Книги по живописи

Guido di Petro was born in 1387 in Tuscany, near Fiesole. While still very young, he joined the Observant Dominican order, making the vow of absolute poverty and obedience. His talent soon proved useful as he began to paint miniatures for missals and other religious books.

In 1436, along with several other friars, he moved to the convent of San Marco in Florence. There he painted frescos in the cloister and in the chapel. His move to Florence established a fundamental change for him, as he was plunged into the effervescence of a major artistic centre under the protection of Medici family – the most influential patrons of the arts of the time.

He was among the first to use the techniques of perspective proposed by Leon Battista Alberti. His method of depicting movement, as well as his use of colour and facial expressions to highlight grace and emotion, place him among the major painters of European Gothic and early Renaissance, with such brilliant works as the Annunciation, and The Last Judgement. Gentile da Fabriano may have been one of his students.

By the end of his life, he was an archpriest in Florence and died in 1455 in Rome. Called “Blessed Angelico for a long time (Vasari dates this name back to 1469), he was not officially beatified until 1984 by Pope John Paul II.

Through a series of magnificent illustrations, combined with artistic and biographical analysis, Etienne Beissel unravels the talent of this unique artist, who alone knew how to paint a Christian soul, and whom André Malraux considered to be the painter who marked the severance between the sacred art of the Middle Ages and the new art born with the Renaissance.

The power and magnitude of his lifes work are vividly conveyed by this thorough evaluation written by Hugh Davies, director of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, and art historian Sally Yard. Born in Dublin, as a teenager Bacon moved to London, where he worked as an interior designer and taught himself to paint. Responding to influences as diverse as Michelangelo and the photographer Muybridge, he has created a motion-filled style uniquely his own. Fascinated by the challenge of capturing what he calls "the mysteries of appearance," Bacon confronts us with emotional images that demand an emotional response.

Francis Bacon and the Masters presents more than twenty of the artist’s paintings, the majority coming from the extraordinary collection assembled by Bacon’s patrons, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, over the course of the artist’s lifetime and now in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

Along with other landmark paintings from the Tate Collection and other major public and private collections, these are placed in the context of masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg: Egyptian mummy masks, Roman and Renaissance sculpture, and a number of the museum’s most famous paintings such as Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Man, Matisse’s Nymph and Satyr and Picasso’s A Young Lady. These remarkable works, brought together for a ground-breaking exhibition at the Hermitage and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, are given further context by items and photographs from Bacon’s own studio archive, now in Dublin.

The exhibition is guest curated in both venues by Dr Thierry Morel, and co-curated by Amanda Geitner and Calvin Winner from SCVA. The contributing authors are Dr Thierry Morel, Professor Paul Joannides (Cambridge University), Amanda Geitner (SCVA), Calvin Winner (SCVA) and Margarita Cappock (Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane).

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was one of the great figurative painters of the twentieth century.

This book, newly available in paperback, provides a thorough account of the life and work of this complex and conflicted artist, whose paintings retain their visceral impact and relevance today. Essays by international scholars provide new insights into Bacon's art and life, and some fifty art works from every decade of his career from the pensive and shocking works of the 1940's to the exuberantly coloured and visceral large paintings of the 1970s and 80's show Bacon' unique representations of the human body through his mastery of paint.

Over 150 additional illustrations portray his studio, friends and lovers, and reveal the diversity of his source materials, from Velázquez to the motion photos of Eadweard Muybridge.

The exhibition and the catalog will show for the first time in Spain a selection of around 80 paintings and drawings by the Czech artist, all from the Centre Georges Pompidou, and documents from the collection of Pierre Brulle, a leading expert on Kupka, who was considered the first painter to explore the concept of abstract act. The splendid collection of works from the Centre Georges Pompidou, mostly donated by the artist's widow in 1963, shows very clearly the development of Kupka's art from his early Symbolist paintings to his final years. Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) began his artistic career at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he learned an academic style. Later on, in Vienna, he began to take an interest in Symbolism and allegorical art. After moving to Paris in 1896, Kupka worked as a press and advertising illustrator while at the same time making contact with the early avant-garde movements such as Fauvism and Cubism, though maintaining his independence and his own personal language. His interest in Futurist writings meant that around 1910 his work started to become increasingly abstract, with the idea of reflecting movement and studying the effects of colour and the relationship between music and painting. This led to the publication of the book La Creation dans les arts plastiques in 1913. Despite his links to the "isms" of the period, Kupka always felt himself to be a lone experimenter.

Frida Kahlo - painter of pictures expressing the burdens that weighed upon her soul

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is one of the most important 20th-century painters, and one of the few Latin American artists to have achieved a global reputation. In 1983 her work was declared the property of the Mexican state.

Kahlo was one of the daughters of an immigrant German photographer and a Mexican woman of Indian origin. Her life and work were more inextricably interwoven than in almost any other artist's case. Two events in her life were of crucial importance. When she was eighteen, a bus accident put her in hospital for a year with a smashed spinal column and fractured pelvis. It was in her sick bed that she first started to paint. Then, aged twenty-one, she married the world-famous Mexican mural artist Diego Rivera. She was to suffer the effects of the accident her whole life long, and was particularly pained by her inability to have children.

Kahlo's arresting pictures, most of them small format self-portraits, express the burdens that weighed upon her soul: her unbearable physical pain, the grief that Rivera's occasional affairs prompted, the sorrow her childlessness caused her, her homesickness when living abroad and her longing to feel that she had put down roots, profound loneliness. But they also declare her passionate love for her husband, her pronounced sensuousness, and her unwavering survival instinct.

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

The author:
Andrea Kettenmann (born in 1959) studied art history in Gießen, Göttingen and Heidelberg before joining the art history department of the University of Hamburg. In 1986 she visited Mexico on a fellowship, and now lives there, working as a freelance art historian. She has now worked on a number of exhibitions and catalogues, including the catalogue for the retrospective on Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo’s husband, in Detroit.

Pain and passion. The original and intimate art of Mexico’s most famous female painter

The arresting pictures of Frida Kahlo (1907–54) were in many ways expressions of trauma. Through a near-fatal road accident at the age of 18, failing health, a turbulent marriage, miscarriage and childlessness, she transformed the afflictions into revolutionary art.

In literal or metaphorical self-portraiture, Kahlo looks out at the viewer with an audacious glare, rejecting her destiny as a passive victim and rather intertwining expressions of her experience into a hybrid surreal-real language of living: hair, roots, veins, vines, tendrils and fallopian tubes. Many of her works also explore the Communist political ideals which Kahlo shared with her husband Diego Rivera. The artist described her paintings as “the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.”

This book introduces a rich body of Kahlo’s work to explore her unremitting determination as an artist, and her significance as a painter, feminist icon, and a pioneer of Latin American culture.

 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

They met in 1928, Frida Kahlo was then 21 years old and Diego Rivera was twice her age. He was already an international reference, she only aspired to become one.
An intense artistic creation, along with pain and suffering, was generated by this tormented union, in particular for Frida. Constantly in the shadow of her husband, bearing his unfaithfulness and her jealousy, Frida exorcised the pain on canvas, and won progressively the public’s interest. On both continents, America and Europe, these commited artists proclaimed their freedom and left behind them the traces of their exceptional talent.
In this book, Gerry Souter brings together both biographies and underlines with passion the link which existed between the two greatest mexican artists of the 20th century.

42 selected master works by legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. A special bargain in first-class Schirmer/Mosel quality.

This companion volume to an ambitious retrospective holds a mirror up to the iconic artist whose work so strongly reflected her life.

The life and work of Frida Kahlo were inextricably intertwined. This beautiful monograph celebrates the artist while exploring the lesser-known aspects of her story. Reproductions of Kahlo's paintings are accompanied by a series of illuminating essays that explore the artist’s private writings and the intense public interest in her life, the role of physical and mental suffering in the creative process, and the coded and double meanings hidden in so much of Kahlo’s work. In addition, a photographic essay compiled by her grandniece, Cristina Kahlo, features images from the family’s private collection. As an icon of female strength and suffering, Frida Kahlo has become something of an art world myth. This scholarly yet profoundly moving illustrated tribute to her life and work offers a measured perspective that rises above the noise of celebrity to discover the true artist and the truth of her art.

About the authors:

Peter von Becker is a writer, was head of the cultural section of the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and continues to write regularly for this section.
Ingried Brugger is Director of the Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna.
Salomon Grimberg is a psychiatrist for children in Dallas and co-editor of the catalogue raisonné of Frida Kahlo's work.
Cristina Kahlo is a photographer in Mexico City and Frida Kahlo's grandniece. She is curator for the photography section of the exhibition in which family-owned photographs will be shown.
Arnaldo Kraus is a physician in Mexico City.
Helga Prignitz-Poda is an art historian and specialist in Latin American studies and lives in Istanbul and Berlin. She is a co-editor of the catalogue raisonné of Frida Kahlo's work and curator of the exhibition.
Francisco Reyes Palma is a historian, critic, and curator of Mexican art in Mexico City.
Florian Steininger is a curator of the Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna.
Jeanette Zwingenberger is an art historian in Paris.

Pain and Passion. The complete paintings of Frida Kahlo in an XXL edition

Among the few women artists who have transcended art history, none had a meteoric rise quite like Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). Her unmistakable face, depicted in over fifty extraordinary self-portraits, has been admired by generations; along with hundreds of photographs taken by notable artists such as Edward Weston, Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo, Nickolas Muray, and Martin Munkácsi, they made Frida Kahlo an iconic image of 20th-century art.

After an accident in her early youth, Frida became a painter of her own free will. Her marriage to Diego Rivera in 1929 placed her at the forefront of an artistic scene not only in the cultural Renaissance of Mexico, but also in the United States. Her work garnered praise from the poet André Breton, who added the Mexican painter to the ranks of international surrealism and exhibited her work in Paris in 1939 to the admiration of Picasso, Kandinsky, and Duchamp.

We access the intimacy of Frida’s affections and passions through a selection of drawings, pages from her personal diary, letters, and an extensive illustrated biography featuring photos of Frida, Diego, and the Casa Azul, Frida’s home and the center of her universe.

This large-format XXL book allows readers to admire Frida Kahlo's paintings like never before, including unprecedented detail shots and famous photographs. It presents pieces in private collections and reproduces works that were previously lost or have not been exhibited for more than 80 years, forming the most extensive study of Kahlo's work and life to date.

The editor and author:

Luis-Martín Lozano is an art historian specializing in the study of different aspects of modernism in Mexican and Latin American art. He is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and has conducted extensive research on the work of both Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, as well as publishing widely on both artists. Lozano was formerly the director of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and has been a guest curator for many art institutions in the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and particularly in Mexico.

The contributing authors:

Andrea Kettenmann studied art history in Göttingen and Hamburg before joining the art history department of the University of Hamburg. She has published widely on Frida Kahlo and has contributed to numerous exhibitions and catalogues. She works as a freelance art historian in Mexico City, where she has lived for many years.

Marina Vázquez Ramos is an art historian specializing in modern Mexican art. She works as a university professor, researcher, and exhibition curator, and has edited several publications in Mexico and abroad. She was deputy director general of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and is now director of the Mario Vázquez Raña Library’s Photography Collection and Newspaper Archive.

Das Werk von Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) ist klein. Es umfaßt nur 143 Gemälde, die auch im Format klein sind, selten über 20 x 30 oder 40 x 60 cm hinausgehen. Und dennoch wurden einige ihrer Bilder zu Ikonen des 20. Jahrhunderts: Die gebrochene Säule etwa oder Der verwundete Hirsch. Als »farbiges Band um eine Bombe« bezeichnete André Breton, einer ihrer vielen Bewunderer aus der europäischen Avantgardeszene, die Kunst Frida Kahlos. Exotisch und explosiv, sinnlich und faszinierend vital in ihrer künstlerischen Aussage, spiegeln Kahlos Bilder eine komplexe, oft erschreckende Seelenlandschaft: »meine innere Wirklichkeit «, wie sie selbst sagte. Unsere Monographie zeigt 42 ausgewählte Meisterwerke in voller Größe vierfarbig reproduziert und zusätzlich in den interessantesten Details. »Lesbar« gemacht durch die erklärenden Texte von Helga Prignitz-Poda, erschließt sich Frida Kahlos Kunst den Sinnen wie dem Intellekt und entfaltet den ganzen Reichtum ihrer ungeheuer vielschichtigen Bildsprache. Wir freuen uns, Ihnen das Standardwerk der Kahlo-Spezialistin Helga Prignitz-Poda nun als Sonderausgabe im handlichen Format zum Sonderpreis anbieten zu können.

The painful, exquisite art of Mexico’s favourite artist was a product of immense physical pain, and an emotional tumultuous life. The new book features the range and power of her heavily autobiographical work, from the early, disturbing explorations of personal suffering to the more dulled, painkiller-drenched paintings of her later life.

In Frida Kahlo, legendary figure-head of new Mexican art, life and art match in an unrivalled way. Her vibrant paintings, mostly self-portraits, are a mesmerizing and unsparing testimony to a dramatic life in a tormented body, to an amazing will to survive, and to an outstanding artistic talent. Our bestselling book, now in a low-price reduced-size edition, juxtaposes the paintings with large-size details revealing the beauty and the abysses of Frida Kahlo’s art.