Книги по живописи

A major new survey that offers fresh insights on Pablo Picasso's artworks, written by a leading authority on the master.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. This important new monograph, released to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the artist's death, presents Picasso's unparalleled achievements in all media: painting, sculpture, drawing and prints. Art historian and curator Pepe Karmel offers fresh analysis of this great master for a 21st-century audience, considering Picasso's work through the lens of art rather than biography. He demonstrates how Picasso's style, evolving over the course of seven decades, introduced visual languages and narratives that transformed modern art.

Arranged chronologically by themes and movements, Looking at Picasso is profusely illustrated with renowned paintings, such as the provocative Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and his monumental Guernica, protesting the horror of war; these are accompanied by numerous lesser-known works, including Picasso's daring sculptures and his animated reinterpretation of Velazquez's 17th-century masterpiece Las Meninas.

This engaging book will appeal to museum-goers curious to learn more about Picasso's career and anyone interested in modern art.

About the Author:

Pepe Karmel is Associate Professor at the department of Art History, New York University. He is the author of Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (2003) and Abstract Art: A Global History (2020), and has written widely on art for museum catalogues, as well as the New York Times, Art in America and other publications. He has also curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions, including 'Jackson Pollock' (MoMA, 1998) and 'Dialogues with Picasso' (Museo Picasso Malaga, 2020). Karmel is the Associate Curator of Museo Picasso Malaga.

Contents List:

Preface
1. Life
2. Symbolism
3. Cubism
4. Surrealism
5. War and Peace
Notes

Painter Prince of the Renaissance

Lucas Cranach the Elder created around 500 works during his lifetime. With his portraits of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchton and as court painter to Frederick the Wise, he became one of the most sought-after painters of the Reformation. At the same time, Cranach was the first to translate the Italian Renaissance tradition of the life-size nude into art north of the Alps; his lascivious, barely veiled depiction of Venus, the goddess of love, bears witness to this. On the occasion of the large Cranach exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Austrian writer Teresa Präauer explores the work of this busy prince of painters from A to Z. She focuses not only on Cranach's art, but also on the society that surrounded him, the subjects he painted, and the events that shaped his development.

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) was one of the most prolific painters, graphic artists and letterpress printers of the German Renaissance. Court painter at the court of the Elector of Saxony since 1505, he devoted himself not only to religious works but also to mythological themes and numerous portraits.

The writer  Teresa Präauer (*1979) studied German literature in Salzburg and Berlin as well as art at Mozarteum Salzburg. She writes novels, essays, and columns. In her tragic-comical artist novel Johnny und Jean (Wallstein, 2016), the painter Cranach played a crucial role.

A significant publication of original writing on Lucian Freud, including interviews with leading contemporary artists, marking the 100th anniversary of his birth

Lucian Freud (1922–2011) was one of the greatest figurative painters of the twentieth century. With an unflinching eye and an uncompromising commitment to his work, he created masterpieces that continue to inspire contemporary artists to the present day.

Spanning nearly 70 years, Freud’s career has often been overshadowed by his biography and celebrity. This book re-examines his paintings through a broad series of original approaches. Texts by a variety of rising and established international writers explore topics ranging from the compositional echoes of old master paintings in Freud’s works, to the contextualization of his practice within the class struggles of 1980s Britain. Throughout the book, leading contemporary painters such as Tracey Emin and Chantal Joffe give insightful testimony to the relevance of Freud today.

Marking the 100th anniversary of Freud’s birth, this publication accompanies the first major exhibition of his work in 10 years. Presenting fresh perspectives on his paintings, it introduces Freud to a new generation of scholars and enthusiasts – demonstrating his lasting international importance.

Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press 

Exhibition Schedule:

The National Gallery, London
October 1, 2022–January 22, 2023

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
February 14–June 18, 2023

About the Author:

Daniel F. Herrmann is Curator of Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery, London.

This Is Not a Book. Everyday enigma from Belgium's leading Surrealist

Meet the Belgian Surrealist forever on the hunt for magic and mystery. This introduction to Magritte presents key works from the artist's vast repertoire of visual humour, paradox, and surprise which makes us look and look again, not only at the painting but at our sense of self and the world.

From men in bowler hats, floating in the sky, to a painting of a pipe above the caption "this is not a pipe", René Magritte (1898–1967) created an echo chamber of object and image, name and thing, reality and representation.

Like other Surrealist works, Magritte’s paintings combine a precise, mimetic technique with abnormal, alienating configurations which defy the laws of scale, logic, and science: a comb the size of a wardrobe, rocks that float in the sky, clouds that drift through an open door. The result is a direct yet disorientating realm, often witty, often unsettling, and always prompting us to look beyond the visible, to “what is hidden by what we see.”

This introductory book explores Magritte's vast repertoire of visual humour, paradox, and surprise which to this day makes us look and look again, not only at the painting but at our sense of self and the world.

About the author:

Marcel Paquet (1947–2014) obtained his doctorate in 1978 from the Free University of Brussels with a thesis entitled La différence des penseés de Kant et de Hegel dans la question de l’essence de l’art. He published a number of books on such subjects as Paul Delvaux, Fernando Botero, and Hans Bellmer.

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

Magritte is published in association with a major survey of the work of the pioneering Belgian surrealist artist at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

René Magritte (1948–1967) is renowned for his thought-provoking and enigmatic paintings that challenge the viewer's perception of reality. His exploration of the subconscious and the juxtaposition of ordinary objects in surreal contexts have left an indelible mark on the art world, influencing generations of artists and thinkers.

The exhibition is the first Magritte retrospective to be presented in Australia and includes approximately 100 artworks drawn from public and private collections in the Asia–Pacific, Europe and the United States. The accompanying book provides an engaging, accessible and in-depth survey of Magritte’s practice, giving audiences insights into the evolution of his art from the early 1920s until his final works of the 1960s.

The book features reproductions of the 100+ works in the exhibition alongside rarely seen archival materials, commercial work and photography. The images are accompanied by four essays and an interview with Magritte (originally recorded for Belgian television in 1965), which together offer nuanced perspectives on the aesthetic foundations of his work while also considering the social and artistic context for his practice.

An essay by the curator of Magritte, Nicholas Chambers, leads us through the arc of the exhibition, revealing the artist’s extraordinary capacity for innovation and reinvention. Xavier Canonne, an expert on Belgian surrealism, focuses on the artist’s milieux during the formative period of the 1920s. Natalie Dupêcher, associate curator of modern art at the Menil Collection in Houston, picks up the story in the 1930s and considers the reception and promotion of Magritte’s art outside of Europe. And Belgian art historian Julie Waseige reflects on a key, underlying theme of the artist’s practice: his remarkable use of humour. Additionally, an extensive illustrated chronology compiled by Tai Spruyt charts the artist’s eventful life and career.

About the Authors:

Nicholas Chambers (ed) is senior curator of modern and contemporary international art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. His exhibitions and associated publications at the Art Gallery include Hilma af Klint: the secret paintings (2021), Adman: Warhol before pop (2018) and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection (2016). Chambers has previously been the Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; adjunct professor in the art history department at the University of Pittsburgh; and curator of contemporary international art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. He has organised numerous exhibitions and contributed to publications for museums in Australia, Asia and North America.

Xavier Canonne is director of the Museum of Photography in Charleroi and is a prominent art historian at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He holds a PhD in Art History and Archaeology from the Sorbonne, focusing on surrealism in Belgium from 1950 to 1993, and has been the editor of Marées de la Nuit, a publication specialising in surrealism and the avant-garde, since 1986. He has curated numerous exhibitions, notably Surrealism in Belgium (Fine Arts Museum, Mons, 2007), and has published extensively, including Surrealism in Belgium 1924–2000 (Mercatorfonds, Brussels, 2006) and René Magritte: the revealing image (Ludion, Brussels, 2017).

Natalie Dupêcher is the associate curator of modern art at the Menil Collection, Houston, where she oversees the museum’s landmark holdings of historical surrealist art, in addition to mounting temporary exhibitions. She recently curated Janet Sobel: All-Over (2024) and Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition (2021–23), which was co-organised by the Menil Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kunstmuseum Bern. She holds a PhD from Princeton University and a master’s degree from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Julie Waseige is an art historian and graduate of the Université libre de Bruxelles, specialising in surrealism in Belgium. From 2013 to 2016, she worked as a researcher at the Magritte Museum in Brussels. She has written books about René Magritte and curated international exhibitions including Magritte: Life Line (MASI, Lugano; Amos Rex, Helsinki, 2018–19) and Magritte: A Lab of Ideas, (Nordic Watercolour Museum, Skärhamn, 2022). Between May 2019 and June 2020, she was named the scientific director of the Marcel Mariën Foundation. She was also a historical consultant for the documentary René Magritte: the master of mystery (Seven Doc Productions, France, 2023).

Tai Spruyt is assistant curator of international art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. From 2011 to 2018, Spruyt held a curatorial role at the Biennale of Sydney where she worked on four editions of the exhibition and wrote for the associated publications. She holds master’s degrees in art history and museum and curatorial studies from the University of Adelaide.

Magritte in 400 images offers a selection of the most iconic paintings by René Magritte, along with a multitude of lesser-known jewels from his expansive oeuvre. The novel choice of works will surprise and delight readers as they continue to uncover ever more facets of the master Surrealist, from his unique gouaches to his painted bottles.

Spanning seven chapters, this book brings together the myriad aspects of Magritte’s pictorial vision. Beginning with his first forays into abstract painting in the 1920s, navigating his search for solace in his Sunlit Period, as well as his brittle ‘Vache’ Period, before finally moving on to his Surrealist masterpieces of the 1950s and 1960s, it gently guides the reader through Magritte’s world.

Each chapter opens with a summary of the artistic stakes at play during that period and Magritte’s place in them, immersing the reader in the contemporary artistic milieu. The 400 reproductions of Magritte’s work are complemented by a unique selection of historical photographs. Alive with images and information, this compact gem is a must-have for all art enthusiasts and connoisseurs.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with the Menil Collection, Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 focuses on the breakthrough surrealist years of René Magritte, creator of some of the 20th century's most extraordinary images. 

Bringing together nearly 80 paintings, periodicals and early commercial work, it offers fresh insight into Magritte's identity as a revolutionary painter and surrealist artist. Beginning in 1926, when Magritte first aimed to create paintings that would, in his words, challenge the real world and concluding in 1938 a historically and biographically significant moment just before the outbreak of World War II the publication traces central strategies and themes from this seminal period, particularly those of displacement, transformation, metamorphosis, the misnaming of objects, and the representation of visions seen in half-waking states. 

The publication also presents new conservation research on Magritte's materials and techniques, and an illustrated chronology outlining significant moments in the artist's life during this significant period, including travel, connections with other surrealist artists and writers, contributions to journals, and important exhibitions and reviews.

Christian Rex van Minnen’s art is challenging, intriguing, and disturbing. His provocative paintings depict the dynamic attraction and repulsion of mankind, often leaving the viewer deep in contemplative euphoria. Since his first solo exhibition in 2009, his work has been shown extensively around the world, garnering a cult following of admirers who are deeply moved by his honest paintings, that often reflect the artist’s own thoughts about the fragile male ego and what it means to identify as a white American man.

Van Minnen’s first foray into showcasing his delightfully complex work, Massa Confusa: The Art of Christian Rex van Minnen is a deluxe art book filled with beautiful paintings that raise questions around our identity while also bringing out the grotesque from within all of us.

This generously illustrated volume on the work of Botticelli makes the world’s greatest art accessible to readers of every level of appreciation

The Florentine painter Botticelli personifies the Golden Age of the early Renaissance. Best known for The Birth of Venus and Primavera, Botticelli painted with an expressive poeticism that eschewed formal realism. He used line and colour to gorgeous effect, creating some of the most beloved and familiar images of all time. 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. Chronologically arranged, the book covers important biographical and historic events that reflect the latest scholarship. Additional information includes a list of works, timeline and suggestions for further reading.

About the Author:

Federico Poletti is specialised on art-historical subjects.

This generously illustrated volume on the work of Monet makes the world’s greatest art accessible to readers of every level of appreciation.

Monet’s dazzling depictions of flowers, sunsets, fields, and oceans, in which line and shape are suggested through pure color, changed the way we perceive our natural surroundings. His numerous series, in which he depicts the same object at varying times of the day and in different seasons, pushed the limits of representational art. His final series of water lilies are considered to have ushered in the abstract movement of the twentieth century. Overflowing with images, this book offers full-page spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details, allowing every aspect of the artist’s technique and oeuvre to be appreciated. Chronologically arranged, the book covers important biographical and historic events that reflect the latest scholarship. Additional information includes a list of works, timeline, and suggestions for further reading.

This generously illustrated volume on the work of Jan van Eyck makes the world’s greatest art accessible to readers of every level of appreciation

As a 15th-century Flemish painter who spent most of his life in Bruges, Van Eyck was revered for his innovative manipulation of oil paint. 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.

Like Dreamers Do. The lyrical mark-making of a modern maestro

Explore the lyrical seven-decade career of Catalan-born Joan Miró, a towering figure of 20th-century art, whose highly individual style reflected Surrealist, Dadaist, and abstract elements in dazzling colors and unique symbolic narratives. From automated drawing to sculptures made of gas, this modernist legend abandoned categorization and approval in favor of his own dreamlike worlds.

With a career spanning seven decades, Catalan-born Joan Miró (1893–1983) was a polymath giant of modern art, producing masterworks across painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry, and ceramics, and embracing ideologies as varied as Fauvism, Surrealism, Dada, Magic Realism, Cubism, and abstraction.

Over the course of his prodigious output, Miró evolved constantly, seeking to eschew categorization and the approval of “bourgeois” art critics as much as he pursued his own dreamlike worlds. Emerging into the public spotlight in the early 1920s, he first experimented with Fauvism and Cubism before developing a distinctive style of symbols and pictograms, arranged in elusive visual narratives, with frequent reference to Catalan life. As his career progressed, Miró moved towards Surrealism, and, despite never fully identifying with the movement, emerged as one of its most celebrated practitioners with techniques including automated drawing, Lyrical Abstraction, and Color Field painting. In later years, he diversified his media further, working with ceramics, textiles, and even proposing sculptures made of gas.

Through his vivid colors, dreamlike fantasies, and enigmatic symbols, this book brings together the numerous strands of Miró’s kaleidoscopic oeuvre to introduce his fascinating career, its interaction with major modernist movements, and how it made him into a modernist legend.

The author:

Janis Mink studied art history at Smith College and gained her doctorate in Hamburg under Martin Warnke. She is presently a writer and curator.

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

A new concise history of modern painting, offering an indispensable reference to the complexities and characteristics of this medium.

While acknowledging the legacy of Herbert Read’s classic 1959 study A Concise History of Modern Painting in the World of Art series, academic and artist Simon Morley places the foundation of modern art much earlier than Read, at the emergence of Romanticism and the dawn of the industrial age. Structured loosely chronologically by period, the focus is as much on individual artists as well as movements, with works discussed within a broader context - stylistic, historical, geographical, and gender and ethnic frames - themes that recur throughout the chapters. Generously illustrated, the global and diverse range of artists featured include William Blake, Édouard Manet, Hilma af Klint, Kazimir Malevich, Willem de Kooning, Amrita Sher-Gil, Faith Ringgold and Kehinde Wiley.

This guide also includes an Appendix in the form of questions the reader might like to ask in relation to the artists and the ideas discussed - in order to reconsider the works from a contemporary perspective.

About the Author:

Simon Morley is a visual artist and Assistant Professor in the College of Arts, Dankook University, Republic of Korea. He has lectured at such museums as Tate, The National Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery and Camden Arts Centre, and has contributed to numerous publications including Third Text, World Art, the TLS, The Burlington Magazine, Art Monthly, The Art Newspaper, Contemporary Art and the Independent on Sunday.

Discover the dramatic life and work of Amedeo Modigliani, a pioneer of modern figurative painting

Amedeo Modigliani experimented with sculpture and drawing, but is primarily known for his paintings of nudes and portraits characterized by elongated figures, faces, and necks. He began painting in his youth in Italy before moving to Paris in 1906, during the height of the avant-garde movement. Influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Cezanne, Modigliani developed his own unique, uncharacterizable style. His nudes upended traditions at the time due to their immodesty, candid sexuality, and ability to convey the subject's personality. Because of the works' scandalous nature, Modigliani had very little success with his paintings while he was alive. This volume features stunning full-page illustrations of Modigliani's works, along with information about his life, including his bohemian, over-the-top lifestyle and his untimely, tragic death. Featuring some of Modigliani's best-known works, this book gives an insightful and comprehensive overview on the artist known for modernizing figurative painting.

About the Author:

Olaf Mextorf is an art historian currently working for museums. He already published books on Oscar Schlemmer, Vincent van Gogh and others.

A groundbreaking, new perspective on the painter’s scandalous nudes.

Among the most celebrated works of Modigliani’s brief but brilliant career are his large-format nudes. Drenched in color and glowing with the artist’s deep appreciation of women and the female form, these works ushered in a new era of nude portraiture, while also causing an enormous scandal. This stunning exhibition catalog offers a new perspective on this aspect of Modigliani’s work by examining for the first time his portraits of emancipated women sporting coupe garçonnes haircuts and wearing loin cloths. Modigliani was one of the first chroniclers of the femme moderne, which also influenced his nude painting and the scandal they caused.

Featuring lavish reproductions and astute texts by leading scholars, this volume also examines Modigliani’s cultural context in European Classicism, from Toulouse-Lautrec and Cezanne to the work of his contemporaries, including Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Jeanne Mammen and Wilhelm Lehmbruck; and traces his impact on future European Modernism and New Objectivity.

About the Authors:

Christiane Lange is director of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany.

Ortrud Westheider is director of the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany.