Книги по живописи

Pittura Metafisica. The brooding spaces of Giorgio de Chirico

With his Pittura Metafisica, Greek-born Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico was a highly influential figure in the 20th-century avant-garde. Allied to the Surrealist movement, he developed a compelling style composed of sharp perspectives, striking shadows, ominous voids, and lonely figures, at once dreamlike, anxious, and brooding.

With his Pittura Metafisica, Greek-born Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) was a major influence in Europe’s interwar avant-garde, hailed by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Paul Éluard.

The artist’s Pittura Metafisica set statues or mannequin-like figures in exaggerated one-point perspective spaces including city squares, receding arcades, distant walls, or claustrophobic interiors. Sharp perspectives, striking shadows, geometrical planes, and voids of space crafted a compositional drama and lurking mood of anxiety and loneliness.

The paintings set out to disquiet, to make the viewer reassess the nature of reality and search beneath its appearances for elusive memories and unexpected insights. While the Surrealists around Breton turned to Freud’s theories of the unconscious, de Chirico was fascinated by Nietzsche.

This dependable artist introduction explores all the ominous shadows and brooding corners of de Chirico’s Pittura Metafisica as well as his later development into a more classical style, a shift widely criticized by the Surrealists who had so admired his early paintings.

The author:

Magdalena Holzhey studied art history, Italian, and musicology in Berlin and Pisa. She held various academic and curatorial positions in galleries and museums, including the K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, before becoming Curator of Collections of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld. She has published widely on classical modernism and contemporary art.

About the series:

Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. 

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

Published in conjunction with the large-scale, all-medium, posthumous retrospective of Willem de Koonings career at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), this book offers an unparalleled opportunity to appreciate the development of the artists work as it unfolds over nearly seven decades.

Representing nearly every type of work de Kooning made, in both technique and subject matter, this retrospective includes paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. Among these are the artists most famous, landmark paintings among them Pink Angels, Excavation and the celebrated third Woman series plus in-depth presentations of all his most important series, ranging from his figurative paintings of the early 1940s to the black-and-white compositions of 1948-49, and from the urban abstractions of the mid 1950s to the artists return to figuration in the 1960s and the large gestural abstractions of the following decade.

Also included is de Koonings famous yet largely unseen theatrical backdrop, the 17-foot-square Labyrinth (1946). With lavish, full-colour documentation, this volume is the most complete account of de Koonings career ever published.

Goddess of the Automobile Age

The changing aspects of femininity and masculinity

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) stood at the center of the sophisticated Paris art world of the 1920s and 30s. Her love for beautiful women, elegant automobiles, and the modern metropolis provided not only motifs for her pictures, but also influenced her artistic style.

Simultaneously with her career as artist, Tamara de Lempicka pioneered a new image of life on the screen, evident in the new, self-confident woman and the changing aspects of femininity and masculinity. The same sense of style was reflected in a futuristic cult of speed, domestic design forms promulgated by the Bauhaus, and the dandyism of a George Brummell. Tamara de Lempicka’s best-known painting, "Self-Portrait, or Tamara in a Green Bugatti", presents the artist as a female dandy brimming with cool elegance.

Whether as an Art-Déco artist, a post-Cubist or a Neoclasissist, de Lempicka struck the taste of a cosmopolitan (and wealthy) public that found its own image reflected in her work.

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

Freewheeling. Tamara de Lempicka, icon of Art Deco

Tamara de Lempicka (1896 1980) lived art in the fast lane. With an appetite for glamour and fame as much as Left Bank bohemianism, she fled her native Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and set about taking Paris by storm. Her prolific, monumental oeuvre remains one of the most vivid documents of 1920s Art Deco. 

De Lempicka s style deployed cool colors and tight, post-cubist forms into an at once neoclassical and voluptuous figuration. Her subjects, often nude, are sensual, aloof, and powerful. Bedecked in seductive light and textures, they command our attention but typically avert their gaze with an aspect of haughty grandeur. Her subjects include both high-society patrons and progressive portraits of emancipated and lesbian women, such as Women Bathing, Portrait of Suzy Solidor, and her notorious Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, showing Tamara behind the wheel. A vision of speed, sophistication, and independence, the work was commissioned for the cover of German magazine Die Dame, which defined de Lempicka as the epitome of women s liberation. 

Through some of her finest, most compelling portraits, this introduction to de Lempicka explores the artist s unique visual language and its privileged place not only in the annals of interwar art but also in the history of female artists and in our collective consciousness of the Roaring Twenties.

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

Capturing fleeting moments. Degas’s mastery in the depiction of movement

"No art could be less spontaneous than mine. Inspiration, spontaneity, temperament are unknown to me. One has to do the same subject ten times, even a hundred times over. In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement."  - Edgar Degas

In terms of both theme and technique, the key to understanding the early work of Edgar Degas (1834–1917) is classical painting. Although he was eventually associated with the Impressionists and even participated in their joint exhibitions, Degas never adopted a purely Impressionist approach.

Degas’s work, reflecting an extremely personal and psychological perspective, emphasizes the scenic or concentrates on the detail. Thus, Degas’s painting is often discussed with reference to the rise of short-exposure photography. Thematically, nature proved less interesting to the artist than the life and inhabitants of the modern metropolis. Degas primarily sought his motifs at the race track or circus, in bedrooms, or in ballet salons - and dancers always remained his favorite theme.

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

Capturing fleeting moments. Degas’s mastery in the depiction of movement

Most commonly associated with the birth of the Impressionist movement in mid-19th-century Paris, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in fact defied easy categorization and instead developed a unique style, strongly influenced by Old Masters, the body in motion, and everyday urban life.

The elder scion of a wealthy family, Degas cofounded a series of exhibitions of “Impressionist” art, but soon disassociated himself from the group in pursuit of a more realist approach. His subjects centered on the teeming, noisy streets of Paris, as well as its leisure entertainments, such as horse racing, cabarets, and, most particularly, ballet. With often ambitious, off-kilter vantage points, his images of ballerinas numbered approximately 1,500 works, all deeply invested in the physicality and the discipline of dance.

Through illustrations of Foyer de la Danse (1872), Musicians in the Orchestra (1872), and many more, this book provides an essential overview of the artist who created a category all his own, a world of classical resonance, bold compositions, and an endless fascination with movement, which together produced some of the most striking and influential works of the era.

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

This book accompanies the first major museum exhibition devoted to a reconstruction of the infamous Nazi display of modern art since the presentation originated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991.

]During the Nazi regime in Germany, “degenerate art” was the official term for much of the most important modern art of the day. “Degenerate art” was defined by the Nazi regime as artwork that was not in line with the National Socialists’ ideas of beauty. Their condemnation extended to works in nearly every major art movement: Expressionism, Dada, New Objectivity, Surrealism, Cubism, and Fauvism. Banned artists included Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, and Oskar Kokoschka. Richly illustrated, Degenerate Art elucidates the historical and intellectual context of the notorious exhibition in Munich in 1937, which spurred the attack on modern art.

The book contains reflections on the genesis and evolution of the term “degenerate art” and details of the National Socialist policy on art. Art works from the exhibition Degenerate Art are compared to works of art from The Great German Art Exhibition, which was held at the same time and displayed the works of officially approved artists. The book also presents the after-effects of the attack on modernism that are felt even today.

About the Author:

Olaf Peters is Professor of Modern Art at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg and the author of Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937 and Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933 (both by Prestel).

“I was aware of Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, long before I encountered the many other “Diego Riveras” that roamed the world between the beginning of the twentieth century and the late 1950s. […] While his easel paintings and drawings constitute a large body of both his early and late work, his unique murals explode off walls in virtuoso performances of mind-staggering organisation. On those walls the man, his legend and myths, his technical talent, his intense story-telling focus and self-indulgent ideological convictions all come together.”
(Gerry Souter)

Gerry Souter, the author of the remarkable Frida Kahlo, overcomes his huge admiration for Diego Rivera to give the artist a human dimension, found in his political choices, his love affairs and his belief that “this truth was Mexico, the language of his thoughts, the blood in his veins, the azure sky above his resting place.”

About the author
Gerry Souter earned his degree at The Art Institute of Chicago and then went on to do further studies in art at the University of Chicago. Himself an artist, Souter has exhibited his paintings and photographs at The Art Institute of Chicago, the Phoenix Art Museum and a number of other galleries. A professional author, he has written more than twenty books since 1997, with great success. His continuing studies in Art History and Architecture, the sharpness of his writing, and his visual experience add a dynamic aspect to the study of the lives of artists and the description of their works, keeping the reader captivated, page after page.

Diego in Detail. The most comprehensive study of Rivera’s work ever realized

Latin American folk hero, husband of Frida Kahlo, devout Communist, and Mexico’s most important artist: the oeuvre of Diego Rivera is finally done justice in this monograph constituting the most comprehensive study of his work ever made. More than a half-century after his death, Rivera’s story, complete mural works, and recently discovered pieces are brought to life alongside private photos and drawings.

A veritable folk hero in Latin America and Mexico’s most important artist — along with his wife, painter Frida Kahlo — Diego Rivera (1886–1957) led a passionate life devoted to art and communism. After spending the 1910s in Europe, where he surrounded himself with other artists and embraced the Cubist movement, he returned to Mexico and began to paint the large-scale murals for which he is most famous. In his murals, he addressed social and political issues relating to the working class, earning him prophetic status among the peasants of Mexico. He was invited to create works abroad, most notably in the United States, where he stirred up controversy by depicting Lenin in his mural for the Rockefeller Center in New York City (the mural was destroyed before it was finished). Rivera’s most remarkable work is his 1932 Detroit Industry, a group of 27 frescos at the Detroit Institute of Art in Michigan.

This volume features numerous large-scale details of the murals, allowing their various components and subtleties to be closely examined. In addition to the murals is a vast selection of paintings, vintage photos, documents, and drawings from public and private collections around the world, many of which the whereabouts were previously unknown to scholars and whose inclusion here is thanks to the most intense research performed on Rivera’s work since his death. Texts include an illustrated biography and essays by prominent art historians offering interpretations of each mural. One could not ask for a more comprehensive study of Rivera’s oeuvre; finally, his work is the subject of the sweeping retrospective it deserves.

About the Authors:

Luis-Martín Lozano is art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art. He is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to research Rivera’s and Kahlo’s oeuvre in California. Lozano has taught and lectured extensively on the subject of Mexican art and has written more than 50 essays about Mexican modernism as well as monographic essays about Diego Rivera, María Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo and many others. Since 2001 he has been director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de México.

Diego Rivera's grandson Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera has worked as editor of the magazines Punto Cero en Literatura, El Faro revista de literatura y arte and M'hija, together with Carlos Jaurena. He founded Kahlo-Coronel Fotogalería, Mexico’s first private photo-gallery, in 1987. His collection of Mexican popular pottery is the world’s most extensive, including more than 15,000 pieces from the 16th century to the present day. He has curated more than 100 exhibitions for art galleries, museums, and biennials and has written 71 publications.

"It is my wish to come very close, strikingly close, to the times in which we live, without submitting to artistic dogma...I need the connection to the world of senses, the courage to portray ugliness, life as it comes." - Otto Dix

In the 1920s, Otto Dix was the artist of Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity, par excellence. Painting in a very realistic, almost photographic style, he chose as subjects the poverty, violence, death, and war that he experienced as a soldier in World War I. After this terrible experience, he painted the famous triptych The War.

Dix staged the world as a play, a grotesque farce. But the form he chose to do so was based on the classical canon of beauty. Dix lived his life and served art, for he adhered to the age-old rule that the American painter Ad Reinhardt put in a nutshell: "Life is life, and art is art."

One of the great book illustrators of all time, Gustave Doré created richly detailed, brilliantly imaginative scenes of legendary worlds filled with fantastic creatures. This collection of more than ninety illustrations dramatically demonstrates the amazing inventiveness of this remarkable nineteenth-century artist.

His fanciful portrayals of sea serpents, fire-breathing dragons, lost souls suffering endless agonies, and scores of other grotesque images were originally drawn for The Bible, Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, and other great works of literature. An excellent reference and an exceptional supply of royalty-free graphics for use by artists and craftspeople, these magnificent illustrations will delight lovers of fine art and anyone fascinated by creatures of myth and fantasy.

This expansive and informative book on Surrealist drawing reveals drawing to be a fundamental medium of Surrealist expression.

Drawing, often considered a minor art, was central to Surrealism from the very beginning.

Automatic drawing, exquisite cadavers, and frottage are just a few of the techniques invented by Surrealists as means to tap into the subconscious realm. While previous books have examined the connection between drawings and Surrealist paintings, "Drawing Surrealism" is the first to recognize the medium as a fundamental form of Surrealist expression, and to explore its impact on other media as well.

Surrealist collage, photography, and even paintings are presented in the context of drawing as a metaphor for innovation and experimentation. It is also the first book to encompass a wide array of artists on a global scale — from the great figures in Surrealist history to lesser-known Surrealists from Japan, Central Europe, and the Americas, where the movement had a profound and lasting effect. In addition to brilliant reproductions of drawings and other works by more than 100 artists, this volume also includes a substantial historical essay by the exhibition’s curator as well as informative essays by leading scholars.

This groundbreaking book offers a deep understanding of the techniques and concerns that made Surrealism such an intimate perceptual revolution.

81 plates show development from youth to full style. Many favorites, many new. Introduction by Alfred Werner. Includes Self-Portrait at the Age of Thirteen, Female Nude (with Headcloth and Slippers), Orpheus Slain by Bacchantes, with Boy Running Away.