Искусство

The controversial darling and target of the popular press. Scandalous Amedeo Modigliani

To contemporaries, Amedeo Modigliani was the very definition of Parisian Bohemia, the controversial darling and target of the popular press and the model on which many a novel, play and film was based.

As an artist, the scandalous Modigliani made his name chiefly with his celebrated pictures of women, with almond eyes and long necks and bodies. His style had ancient roots that lay deep in classical antiquity or Africa. But his portraits of intellectual giants of the age, friends such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau or Diego Rivera, were inimitable also. In Doris Krystof’s study, the scene Modigliani was the hero of comes alive, and his sensitive paintings and sculptures speak in tongues.

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:

After studying the history of art, history and literary studies in Freiburg im Breisgau and Cologne, Doris Krystof worked as an academic associate at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf and as curator at the Kunsthalle Wien. Since 2001 she has been curator for the collection and changing exhibitions at the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. She has authored numerous publications on modern and contemporary art.

Opening at the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris from 25 October 2002 through 2 March 2003, the exhibition will present a wide selection of Modigliani's work including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and never-before-seen masterpieces, selected from major international museums and private collections. The show will be a comprehensive survey of Modigliani's career, from his earliest days as a painter to his premature death in 1920. Amadeo Modigliani was one of the greatest Italian artists of the early 1900s.

Born in Livorno in 1884, he moved to Paris in 1906, during the explosion of Fauvism and Cubism, which had a determining impact on his artistic career. Here Modigliani befriended Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Brancusi. His friendship with Constantin Brancusi kindled Modigliani's interest in sculpture, in which he would continue his very personal idiom, distinguished by strong linear rhythms, simple elongated forms, and verticality. In Paris Modigliani immersed himself in cafe and nightlife, developing a dissolute lifestyle that enhanced his reputation as a bohemian but eventually ruined his life. As his health began to fail around 1914 he turned to painting almost exclusively, producing some of his best works. His interest in African masks and sculpture remains evident, especially in the treatment of the sitter's faces: flat and mask-like, with almond eyes, twisted noses, pursed mouths, and elongated necks. As his health began to fail around 1914 he turned to painting almost exclusively. Leopold Zborowski became his exclusive representative and moved Modigliani to the south of France in early 1918. Paris had become too unstable because of the fighting during World War I. It was here that he met Jeanne Hebuterne who became his mistress. By spring, they were back in Paris. Jeanne gave birth to a daughter in the fall and his works were beginning to sell. But, his health took a turn for the worse. He died on January 24, 1920, of tubercular meningitis. The following day Jeanne, nine months pregnant with her second child, threw herself from a window of her parents home and died.

With extraordinary exhibitions and the world’s finest collection of modern and contemporary art, MoMA is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present, the established and the experimental

With 126 years spanning the time between the earliest and most recent works, MoMA Masterpieces offers an unparalleled opportunity to immerse oneself in the multitude of artistic approaches encompassed under the banner of modern art.

This richly illustrated overview provides the perfect means to understand and enjoy the art of our time. The book opens with an introduction by Ann Temkin, who offers reflections on the development of the collection. The thoughtful selection of works that follows highlights the collection’s peerless range of styles and ideas.

Legendary favourites, such as van Gogh’s 'The Starry Night', Picasso’s 'Girl before a Mirror' and Andy Warhol’s 'Gold Marilyn Monroe', sit alongside lesser-known masterworks such as Horace Pippin’s 'Abe Lincoln, The Great Emancipator' and Niki de Saint Phalle’s 'Shooting Painting American Embassy'. Contemporary landmarks, such as Gerhard Richter’s 'October 18, 1977' and Kara Walker’s 'Gone: A Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart' demonstrate the outstanding contributions of more recent art.

About the Author:

Ann Temkin is the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art.

Альбом знакомит с МоМА (Museum of Modern Art) - одним из самых известных музеев Нью-Йорка, где хранится лучшее в мире собрание современного искусства. Здесь представлены работы художников, созданные в период с конца XIX века по сегодняшний день. Живопись, скульптура, архитектура, дизайн, графика, иллюстрированная книга, рэди-мейд - вот далеко не полный перечень форм, в которых проявляется сейчас искусство. Читатель познакомится со ставшими уже классическими полотнами Пикассо, Сезанна, Моне, Гогена, Ван Гога, с произведениями авангардистов XX века: Мондриана, Уорхола, Поллока, Колдера, с искусством наших дней. Сопоставление разных стилей, техник и форм позволяет составить пеструю картину современного искусства.

- Книга помещена в банку из-под сгущенного молока, увеличенную до размеров книги.
- Внутрь банки вложены четыре резиновых мяча с именами художников.
- Банка с альбомом продается в авоське советских времен.
- На обложке книги - одна из самых известных картин Энди Уорхола с изображением банок с томатным супом "Campbell".
- Более 500 иллюстраций. 

Эта книга об искусстве, которое долго не признавалось в нашей стране и о котором почти ничего не было известно широкой публике: лишь знатоки-искусствоведы знали его истинную ценность.
Современное западное искусство едва просматривалось за железным занавесом СССР. Когда Энди Уорхол иронизировал над обществом изобилия, в Советском Союзе царил тотальный дефицит. Жестянка с томатным супом "Campbell" в США была символом дешевизны, массовости, доступности, удобства... А жестянка со сгущенным молоком в СССР символизировала лакомство, удачу, беззаботную жизнь...
Американская идея - возведение обыденных предметов в ранг предметов искусства - для советского человека была чуждой: обыденные предметы имели собственную, жизненно необходимую смысловую ценность. Причем здесь искусство? Сама эта мысль показалась бы абсурдной. Мир западный и мир, в котором жил советский человек, существовали параллельно, но совершенно отдельно друг от друга много десятилетий.
Современность уравняла обе жестянки в своей ценности. Нынче и у нас сгущенка - дешевый, массовый, доступный продукт, над которым не грех иронизировать.
Теперь параллельно существовавшие миры пересеклись!

Авторы книги стремились дать общее представление об уникальном собрании нью-йоркского Музея современного искусства, насчитывающем сейчас более 100 000 произведений искусства. Основание Музея в 1929 г. позволило продемонстрировать широкой публике лучшие произведения современного искусства и стало событием в культурной жизни США. С огромным энтузиазмом сотрудники Музея пополняли и совершенствовали его коллекцию, так что сегодня музей обладает лучшим в мире собранием такого рода. По счастливому совпадению публикация альбома совпала с празднованием 75-летия Музея. В ожидании этого события Музей расширил и обновил свое помещение: новое здание стоимостью 425 миллионов долларов, сооруженное по проекту одного из самых передовых японских архитекторов Йосио Танигучи, - это практически новый музей.

How did the monks, nuns and hermits live? What rules did they agree to obey? To what extent were they able to uphold those ideals in reality? What was the relationship between the monasteries and wordly authorities? And what was the source of the power that the religious orders were able to exercise in political affairs at various times? Are the remarkable cultural accomplishments of the cloisters simply the fruits of great self-discipline, or did they also result from a privileged way of life? Who were the men and women who entered monasteries?

Art historian Kristina Krüger is a specialist in the art and architecture of the Middle Ages. Her research and publications focusing in particular on the relationship between architecture and liturgy make her the ideal author for this book. Rainer Warland is a professor at the Institute for Christian Archaeology and Art History at the University of Freiburg, Germany.

Highlights
• The history of monasticism from its origins in late antiquity through its apex in the High Middle Ages and into the present. Presentation of various religious orders and what makes them unique, as well as short biographies of famous abbots, abbesses and monastic scholars.
• Architecture of monastic complexes and the art and crafts within them.
• Special chapters devoted to everyday life in a cloister, medieval book illumination, monastic gardens, and other comprehensive topics.
• Richly illustrated with photographs that bring the architecture, sculpture and paintings to life, as well as color graphics, maps and floor plans.

The quest for "universal harmony"

Less is often more - such is Piet Mondrian’s approach to art. His main pictorial elements are horizontals and verticals, his preferred colours yellow, red and blue.

Throughout his life, Mondrian (1872-1944) applied these simple elements in his quest for "universal harmony". This publication in our Basic Art Series presents an extra-ordinary painter and art theoretician whose influence on architects and designers is as profound today as it ever was.

Посмотреть русскоязычное издание книги Mondrian - Мондриан

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

Abstract pioneer. Harmonies in red, yellow, and blue

Less was more for Piet Mondrian. With his strictly limited pictorial elements — the colours red, yellow, and blue, black lines, white space — he sought a ‘universal harmony’ and created a whole new domain of avant-garde abstraction. This essential guide presents Mondrian's pioneering oeuvre, as well as his works of fashion and design, from White Stripes album covers to haute-couture dresses.

A key figure in the international avant-garde, Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was at once an extraordinary painter and leading art theoretician whose influence resonates to this day. Coining the term “Neo-plasticism”, he pursued a style of painting composed only of primary colours against a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines and a white base background.

Mondrian’s vision was that this essential painting would help to achieve a society in which art as such has no place, but rather exists for the total realization of “beauty.” With stints in Amsterdam, Paris, London, and New York, Mondrian drew upon the modern metropolis and modern music, especially jazz, as points of inspiration. In 1917, he co-founded De Stijl, originally a publication, and subsequently a circle of practitioners, committed to a strictly geometrical art of horizontals and verticals.

With key works and succinct texts, this introductory book presents Mondrian's distinctive and pioneering oeuvre, an abiding inspiration for fashion, art, architecture, and design, from White Stripes album covers to Yves Saint Laurent dresses.

The author:

Susanne Deicher studied in Göttingen and Berlin, where she gained her doctorate in 1993 with a thesis on Piet Mondrian. Since 1997 she has been a professor of History of Art and Culture, Aesthetics, and Architectural and Design Theory at the University of Wismar.

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

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was both the most typical and the most individual painter associated with the Impressionist movement. His long life and extraordinary work were dedicated to a pictorial exploration of the sensations which reality, and in particular landscape, offer the human eye. Monet’s poplars, grain stacks, Rouen Cathedral, and water lilies paintings—among the most beloved works of the Impressionist period—were created long before the currents of the contemporary avant-garde and had an inestimable influence on the development of modern art.

Lasting impressions of nature. The most typical and the most individual Impressionist painter

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was the most typical and the most individual Impressionist painter. His long life he dedicated to a pictorial exploration of the sensations which reality, and in particular landscape, offers the human eye.

But while Monet the painter was faithful and persevering in the pursuit of his motifs, his personal life followed a more restless course. Parisian by birth, he discovered plein-air painting as a youth in the provinces, where one of his homes, Argenteuil, has come to represent the artistic flowering and official establishment of Impressionism as a movement, with Monet as its creative leader.

In his endeavor to capture the ever-changing face of reality, Monet went beyond Impressionism and thereby beyond the confines of self-contained panel painting: in Giverny he painted the Poplars, Grain Stacks and Rouen Cathedral series in which he addressed one motif in constantly new variations. Here, too, Monet laid out the famous garden with its water-lily pond which he was to paint on huge canvases well into the 1920s. He thereby sought to render not reality as objectively experienced, but rather that which takes place "between the motif and the artist." In their open, merely tenuously representational structure and impressive scale, Monet’s water lily paintings — created long before the currents of the contemporary avant-garde — point the way to the developments of the future.

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:

Christoph Heinrich studied art history, theater, and German in Vienna and Munich, receiving his doctorate for his work on the changing concept of the monument in contemporary art. Since 1994, he has been employed at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, where he was appointed curator of the Galerie der Gegenwart in 1997. He is the author of numerous writings, and has organzied many exhibits on 20th-century and contemporary art.

Prince of the Impressionists. Capturing the ever-changing face of reality

Hailed the Prince of the Impressionists, Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) transformed expectations for the purpose of paint on canvas. Defying the precedent of centuries, Monet did not seek to render only reality, but the act of perception itself. Working en plein air with rapid, impetuous brush strokes, he interrogated the play of light on the hues, patterns, and contours and the way in which these visual impressions fall upon the eye.

Monet's interest in this space between the motif and the artist encompassed too the ephemeral nature of each image we see. In his beloved water lily series, as well as in paintings of poplars, grain stacks, and the Rouen cathedral, he returned to the same motif in different seasons, different weather conditions, and at different times of the day, to explore the constant mutability of our visual environment.

This book offers the essential introduction to an artist whose works simultaneously reflected upon the purpose of a picture and the passage of time, and in so doing transformed irrevocably the story of art. 

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

The Monet exhibition taking place in fall 2010 at the Grand Palais in Paris has caused an international sensation. In a rapturous review on the front page of The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman says that it gives us a sublime painter whose achievement places him in the company of artists who reveal the world with new vision. This catalogue offers a permanent record of this magnificent art exhibition. 

Claude Monet is one of the most beloved painters in the history of art. His work appeals both to the broad general public and to artists, who are moved and challenged by his achievement over a working life that spanned six decades. With more than 300 illustrations of Monet’s greatest works and accessible essays by leading art historians, this lush volume offers a vivid new perspective on the artist and his work.

Strokes of genius: the magic of Monet!

Claude Monet (1840–1926) was both the most typical and the most individual painter associated with the Impressionist movement. His long life and extraordinary work were dedicated to a pictorial exploration of the sensations which reality, and in particular landscape, offer the human eye. Monet’s poplars, grain stacks, Rouen Cathedral, and waterlily paintings — among the most beloved works of the Impressionist period — were created long before the currents of the contemporary avant-garde and had an inestimable influence on the development of modern art. This book traces the life’s work of one of art history’s most beloved painters.

Master of the Sublime. The essential Impressionist

Along with Turner, no artist has sought more than Claude Monet (1840-1926) to capture light itself on canvas. Of all the Impressionists, it was the man Cézanne called "only an eye, but my God what an eye!" who stayed completely true to the principle of absolute fidelity to the visual sensation, painting directly from the object.

It could be said that Monet reinvented the possibilities of colour, and whether it was through his early interest in Japanese prints, his time in the dazzling light of Algeria as a conscript or his personal acquaintance with the major painters of the late 1800s, what Monet produced throughout his long life would change forever the way we perceive both the natural world and its attendant phenomena. The high point of his explorations were the late series of waterlilies, painted in his own garden at Giverny, that, in their moves towards almost total formlessness, are really the origin of abstract art.

This biography does full justice to this most remarkable and profoundly influential of artists and offers numerous reproductions and archive photos alongside a detailed and insightful commentary.

The author:

Daniel Wildenstein (1917-2001) was an art historian and member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris). From 1939 onwards, he was Director of the Wildenstein Galleries of New York, London and Tokyo. He edited several international journals, e.g. the magazine Arts from 1956-1962 and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts after 1963. He co-founded the Fondation Wildenstein in 1970 (it was renamed the WildensteinInstitute in 1984), and was a prime mover in many exhibitions of international repute. Daniel Wildenstein also edited the catalogues raisonnés of various 18th, 19th and 20th-century artists. He was a world authority on Impressionism, and published catalogues of the works of Gauguin, Manet and Monet.

Master of the sublime. The essential Impressionist

No other artist, apart from J.M.W. Turner, tried as hard as Claude Monet (1840–1926) to capture light itself on canvas. Of all the Impressionists, it was the man Cézanne called “only an eye, but my God what an eye!” who stayed true to the principle of absolute fidelity to the visual sensation, painting directly from the object.

It could be said that Monet reinvented the possibilities of colour. Whether it was through his early interest in Japanese prints, his time as a conscript in the dazzling light of Algeria, or his personal acquaintance with the major painters of the late 19th century, the work Monet produced throughout his long life would change forever the way we perceive both the natural world and its attendant phenomena. The high point of his explorations was the late series of waterlilies, painted in his own garden at Giverny, which, in their approach toward almost total formlessness, are really the origin of abstract art.

This biography does full justice to this most remarkable and profoundly influential artist and offers numerous reproductions and archive photos alongside a detailed and insightful commentary.

The author:

Daniel Wildenstein (1917-2001) was an art historian and member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris). From 1939 onwards, he was Director of the Wildenstein Galleries of New York, London and Tokyo. He edited several international journals, e.g. the magazine Arts from 1956-1962 and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts after 1963. He co-founded the Foundation Wildenstein in 1970 (it was renamed the Wildenstein Institute in 1984), and was a prime mover in many exhibitions of international repute. Daniel Wildenstein also edited the catalogues raisonnés of various 18th, 19th and 20th-century artists. He was a world authority on Impressionism and published catalogues of the works of Gauguin, Manet and Monet.

About the series:

Bibliotheca Universalis — Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!

Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together more than 100 of our all-time favourite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.

Bookworm’s delight — never bore, always excite!