Книги по живописи

The restoration of Michelangelos magnificent frescoes in the Vaticans Sistine Chapel is perhaps the most controversial event in the art world in the past three decades. Now, after nearly fifteen years of effort, the restoration is finally complete. This unique volume-the first to document the project-is the result of an unparalleled international photographic campaign. For the first time, the restored Chapel is shown in its entirety, from the Creation to the Last Judgment. Glorious, full-color photographs-250 in all-portray the frescoes both before and after their restoration, providing an unforgettable view of the meticulous work that many believe restored the frescoes to their original High Renaissance splendor.

Originally created in the late 1400s, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel are the best-known of all the Vatican masterpieces. As early as 1502, however, tourists began noting the damage wrought by smoke and crumbling walls. By 1980 the need for conservation appeared to be dire. The restoration team had to contend with centuries of decay-structural fractures in the walls and ceilings, soot and dust accumulation, and rainwater seepage that left white patches on every surface. Artisans in previous centuries had made attempts at conservation, but often did more harm than good; the frescoes were found to be coated with many layers of "protective" glue that had yellowed and darkened with age.

Though many art historians opposed the restoration, believing that Michelangelo was a somber artist who worked in dark and muted colors, the endeavor presents frescoes that are gloriously vivid, setting the chapel aglow with their brilliance. In addition, they provide new insights about Michelangelos brushstroke techniques, and add more information to a centuries-old debate over how he worked with the wet plaster surface of the frescoes.

Written with Gianluigi Colalucci, the technical overseer of the restoration, the text provides an intimate understanding of this masterpiece of Renaissance art. It explains the various forensic studies carried out in the course of the project, the pragmatic concerns of the restoration, and the many problems of historical approach that were confronted. This volume, including remarkable new pictures of the Chapel frescoes, belongs in the libraries of every art historian and student of the Italian Renaissance.

Fellow painter Walter Erben spent countless hours conversing with his colleague Joan Miró (1893-1983) at his house in Mallorca in preparation for this book. Over the course of these talks, Miró gave Erben many interesting and invaluable insights into his art, as well as his own interpretations of his most significant works.

Thus was born this Miró retrospective which explores, through texts and images, the life`s work of one of the 20th century's most influential painters.

The author: Walter Erben (1908-1981) studied German at Berlin University as well as painting at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, where he studied under Oskar Moll and Paul Klee. Erben taught fine art in Rome and Hagen, authored many successful books on the subject, and lectured extensively during his lifetime.

The editor: Hajo Düchting (b. 1949 in Düsseldorf) studied art history, philosophy and archaeology in Munich, where he gained his doctorate in 1981 with a thesis on Robert Delaunay’s Windows series. After working in museum and adult education, he moved on to teaching posts and guest professorships at the universities of Munich, Kassel, Leipzig, Saarbrücken and Mainz. Düchting has published numerous articles on the art of the modern era, colour theory and the teaching of art and has authored a number of TASCHEN titles, including Paul Cézanne (1988), Wassily Kandinsky (1990); Robert and Sonia Delaunay (1993) and Georges Seurat (1999).

Assassinator of painting. The artist who upset the establishment

Joan Miró (1893-1983) is one of the most significant Spanish painters of the twentieth century. The themes and treatments of his early work were shaped by the Catalan landscape and clearly show the influence of Fauvism and Cubism. During his travels, Miró encountered the intellectual avant-garde of his time; his friends included Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, André Masson, Jean Arp and Pablo Picasso.

From the mid-1920s onward, Miró strove to leave direct objective references behind and developed the pictograms that typify his style. The pictures of this period, which include perhaps the most beautiful and significant of his whole oeuvre, dispense with spatiality and an unambiguous reference to objects. From then on, the surfaces were defined by numerals, writing, abstract emblems, and playful figures and creatures. In the postwar years be begin producing graphic works, ceramics, monumental murals, and sculptures. In these works, too, the Catalan artist sought the solid foundation of a figurative, symbolic art, featuring faces, stars, moons, rudimentary animal forms, and letters. Joan Miró developed in several stages his characteristic flowing calligraphic style and his world of forms resembling shorthand symbols in several stages. From Fauvism to Surrealism by way of his original childlike style, Miró sought to shake up the establishment and in doing so made a name for himself.

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

Masters that matter in Modern Art

A blow-by-blow account of groundbreaking works in Modernism

The story of Modern Art began roughly 150 years ago in Paris, where a circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, shook up the established art world. They painted their pictures with broad strokes that seemed unfinished in light of the meticulous official art, they portrayed life on the street instead of overblown heroic scenes and they escaped the power of the reigning salon painters by organising their own independent exhibitions. Once standard academic practice had been overcome, there was no holding back, and in a constant desire to pursue new roads, one style supplanted the next, always bringing different innovations: after Impressionism, there followed Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Abstract Art, renewed Realism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art. And still in Post-Modernism and the contemporary work of a Koons, Kelley or Wool, this modernist drive to make something new is still much alive.

Essays introducing all the major art movements give the reader a thorough grounding in the historical development of Modern Art. At the heart of this book though is the year-by-year succession of groundbreaking works, with 200 featured pieces receiving an own text that introduces the artist and makes the importance of the work apparent. These paintings and sculptures, photographs and conceptual works, both classics and surprising rediscoveries, tell the story of an art epoch that continued to thrive on ever fresh ideas and innovations.

• 187 artists’ portraits
• 44 original photos of artists in their studios
• 14 essays
• 7 fold-outs
• 30-page appendix with artists’ biographies, a glossary of key terms and an index of names and works

Click here to download table of contents

The editor:
Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor based in Berlin, with numerous publications mainly on contemporary art and photography. For TASCHEN he has edited, among other titles, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen and Neo Rauch.

Modigliani - Sensitive paintings and sculptures that speak in tongues

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 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.

About the Series:

Every 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 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.

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.