Искусство

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.

Modern Matters. A blow-by-blow account of Modernism

This indispensable overview traces the restless energy of modern art with a year-by-year succession of the groundbreaking artworks that shook standards and broke down barriers. Featuring hundreds of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and conceptual pieces that trace the story of modern art’s innovation and adventure.

Most art historians agree that the modern art adventure first developed in the 1860s in Paris. A circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, began painting pictures with rapid, loose brushwork. They turned to everyday street life for subjects, instead of overblown heroic scenes, and they escaped the power of the Salon by organizing their own independent exhibitions.

After this first assault on the artistic establishment, there was no holding back. In a constant desire to challenge, innovate, and inspire, one modernist style supplanted the next: Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, abstract art, renewed Realism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and conceptual practice.

This indispensable overview traces the restless energy of modern art with a year-by-year succession of the groundbreaking artworks that shook standards and broke down barriers. Introductory essays outline the most significant and influential movements alongside explanatory texts for each major work and its artist.

The editor:

Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor specializing in contemporary art and photography. His TASCHEN publications include Collector’s Editions like Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Ai Weiwei, and the David Hockney SUMO A Bigger Book, as well as monographs like the XXL-sized Jean-Michel Basquiat and survey books such as Modern Art and Art Now! Vols 3 and 4.

This story of modern art unfolds like a timeline of watershed events that decisively influenced popular opinion and paved the way for further artistic achievement.

Chronologically arranged, each chapter focuses on a particular work or idea that changed modern art as we know it. Through beautiful spreads and with informative text, readers will discover how a painting such as Édouard Manet’s »Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe« shocked the art establishment with its depiction of nude women alongside fully clothed men. The author explains how the work’s striking visual quality and easy brushstrokes helped give birth to the Impressionist movement. This book features a number of similarly pioneering works such as Monet’s »Impression, Sunrise«, Cézanne’s »Mon Sainte-Victoire«, Van Gogh’s »Wheatfield with Crows«, Rodin’s »Monument to Balzac«, Matisse’s »Woman with a Hat«, Picasso’s »Les Demoiselles d’Avignon«, Duchamp’s »Bicycle Wheel«, Ernst’s »Aquis Submersus«, Rivera’s »La Creación«, Calder’s »Lobster Trap and Fish Tail«, Pollock’s »Full Fathom Five«, Nam June Paik’s »TV Cello«, Smithson’s »Spiral Jetty«, and Chuck Close’s »Bob«. Perfect for perusing or reading from cover to cover, this book illustrates how the world’s greatest artists are geniuses at synthesizing the accomplishments of those before them in order to create groundbreaking works for others to follow.

From Leighton to Lucas, thismagnificent survey explores sculpture in Britain over the last 130 years.

Considering the way in which sculpturemediates issues of national identity and how Britains links with its Empire have shaped its artistic output, the book also highlights the dialogues between British and international sculpture.

The importance of the countrys landscape as a location andmediumis examined, as is the perennial choice faced by the sculptor between figuration and abstraction.

Sculpture has changed dramatically in the last century. Traditionalmaterials have given way to expanded practices and the dematerialisation of the art object altogether.

With incisive essays by a number of leading authorities, and including previously unpublished archivematerial and new bibliographic sources, this compelling book documents these seismic shifts.

Modernism: Designing a New World is the first book to explore Modernism in the designed world from a truly international perspective, and across all the arts. It offers a reassessment of the idea of Modernism and reveals the fundamental ways in which it has shaped our own world and its visual culture.

Modernism flourished during the years 1914 to 1939. As a movement it was the key point of reference for 20th century architecture, design and art. Modernists had a Utopian desire to create a better world, frequently combined with social and political beliefs that design and art could transform society. The range of objects illustrated – including painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints and collage as well as architecture, interiors, furniture, manufactured products, graphic and fashion design – reflect the period’s emphasis on the unity of the arts and the key role of the fine arts in shaping contemporary visual culture. Europe and America take centre stage but the reach of Modernism is demonstrated by selected works from around the world, including Russia, Palestine and Japan.

What has prompted contemporary artists to investigate modernity and modernism over the course of the past decades? This publication accompanying the exhibition Modernologies sets out to explore artistic responses to modernity as a socio-political movement aspiring to cultivate a universal language. Diverging conceptions of modernity and the knowledge gained through postcolonial studies in recent years have led to the notion of ‘multiple modernities’.

Against this backdrop, this exhibition advocates neither a ‘new formalism’ nor a ‘return to abstraction’. Its aim is neither to discover hitherto unknown or largely forgotten currents of modernism. On the contrary, it fundamentally challenges the conditions, constraints and consequences of modernity, exposes ambivalences, attempts to develop new readings of the rhetoric of modernity and the concomitant grammar of modernism.

A younger generation of artists is increasingly addressing the legacy of modernity and modernism and the failure of the utopia associated with these terms. What is these artists’ relationship to the promises and formal languages of modernity? How can this historical era even be critically reflected in and be subjected to re-evaluation?

Modernologies unfolds a cartography of alternative viewpoints and narratives, lines of conflicts and unresolved contradictions. More than eighty works and projects by more than thirty artists and collectives establish a new ‘mapping of the critique of modernity’ to which an additional layer is added through comprehensive essays exploring the ideology of aesthetic modernity and delving into interrelationships between modernity and coloniality.

Artists’ statements generated by André Rottmann and texts by various authors, including Inke Arns, Silke Baumann, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, Barbara Clausen, Helmut Draxler, Jordi Font Agulló, Karin Gludovatz, Teresa Grandas, Patricia Grzonka, Matthias Michalka, Juliane Rebentisch, Anne Rorimer, Gertrud Sandqvist, Kerstin Stakemeier.

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.

With extraordinary exhibitions and the world’s finest collection of modern and contemporary art, MoMA is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present, the established and the experimental

With 126 years spanning the time between the earliest and most recent works, MoMA Masterpieces offers an unparalleled opportunity to immerse oneself in the multitude of artistic approaches encompassed under the banner of modern art.

This richly illustrated overview provides the perfect means to understand and enjoy the art of our time. The book opens with an introduction by Ann Temkin, who offers reflections on the development of the collection. The thoughtful selection of works that follows highlights the collection’s peerless range of styles and ideas.

Legendary favourites, such as van Gogh’s 'The Starry Night', Picasso’s 'Girl before a Mirror' and Andy Warhol’s 'Gold Marilyn Monroe', sit alongside lesser-known masterworks such as Horace Pippin’s 'Abe Lincoln, The Great Emancipator' and Niki de Saint Phalle’s 'Shooting Painting American Embassy'. Contemporary landmarks, such as Gerhard Richter’s 'October 18, 1977' and Kara Walker’s 'Gone: A Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart' demonstrate the outstanding contributions of more recent art.

About the Author:

Ann Temkin is the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art.

Альбом знакомит с МоМА (Museum of Modern Art) - одним из самых известных музеев Нью-Йорка, где хранится лучшее в мире собрание современного искусства. Здесь представлены работы художников, созданные в период с конца XIX века по сегодняшний день. Живопись, скульптура, архитектура, дизайн, графика, иллюстрированная книга, рэди-мейд - вот далеко не полный перечень форм, в которых проявляется сейчас искусство. Читатель познакомится со ставшими уже классическими полотнами Пикассо, Сезанна, Моне, Гогена, Ван Гога, с произведениями авангардистов XX века: Мондриана, Уорхола, Поллока, Колдера, с искусством наших дней. Сопоставление разных стилей, техник и форм позволяет составить пеструю картину современного искусства.

- Книга помещена в банку из-под сгущенного молока, увеличенную до размеров книги.
- Внутрь банки вложены четыре резиновых мяча с именами художников.
- Банка с альбомом продается в авоське советских времен.
- На обложке книги - одна из самых известных картин Энди Уорхола с изображением банок с томатным супом "Campbell".
- Более 500 иллюстраций. 

Эта книга об искусстве, которое долго не признавалось в нашей стране и о котором почти ничего не было известно широкой публике: лишь знатоки-искусствоведы знали его истинную ценность.
Современное западное искусство едва просматривалось за железным занавесом СССР. Когда Энди Уорхол иронизировал над обществом изобилия, в Советском Союзе царил тотальный дефицит. Жестянка с томатным супом "Campbell" в США была символом дешевизны, массовости, доступности, удобства... А жестянка со сгущенным молоком в СССР символизировала лакомство, удачу, беззаботную жизнь...
Американская идея - возведение обыденных предметов в ранг предметов искусства - для советского человека была чуждой: обыденные предметы имели собственную, жизненно необходимую смысловую ценность. Причем здесь искусство? Сама эта мысль показалась бы абсурдной. Мир западный и мир, в котором жил советский человек, существовали параллельно, но совершенно отдельно друг от друга много десятилетий.
Современность уравняла обе жестянки в своей ценности. Нынче и у нас сгущенка - дешевый, массовый, доступный продукт, над которым не грех иронизировать.
Теперь параллельно существовавшие миры пересеклись!

Авторы книги стремились дать общее представление об уникальном собрании нью-йоркского Музея современного искусства, насчитывающем сейчас более 100 000 произведений искусства. Основание Музея в 1929 г. позволило продемонстрировать широкой публике лучшие произведения современного искусства и стало событием в культурной жизни США. С огромным энтузиазмом сотрудники Музея пополняли и совершенствовали его коллекцию, так что сегодня музей обладает лучшим в мире собранием такого рода. По счастливому совпадению публикация альбома совпала с празднованием 75-летия Музея. В ожидании этого события Музей расширил и обновил свое помещение: новое здание стоимостью 425 миллионов долларов, сооруженное по проекту одного из самых передовых японских архитекторов Йосио Танигучи, - это практически новый музей.

How did the monks, nuns and hermits live? What rules did they agree to obey? To what extent were they able to uphold those ideals in reality? What was the relationship between the monasteries and wordly authorities? And what was the source of the power that the religious orders were able to exercise in political affairs at various times? Are the remarkable cultural accomplishments of the cloisters simply the fruits of great self-discipline, or did they also result from a privileged way of life? Who were the men and women who entered monasteries?

Art historian Kristina Krüger is a specialist in the art and architecture of the Middle Ages. Her research and publications focusing in particular on the relationship between architecture and liturgy make her the ideal author for this book. Rainer Warland is a professor at the Institute for Christian Archaeology and Art History at the University of Freiburg, Germany.

Highlights
• The history of monasticism from its origins in late antiquity through its apex in the High Middle Ages and into the present. Presentation of various religious orders and what makes them unique, as well as short biographies of famous abbots, abbesses and monastic scholars.
• Architecture of monastic complexes and the art and crafts within them.
• Special chapters devoted to everyday life in a cloister, medieval book illumination, monastic gardens, and other comprehensive topics.
• Richly illustrated with photographs that bring the architecture, sculpture and paintings to life, as well as color graphics, maps and floor plans.

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