Cutting Edge. A revealing trend in turn-of-the-century Vienna

Discover a moment when traditional craft met burgeoning modernism. This revelatory catalogue sheds light on the understudied Vienna woodblock revival of the early 20th century, a uniquely influential artistic current which not only sought to democratize art through mass media but also sowed key stylistic seeds for Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter, and beyond.

At the turn of the 20th century, amid the domed grandeur of Vienna, a group of Secession artists reclaimed the humble woodblock. The gesture, though short-lived, and long overlooked by established art histories, may be seen as a decisive social, as well as aesthetic, moment. Elevating a primarily illustrative, mass-production medium to the status of fine art, the woodblock revival set a formal precedent for Expressionism while democratizing art for all.

Coinciding with the travelling exhibition through the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Albertina, Vienna, this TASCHEN edition brings together leading examples of the Viennese woodblock renaissance to give a long-overdue exploration of its achievements and influence. Through prints, publications, calendars and pages from Ver Sacrum, the official magazine of the Vienna Secession, it gathers works remarkable for their graphic and chromatic intensity, and vital with the traces of japonisme as much as the stylistic seeds of Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter and later Expressionist movements.

Through figure studies, landscapes, patterns, and typographical treasures, the featured works are accompanied by detailed captions, as well as essays exploring their aesthetic and ideological implications, and biographies for the more than 40 artists. Examining their stark contours, stylization of the surface per se, and tendency towards contained colour areas we evaluate the Viennese woodblocks as essential harbingers, and benchmarks, of the 20th-century modernism to come. At the same time, we assess how the dissemination of the woodblocksubstantiated the Seccessionist claim for a democratized, all-encompassing art, while adding to their reappraisal of originality, and authenticity, and convention.

The editors:

Tobias G. Natter is an internationally acknowledged expert on art in “Vienna around 1900.” For many years he worked at the Austrian Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, latterly as head curator. He also worked as guest curator at the Tate Liverpool, the Neue Galerie New York, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Schirn in Frankfurt am Main, and the Jewish Museum in Vienna. From 2006 to 2011, he directed the Vorarlberg Museum in Bregenz, and from 2011 to 2013 was director of the Leopold Museum in Vienna. In 2014 he founded Natter Fine Arts, which specializes in assessing works of art and developing exhibition concepts. He is the author of TASCHEN’s Gustav Klimt. Complete Paintings, Art for All. The Colour Woodcut in Vienna around 1900 and Egon Schiele. The Complete Paintings 1909–1918.

Max Hollein studied business administration and art history in Vienna. From 1995 to 2000 he had a leading function at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Max Hollein is curator of numerous exhibitions and editor of more than one hundred exhibition catalogues. He has published on modern and contemporary art and on museums in general. From October 2001 to May 2016 he was director of the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and as of January 2006 also of the Städel Museum and the Liebieghaus with its sculpture collection. He has been director of the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco since June 2016.

Klaus Albrecht Schröder studied art history and history at Vienna University. From 1988 to 2000, he was director of the Kunstforum Wien and established it as an exhibition venue with trailblazing presentations. From 1996 to 2000 Schröder was a board member and commercial director of the newly-founded private Leopold Foundation, and in 1999 he was appointed designated managing director of the Albertina in Vienna. Since January 2000 he has headed the Albertina as managing director and director. After it reopened in 2003, within the shortest space of time the Albertina was ranked as the most visited museum in Austria.

An entirely new approach to exploring global art history, presented through the lens of one of the world's leading art museums

Featuring more than 800 artworks from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, this groundbreaking book - organized by thematic keywords rather than the usual chronological or geographical categories, and drawing upon analytics from The Met's online Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History - offers fresh, unconventional ways of engaging with visual culture. Beyond the wealth of illustration, more than 160 engaging curatorial essays place the works in wider contexts, while a foldout, detachable timeline offers further perspective.

About the Author: 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is one of the most important cultural institutions in the world and hosts more than six million visitors each year, with many millions more accessing its collection online. The museum's director Max Hollein contributes the foreword to Art =, while essays are written by the museum's curatorial staff and other art experts.

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- An innovative approach that offers an inclusive, 21st-century definition of what ‘art' equals
- A greater range of artworks from The Met's collection than is shown in any other ‘highlights' publication
- Authoritative texts written by experts, including many of The Met's world-renowned curatorial specialists
- Includes content drawn from the multi-award-winning Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
- Published to coincide with The Met's 150th-anniversary celebrations in 2020
- An essential reference book for everyone interested in fine art, archaeology, anthropology, fashion, design, and photography from around the world
- Beautiful package and ingenious design

Throughout his career Moholy-Nagy produced brilliant works in painting, film, photography, sculpture, set design and typography. A leading proponent of the Bauhaus School, he strove to apply artistic principles to every aspect of daily life.

This companion volume to a retrospective features 170 works from all phases of Moholy-Nagy s career. Essays on his involvement with the Bauhaus School; his late paintings; his photographs, photograms, and photosculptures; and his accomplishments in the field of graphic art are complemented by numerous colour illustrations.

The book also documents the reconstruction of a never completed work,

The Room of Today, which incorporates the most important themes Moholy-Nagy brought to his art. Readers viewing his work for the first time, along with those already possessing a deep appreciation for his art, will celebrate this long-overdue volume.

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) is the preeminent representative of Realism and the spearhead of a style of painting committed to socially relevant issues. His lifelike portraits defy the artistic convention of idealization. The painter had another side, however: in his portraits, landscapes, drawings, and still lifes, he depicted a contemplative, meditative, inward-looking world, which stood in stark contrast to the fast-paced industrialization of the period. This publication introduces this “other” Courbet, one who, inspired by German Romanticism, succeeded in creating the vision of poetic modern art, as it was later refined not only by Cézanne and Picasso, but also by the Symbolists and Surrealists. His immersion into the depths of a personality, into the remoteness of pristine nature, as well as his thematization and dissolution of matter are reasons why many contemporary artists still make reference to his work.