Книги по живописи

Colorful dreams and tales

Chagall's world full of everyday miracles

The Belarusian painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985) is widely regarded as epitomizing the "painter as poet". The worldwide admiration he commanded remains unparalleled by any artist of the century.

Chagall’s paintings, steeped in mythology and mysticism, portray colorful dreams and tales that are deeply rooted in his Russian Jewish origins. The memories and yearning they evoke recall his native Vitebsk, and the great events that mark the life of ordinary people: birth, love, marriage and death. They tell of a world full of everyday miracles—in the room of lovers, on the streets of Vitebsk, beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Heaven and earth seem to meet in a topsy-turvy world in which whimsical figures of people and animals float through the air with gravity-defying serenity.

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

Colourful dreams and tales

Chagall's world full of everyday miracles

The Belarusian painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985) is widely regarded as epitomizing the "painter as poet". The worldwide admiration he commanded remains unparalleled by any artist of the century.

Chagall’s paintings, steeped in mythology and mysticism, portray colourful dreams and tales that are deeply rooted in his Russian Jewish origins. The memories and yearning they evoke recall his native Vitebsk, and the great events that mark the life of ordinary people: birth, love, marriage and death. They tell of a world full of everyday miracles - in the room of lovers, on the streets of Vitebsk, beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Heaven and earth seem to meet in a topsy-turvy world in which whimsical figures of people and animals float through the air with gravity-defying serenity.

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 authors:
Rainer Metzger studied art history, history and German studies in Munich and Augsburg. He received his doctorate in 1994, and has worked as a fine arts journalist for the Viennese newspaper Der Standard. He has written numerous books on art, including volumes on Van Gogh and Chagall.

Ingo F. Walther (1940-2007) was born in Berlin and studied medieval studies, literature, and art history in Frankfurt am Main and Munich. He published numerous books on the art of the Middle Ages and of the 19th and 20th centuries. Walther's many titles for TASCHEN include Vincent Van Gogh, Picasso, Art of the 20th Century, and Codices Illustres.

Посмотреть русскоязычное издание книги Chagall - Шагал

No doubt one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Marc Chagall (1887-1985) created a unique world full of pathos, poetry, humor, and enchantment, drawing on vivid memories of his Jewish upbringing in Russia. His original style and his connection to the past endured throughout his seven-decade career, despite the great movements and schools of 20th century art which he saw developing around him. All aspects of Chagall`s work are covered here, from paintings to stained glass, tapestries, ceramics, and more.

The Russian Avant-Garde, which brought about an artistic revolution between 1905 and 1934, represents one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of 20th-century art. 

Artists like Malevich, Kandinsky and Chagall are highly esteemed the world over. But this movement was much more diverse than is generally realised. For the first time this artistic wealth is being presented in a major sequence of pictures. 

140 masterpieces of painting demonstrate the parallel development of widely different styles, design principles and aesthetic ideas. 

The avant-garde artists influenced each other or were sometimes in conflict with each other. At the same time you could find advocates of representational Expressionism and supporters of pure abstraction; styles like Primitivism, Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism followed each other in succession. 

Surprising contrasts of works by different artists demonstrate the differences, so that the successive conflicting –isms are clearly demonstrated. 

Through this visual confrontation the picture of all the many different forms of Russian avant-garde come alive.

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) befreite auf seinen Bildern die Welt von den Fesseln der Schwerkraft und entrückte sie in die Freiheit der Poesie. Dabei inspirierten ihn Folklorismen seines weißrussischen Heimatorts Wizebsk ebenso wie seine jüdische Herkunft, die christliche Ikonografie und die Ausdrucksformen der internationalen Avantgarden, mit denen er sich ab 1911 in Berlin und Paris verstärkt auseinander setzt.

Eine exklusive Auswahl von über 100 kostbaren Arbeiten aus allen Schaffensperioden Chagalls stellt die vorliegende Sonderausgabe vor: Gemälde, Buchillustrationen und Gouachen, unter anderem aus dem Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, dem Staatlichen Russischen Museum in St. Petersburg und der Tretjakow Galerie in Moskau.

In his images, Marc Chagall (1887-1985) liberated the world from the chains of gravity and allowed it to enjoy the enraptured freedom of poetry. In the process, he was inspired by the folklore of his White Russian homeland, Wizebsk, as well as his Jewish ancestry, Christian iconography, and the expressive forms of international avant-garde art, which he explored more intensively after 1911 in Berlin and Paris.

This special-price edition features an exclusive selection of over one hundred treasured works from all of Chagall’s creative phases: paintings, book illustrations, and gouaches, including works in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Tretjakov Gallery in Moscow.

Chagall’s creative breakthrough came at a time when his life was torn between contrasting experiences.

Chagall lived in Paris from 1911 until 1914, creating paintings that combined his recollections of Russian provincial life with iconic fragments of the metropolis around him. Reminiscences of Russian folk art make an appearance in his works from the period, as do the most recent stylistic experiments he was exposed to through his life in the center of the artistic avant-garde and his acquaintance with many of the most progressive artists, including Picasso, Robert and Sonja Delaunay, and Jacques Lipchitz. Overtaken by the outbreak of World War I during a visit back home, Chagall was forced to spend the next eight years in Russia.

The unexpected change of circumstances initially prompted a phase of searching self-scrutiny that speaks from many paintings and works on paper created in and after 1914. The artist produced numerous self-portraits, depictions of Jewish life, and designs for the stage setting for the celebration of the first anniversary of the October Revolution 1918.

The catalogue contains a representative selection of works from what was for Chagall a period of rapid artistic evolution and personal as well as political upheaval.

Painting for Her Life. Charlotte Salomon’s artistic feat under the Third Reich

When German artist Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) handed her gouache series Life? or Theater? over to a friend, she beseeched him to “take good care of it, it is my entire life.” A few months later, the five-months pregnant Charlotte was picked up by a Gestapo truck, deported to Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz, where she died upon arrival at the age 26.

The work Salomon left behind is, in a very real sense, her pièce de résistance – in her own words, “something wildly eccentric.” A cycle of nearly 1,300 autobiographical gouaches, it combines creative force with pioneering personal narrative into one shattering document of self-expression.

Divided into three sections, the gouaches unveil a vivid self-portrait spanning across all facets of Charlotte's existence: from a complicated family life, marked by the suicides of nearly all female relatives; growing up in Berlin; her close relation to singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn; the rise of the Nazis; to her exile to France in 1939. Throughout, the artist challenges these destructive forces by deploying playful pseudonyms and fantastical elements alongside emotional candor, remarkable observation, and a meticulous visual memory. Her film strip-like sequences are interspersed not only with words but also musical suggestions, making Life? or Theater? the storybook for a whole musical, years before the heyday of that genre.

Without comparison, the gouaches are a triumph of personal truth and individual expression. Published here with a selection of the 450 most important pieces, Life? Or Theatre? is an unrivaled opus magnum from a great and ambitious artist, dark with her early death, but luminous with her precision, her lyricism, and her courage.

Fabric monuments

In the summer of 1995, the Reichstag building in Berlin was transformed into an immense sculptural experience by Christo and Jeanne-Claude along with a team of hundreds of workers.

Using fabric materials has become a famous tradition for Christo and Jeanne-Claude: landscape projects in the USA, Japan, and Australia and urban projects such as the Pont Neuf Wrapped in Paris have established them as the most extraordinary artist couple of the age.

This in-depth survey of their unusual work is illustrated with absorbing photographs by Wolfgang Volz.

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 photographer:
Wolfgang Volz has worked with Christo and Jeanne-Claude as the exclusive photographer of their works since 1971. He was also project director (with Roland Specker) for Wrapped Reichstag and (with Josy Kraft) for Wrapped Trees, and was in charge of The Wall - 13,000 Oil Barrels, 1999. His close collaboration has resulted in many books and more than 300 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world.

The author:
Jacob Baal-Teshuva, born 1929, is author, critic and independent curator of museum shows. He studied at the Hebrew university in Jerusalem and the New York University. His numerous publications include works on Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Jacob Baal-Teshuva lives and works in New York and Paris.

Claude Lorrain (ca. 1600/1604–1682) ist zu Recht der Vater der europäischen Landschaftsmalerei genannt worden. Der bedeutendste Landschaftsmaler des 17. Jahrhunderts schuf auf der Grundlage genau beobachteter Naturstudien vor allem der römischen Campagna arkadische und zeitlos klassische Ansichten, oft mit biblischen oder mythologischen Szenen.

Lorrains in weiches Licht getauchte ideale Landschaften begeisterten schon früh die Romreisenden auf der Grand Tour, sodass viele seiner Werke sich heute in britischen Sammlungen befinden und der englische Landschaftsgarten entscheidend von seiner Ästhetik geprägt wurde. Zum Schutz vor Raubkopien seiner Gemälde schuf er die gezeichneten Kopien des Liber Veritatis, welches als Kunstwerk eigenen Rechts Ausdruck dafür ist, dass er seine Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken als den Gemälden gleichrangig verstand. 140 von Lorrains Werken stellt der Band vor, darunter auch »Bildpaare«, die das unkonventionelle Vorgehen des Künstlers besonders deutlich werden lassen.

Claude Lorrain (c. 1600/1604–1682) is justifiably referred to as the father of European landscape painting. Basing his work on carefully observed studies of nature, the most important landscape painter of the seventeenth century created Arcadian, timeless, classic paintings, often of biblical or mythological scenes.
Lorrain’s idealized landscapes are immersed in soft light, and very early on they excited travelers to Rome doing the Grand Tour—today, many of his works are included in British collections, and the English garden itself was definitely influenced by his aesthetics. In order to protect his paintings from being plagiarized, he drew copies of them in his Liber Veritatis, which, as a work of art in its own right, is an expression of the artist’s belief that his drawings and prints were on an equal par with the paintings. This volume presents 140 of Lorrain’s works, including the “pendants,” which make the artist’s unconventional approach remarkably palpable.

Part of a new series of beautiful gift art books, Claude Monet: Masterpieces of Art features all of the popular works of this insightful and experimental artist, from his first inklings as an Impressionist to his later flirtations with Abstract Expressionism. With a fresh and thoughtful introduction to the life and art of one of the most famous artists in the world, the book goes on to showcase his key works in all their glory.

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.

Towards the end of his life and much inspired by Japanese water gardens, Monet spent a great deal of time in his beloved Giverny. Adorned with poppies, blue sage, dahlias and irises, the waters were disturbed only by bamboos and water lilies. His water garden was originally created to satisfy a need to be near water, and to provide a visual feast that could be enjoyed from his house. The pond was fed by the river Ru, and weeping willow and silver birch hung over its edges, caressing the fronds of the greenery and blossoms below. Its famous green wooden footbridge was built across the water and it became the central focus of many of his works. He said, ‘It took me some time to understand my water lilies. I planted them for pleasure.’ and so he began to work on what is probably the most famous series of paintings the world has ever seen.

346 reproductions of woodcuts, arranged chronologically, by the German artist with supplementary information on his life.

Albrecht Dürer was a master in various media, but it was in woodcut design that his creative genius reached its highest expression. Here are all of his extant woodcuts, a collection of over 300 great works containing all the familiar cuts long treasured by the world's art lovers: the celebrated series on the Life of the Virgin, The Apocalypse of John (17 cuts), The Great Passion, St. Jerome in his Study, Samson Fighting the Lion, The Fall of Icarus, The Six Knots, The Men's Bath, St. Christopher, The Virgin in Glory, The Rhinoceros, The Last Supper of 1523, illustrations from Dürer's The Art of Measurement and from his four books on human proportion, and many others, including much little-known material. This book is the only available source for many of these works.
Although sacred subjects predominate (the Holy Family, scenes from Christ's life, crucifixion, etc., the lives of the saints, Old Testament episodes), many other motifs are treated. There are portraits of prominent men of the ages, book illustrations (secular and religious), coats of arms, celestial and terrestrial globes, animals, mythological and historical themes, etc. The plates are arranged generally in chronological order permitting the reader to view the development of Dürer's art. From out of the gnarled figures and landscapes one can see the emergence of an individualistic style and skill unrivaled in this sphere.

An introduction by Campbell Dodgson and a 34-page textual guide to the plates by Dr. Willi Kurth discuss the evidence and controversies surrounding the authenticity of each work, citing the opinions of all the important Dürer scholars; they also furnish the reader with the historical background of the cuts and of Dürer's life and times--from the years of apprenticeship in Nuremberg to the last works of 1520-1528.

All of the woodcuts are reproduced in excellent detail. This book is indispensable for professional art historians and critics. To the layman with any aesthetic interests at all, it will be a source of stimulation and satisfaction that only great art can provide.

About the Author:

Regarded as the greatest of the German Renaissance artists, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) created a vast body of work that ranges from altarpieces to copper engravings and portraits. Painter, printer, draughtsman, and art theorist, he remains best known for his woodcuts.

Artists featured:

About the Series:
Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Genre Series features:

* a detailed introduction with approximately 35 photographs, plus a timeline of the most important events (political, cultural, scientific, etc.) that took place during the time period
* a selection of the most important works of the epoch; each is presented on a 2-page spread with a full-page image and, on the facing page, a description/interpretation of the work and brief biography of the artist as well as additional information such as a reference work, portrait of the artist, and/or citations

Over 500 striking color images display the artwork of 100 contemporary painters from around the world. Their works, in oils, acrylics, and watercolors, range from very traditional pieces representing their mother countries to emerging styles that are new on the world scene. Naïve style painters resurge with a new spark, while others ventured into a more futuristic direction, mixing styles and creating completely unique and innovative canvases. No matter in which direction the artists take their work, each painting is truly exceptional and comes straight from the heart. The painters, from child prodigies to experienced veterans, are arranged alphabetically, allowing readers to view all the work of each artist together. Through this book, readers will travel the world and discover amazing contemporary artists and their important works of art. This book is a must for serious art collectors, enthusiasts, gallery owners, and artists.

Ces réflexions, qui comparent la vie au cottage à une sorte de paradis sur terre, montrent quelle vision idéalisée du bonheur campagnard était enracinée dans l'imagination des auteurs et artistes du XIXème siècle. Ce livre illustre leur vision : des logements pittoresques entourés de jardins luxuriants aux couleurs vives, habités par des paysans dignes et de charmants enfants, tous représentés dans l'éclat doré d'un éternel soleil. le fait que la réalité quotidienne, pour la plupart des paysans ordinaires, n'eût rien d'idyllique, n'a nui en rien à cette fable romantique que nous avons encore d'aujourd'hui plaisir à considérer, reflet peut-être d'une disposition à considérer la campagne comme un univers autre où règnent l'innocence et l'harmonie.

Très beau choix de 56 huiles et aquarelles - complété de 16 détails - de A. C. STRACHAN, D. WOODLOCK, E. K. JOHNSON, E. A. ROWE, Haynes KING, Henry John Yeend KING, H. ALLINGHAM, J. W. USHER, K. BARNARD, M. B. FOSTER, W. LANGLEY.

Ce bel ensemble de scénes de la vie rurale est accompagné de poésies et de textes de R. L. STEVENSON, D. H. LAWRENCE, D. WORDSWORTH, W. H. DAVIES, J. CLARK, O. WILDE, F. THOMPSON, C. BRONTË, C. DICKENS, G. ELIOT...