Книги по истории искусства

Erwin Blumenfeld (1897–1969) was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. In 1941, he left Europe for the United States, where five years later he became a citizen. During the forties and fifties, he was one of the most sought-after fashion photographers in the world. However, most people are not familiar with the artist’s early work: the often bitingly humorous Dada montages he produced between 1916 and 1933.

This book by Helen Adkins, a renowned expert on the Berlin Dada movement, is the first to provide an extensive study of these early works. Blumenfeld did not intend for them to be shown publicly - they were personal gifts to his friends and acquaintances or enclosed in love letters to his fiancée. The approximately one hundred works - including many that have not previously been published and which the author discovered in the artist’s family archives and in other public and private collections - will be examined within the context of Blumenfeld’s life, photographs, drawings, and literary works.

M.C. Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden (Netherlands). He received his first drawing lessons during secondary school from F.W. van der Haagen, who also taught him the block printing, thus fostering Escher's innate graphic talents.

From 1912 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita, who greatly influenced Escher's further artistic development. Between 1922 and 1934 the artist lived and worked in Italy. Afterwards, Escher spent two years in Switzerland and five in Brussels before finally moving back to Barn in Holland, where he died in 1972.

M.C. Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confrontation with the limitations of our sensory perception.

The transformation of reality

A specifically German artistic revolution

Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Emil Nolde, E. L. Kirchner, Paul Klee, Franz Marc as well as the Austrians Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele were among the generation of highly individual artists who contributed to the vivid and often controversial new movement in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria: Expressionism. This publication introduces their work and places it within the cultural contexts and wider movements of the period.
The author, independent art historian Ashley Bassie, explains how Expressionist art led the way to a new, intense, evocative treatment of psychological, emotional and social themes in the early twentieth century. The book examines the developments of Expressionism and its key works, highlighting the often intensely subjective imagery and the aspirations and conflicts from which it emerged while focusing precisely on the artists of the movement.

The Author
Born in England in 1969, Ashley Bassie is an independent art historian, specialised in German Art. After graduating from the University of Manchester, the author conducted her research across Europe. She published several works creating a link between art and politics and centres her research on the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Anxious Angles. The pioneers and masterworks of “degenerate” Expressionism

Amid a frenzy of lurid colour and distortion, discover a calm, authoritative overview of German Expressionism. From the leading collectives of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter to regional schools and lesser-known artists, Dietmar Elger leads us through the protagonists and principles of this vivid 20th-century movement — its stylistic cacophony, its rage against bourgeois values, and its tussle with modern industrial reality.

German Expressionists were uneasy and angry. Emerging at the dawn of the 20th century, they railed against Christian and bourgeois values as much as rampant urban industrialization. Anti-imperialist, they were dispersed, shattered, and depleted by the horrors of the First World War, and rallied their efforts only to be officially erased by the Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937.

In this comprehensive TASCHEN collection, Head of the Gerhard Richter Archive Dietmar Elger gathers the many artists and elements of this urgent, scattered, complex movement into one authoritative overview of its protagonists, principles, and essential role in 20th-century modernism. Finding a critical calm amid the frenzy of colour and distortion, the book distils Expressionism’s leading collectives, Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, as well as its regional characteristics across its Berlin and Munich hubs, and it's North German, Rheinland, and Viennese variants.

Along the way, we compare and contrast themes and stylistic choices as this dispersed group of artists wrestled with their modern industrial reality. We find luminous streaks from Wassily Kandinsky, and the sickly hues of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the futurist facets of Franz Marc, and a partial Impressionist throwback in the gaudy dabs of Emil Nolde. We walk into seedy bars with bloated old men and then enter a claustrophobic yellow room occupied by an awkwardly posed nude. We are crushed in a cacophony of city sound and smoke and then left alone with woods, a lake, and silence.

Spanning this richness and range in Expressionist output, Elger features such well-known figures as Beckmann, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Nolde, Schiele, while taking care to present inadequately studied artists such as Conrad Felixmüller, Ludwig Meidner, and Marianne von Werefkin. The result is an expansive, inclusive, dependable digest of a vivid, often violent mode of expression, and the yearning and unease behind its frenzied paintwork.

The author:

Dietmar Elger studied art history, history, and literature at the University of Hamburg. In 1984/85, he was secretary of Gerhard Richter’s studio and between 1989 and 2006 curator for painting and sculpture at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover. He has organized numerous exhibitions on modern and contemporary art and has directed the Gerhard Richter Archive at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden since 2006. For TASCHEN he has authored the volumes Expressionism, Dadaism, and Abstract Art.

Of all the riches of the sixteenth-century European nobleman, none spoke more powerfully of his heroism, wealth and taste than his armour, clothing and weapons. Drawing on the V&A's popular arms and armour collection, Angus Patterson looks at the suits designed to kill, protect and impress. From parade suits, lavishly embossed and gilded, decorated with plumes of ostrich feathers and draped with colourful silk sashes to swords, daggers, pistols and gunpowder flasks slung from elaborate belts, detailed new photography alongside paintings and sculpture bring medieval and renaissance fashion to life

Even before the advent of haute couture, Paris was a great centre of fashion. During the second half of the nineteenth century, when the capital was transformed by an ambitious urban plan, its residents responded in kind, wearing styles as polished and modern as the city itself in order to participate in the exciting new social scene. Featuring famed paintings by such Impressionist masters as Degas, Cassatt, Manet, Monet and Morisot, this delightful book revisits the world of Parisian fashion through the eyes of first-hand observers. Thematic chapters present a gallery-like ensemble of paintings that follow in the footsteps of stylish Parisians as they stroll in the parks and boulevards, meet friends at cafes, take in the theatre, relax at home and go on holiday. In an extended narrative-style caption to accompany each image, fashion and art historian Debra N. Mancoff offers a detailed discussion of what men and women wore and how their dress defined them. To complete the picture, illustrated interludes, providing glimpses into dressmaking, corsetry and millinery, the origins of couture and the rise of the department store, reveal how Paris became the fashion capital of the world.

This book charts contemporary illustration’s rich history: the rampant idealism of the 1960s, the bleak realism of the 1970s, the over-blown consumerism of the 1980s, the digital explosion of the 1990s, followed by the increasing diversification of illustration in the early twenty-first century.

The book explores the contexts in which the discipline has operated and looks historically, sociologically, politically and culturally at the key factors at play across each decade, whilst artworks by key illustrators bring the decade to life.

Contemporary illustration’s impact and influence on design and popular culture are investigated through introductory essays and profiles of leading practitioners, illustrated with examples of their finest work.
About the Author

Lawrence Zeegen is an illustrator, educator and writer. He has worked as an illustrator since graduating from The Royal College of Art in 1989. He is Dean of the School of Design at the London College of Communication, and he lectures and speaks at conferences around the world.

Caroline Roberts is a journalist who writes mainly about the graphic arts. She was the founder of Grafik magazine.

Contents:

Foreword Introduction: What is Illustration?
Chapter 1 The 1960s: An Era of Utopian Idealism
Chapter 2 The 1970s: A Decade of Discontent
Chapter 3 The 1980s: The Designer Decade
Chapter 4 The 1990s: The Digital Dawn
Chapter 5 The 2000s: A New Wave
Chapter 6: Where Next?
Further Reading – Books
Further Viewing – Digital
Further Info – Organisations
Contacts – Illustrators and Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements

This book provides a guide to the history of Sevres porcelain as epitomised by seventy of the most important examples in the Royal Collection. Published to accompany the exhibition opening at The Queen's Gallery, London.

Soon after Giorgione introduced the fresco to Venice in the early 16th century, Venetian noble families began to commission the greatest masters of European painting to create grand fresco cycles for the interiors of their city palaces and their splendid villas on the mainland. This superbly photographed volume celebrates these frescoes, among the supreme achievements of Italian art and culture, providing an expertly guided tour of the beautiful residences in which they appear.

From complex allegories to Baroque masterpieces to fanciful distant worlds, Frescoes of the Veneto explores the changing nature of this tradition over the course of three centuries and features work by major artists such as Andrea Urbani and Giambattista Tiepolo, as well as lesser-known painters such as Giovanni Antonio Fasolo, Luca Ferrari da Reggio, and Jacopo Guarana. This splendid volume will be irresistible to lovers of Italian art and architecture and aficionados of the Veneto alike.

This chronological and topographic compilation presents the most famous single and cycles of frescos executed by Italian masters in various centuries using a technique that involves painting coloured pigments onto a layer of plaster not yet completely dry. As an art form, it is rooted in the mists of time, but it was rediscovered at the end of the Middle Ages and proved extremely popular throughout the modern period.

From the paintings adorning the walls of Romanesque churches to the great Baroque and Rococo cycles, the seven chapters of this volume, each with an introduction and additional, informative passages, help acquire a greater understanding and appreciation of this art form from the late Romanesque period through to the end of the 18th century.

Impassioned, polemical, and rebellious, the Futurist movement exalted the modern world by placing machines, speed, and technology at the heart of its artistic experimentations. Futurism embodied the same reality that it tried to capture: a dynamism that reflected the changing structure of the visible world.

This landmark survey, published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism, traces the movement from its origins in Italy to the international creative forum.

Richly illustrated with 130 works by luminaries such as Boccioni, Balla, Picasso, Braque, Leger, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Duchamp, and Malevich, the book explores different modes of expression within shared themes: the lighting of modern cities, dance, crowd movement, and the speed of new mechanical means of transport.

Featuring essays by the world's leading authorities on Futurism and the avant-garde, Futurism is a radical reassessment of the movement and essential for understanding the genesis of many of modernism's greatest works

Fast and furious. The action men of modernism

With motion and machines as its most treasured tropes, Futurism was founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, along with painters Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini. With affiliate painters, sculptors, designers, architects, and writers, the group sought to subsume the dusty establishment into a new age of sleek, strong, purified modernity.

Futurism's place in art history is as ambivalent as it is important. The movement pioneered revolutionary methods to convey movement, light, and speed, but sparks controversy in its glorification of war and fascist politics. Their frenzied, almost furious, canvases, are as remarkable for their macho aggression as they are for their radical experimentation with brushstrokes, texture, and colour in the quest to record an object moving through space.

With key examples from the Futurists prolific output and leading practitioners, this book introduces the movement that spat vitriol at all -isms of the past and, in so doing, created an -ism of their own.

About the series:

Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Genre series features:

- a detailed illustrated introduction plus a timeline of the most important political, cultural and social events that took place during that period
- a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each of which is presented on a 2-page spread with a full-page image and with an interpretation of the respective work, plus a portrait and brief biography of the artist
- approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions

В лице Гауди родился выдающийся художественный гений, который с самых первых шагов своей профессиональной деятельности обладал неповторимым стилем. Многие считали его сначала интересным, а позднее - просто невероятным. Недостаточно сказать, что Гауди внес свой вклад в развитие архитектуры. Он пошел намного дальше и коренным образом изменил ее стиль и структуру. Он работал, не думая об оригинальности или о ниспровержении существующих эстетических норм, а лишь подчиняясь безудержному порыву своей творческой одаренности. Воинствующие мастера-авангардисты XX века, например Аполлинер, Бретон, Дали, Мэн Рей, Элюар, преклонялись перед творчеством Гауди и после его смерти провозгласили архитектора сюрреалистом.
Антонио Гауди, всю жизнь проповедовавший свободу в своей профессии и никогда не принадлежавший ни к одному из художественных сообществ, так и не удостоился почестей и наград от какой-либо академии и в отличие от многих своих коллег никогда не примыкал к какой-либо политической организации. Он был выдающимся самобытным художником, который работал с невероятной четкостью, даже если она, казалось бы, порождалась безудержным воображением. Плоды этого воображения и через 80 лет после смерти архитектора продолжают оставаться главными достопримечательностями Барселоны, где сосредоточены наиболее значительные и самые прекрасные творения удивительного и всеобъемлющего таланта Гауди.
Появление такого феномена, как Антонио Гауди, положило начало беспрецедентному этапу в развитии не только искусства Каталонии, но и всего мира. Подлинное значение творчества архитектора было осознано лишь несколько десятилетий спустя.

Посмотреть русскоязычное издание книги Gaudi: Complete Works 1852-1900 (2 vol) - Гауди: Полное собрание работ в 2-х томах

This is the only book to provide a complete overview of the long history out of which today’s rich and varied gay culture has emerged. Historians from nine countries consider the evidence for same-sex relationships throughout the centuries, charting shifting attitudes towards homosexuality and the gradual emergence of a concept of self-identity.

For thousands of years, men and women have felt a desire for emotional and physical intimacy with those of their own sex. Their story, for many years forgotten, erased, ignored or rewritten, has in recent years become the focus of an extraordinary outpouring of research. Completely new avenues of inquiry have opened up and old assumptions have been challenged. Gay Life and Culture draws upon these findings to present a lively and thought-provoking account of what, until recently, could have been termed a ‘secret history’.

From ancient Greece and Rome right up to the present day with its issues of gay rights, AIDS and civil partnerships, this book also considers same-sex relationships in non-Western cultures, through history and across the globe. From homoerotic Persian poetry to tales of cross-dressing women in 18th-century Italy, from the wild, hedonistic delights of between-the-wars Berlin to concepts of a third gender in Asia and Native North America – all are discussed and recounted from memoirs, letters, archives, and works of art and literature.