count, in which elegance and baseness mix, as do the ingenuous and the sinful. Lautrec had the gift of painting life as it is. No one else has captured the entertainment world of the belle époque in so unadulterated, so masterful and so timelessly true a manner as did Lautrec in his paintings, lithographs and posters.

This monograph sets out to examine the close relations between Lautrec's work and life. It thereby offers the reader a lively impression of Lautrec's art, and at the same time provides an understanding of his private life and of the magnificent Paris of the belle époque.

The Belle Époque (Beautiful Era), which dates from the late nineteenth century to the start of World War I, was an incredible period of creative and scientific activity. Until his death in 1901 at the age of 36, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was one of its leading names along with poets and writers such as Guy de Maupassant and Emile Zola. He exhibited with Vincent Van Gogh and was a friend of Oscar Wilde whom he met during his time in London. Creating literally thousands of artworks during his short life, the images that Toulouse-Lautrec created were evocative of the mood of that time. His drawings and lithographs were often playful or satirical, but captured the essence of his subject

This book brings together over 170 images. In addition, there are documentary images from the period depicting life in fin de siècle Paris and selected cities around the world. Clothing, architecture and images of street life are featured and where possible photographs of the people Toulouse-Lautrec featured in his works such as Aristide Bruant.

Contents:
Introduction
Toulouse-Lautrec and the Belle Époque in Paris
The Works on Paper
The Belle Époque outside Paris

About the Author:

Maria-Christina Boerner, who studied literature, art history and media, received her PhD in Berlin. A lecturer at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), she is also the author of numerous essays on cultural topics.

As a blind person might see the world if the gift of sight were suddenly returned - this is how we might describe the effect of William Turner's paintings on the observer. John Ruskin, Turner's uncompromising 19th-century defender, alluded to this idea when he spoke of an "innocence of the eye" which perceived the world's colours and forms before it could recognize their significance.

But to develop such a style, William Turner (1775-1851) first had to overcome the legacy of late rococo academic teachings. He was simultaneously a romantic and a realist - and yet he transcended both styles. His landscapes, far in advance of their time, have been called forerunners of Impressionism, yet they also possess traits that influenced Expressionism, and many of his late compositions are undeniably surrealistic.

Turner's art cannot be bound by such classifications, and remains an oddity to art history even today. His work arises from a unique relation to the nature that it depicts: through his brilliant sketches, he found a rigorously open kind of painting in which nature sets free the use of colour. And through the workings of the natural elements - especially atmospheric light - Turner confronted nature at the point where nature itself is an image. This book opens up Turner's paintings for the eye, demonstrating that he was not simply illustrating nature, but that his pictures speak directly to the eye as nature does itself - through a world of light and colour.

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