Сборники работ по искусству

Piranesi's fantastic worlds. The great 18th-century architectural artist and master engraver

One of the greatest architectural artists of all time, and certainly the most famous copper engraver of the 18th century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) is best known for his terrifyingly original series of etchings of labyrinthine and megalomaniac prisons, Carceri d’Invenzione. In his own day, he was most celebrated for his Vedute, 137 etchings of ancient and modern Rome; so renowned were these startling and dramatic chiaroscuro images, imbued with Piranesi’s romantic feeling for archaeological ruins, that they formed the mental picture of Rome for generations after. Indeed, Piranesi could be said to have shaped a whole strain of contemporary architecture, as well as the wider visualization of antiquity itself. In our time, he has had a direct influence on writers such as Borges and Kafka and on filmmakers such as Terry Gilliam and Peter Greenaway. Anyone who contemplates Piranesi’s etchings will confront the existential nightmare of human existence and its infinite mysteries.

One the greatest architectural artists of all time, and certainly the most famous copper engraver of the 18th century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) is most known for his terrifyingly original series of etchings of labyrinthine and megalomaniac prisons, Carceri d'Invenzione. In his own day, he was most celebrated for his Vedute, 137 etchings of ancient and modern Rome; so renowned were these startling and dramatic chiaroscuro images, imbued with Piranesi's romantic feeling for archaeological ruins, that they formed the mental picture of Rome for generations after. Indeed, Piranesi could be said to have shaped a whole strain of contemporary architecture, as well as the wider visualization of antiquity itself. In our time, he has had a direct influence on writers such as Borges and Kafka and on filmmakers such as Terry Gilliam and Peter Greenaway. Anyone who contemplates Piranesi's etchings will confront the existential nightmare of human existence and its infinite mysteries…

Archaeology and Imagination. Impossible staircases and startling ruins from Italy’s master engraver

The most famous 18th-century copper engraver, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) made his name with etchings of ancient Rome. His startling, chiaroscuro images imbued the city’s archaeological ruins with drama and romance and became favourite souvenirs for the Grand Tourists who travelled Italy in pursuit of classical culture and education.

Today, Piranesi is renowned not just for shaping the European imagination of Rome, but also for his elaborate series of fanciful prisons, Carceri, which have influenced generations of creatives since, from the Surrealists to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka.

Loosely based on contemporary stage sets rather than the actual dingy dungeons of Piranesi’s day, these intricate images defy architectural reality to play instead with perspective, lighting, and scale. Staircases exist on two planes simultaneously; vast, vaulted ceilings seem to soar up to the heavens; interior and exterior distinctions collapse. With a low viewpoint and small, fragile figures, the prison scenes become monstrous megacities of incarceration, celebrated to this day as masterworks of existentialist drama.

About the series:

Bibliotheca Universalis — Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!

Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together more than 100 of our all-time favourite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.

Bookworm’s delight — never bore, always excite!

This definitive portrait of Camille Pissarro by one of the world’s foremost authorities on Impressionism and French painting reveals the deep connection between Pissarro’s humanitarian concerns and his creative output.

Throughout his career, the Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro produced a vast oeuvre of paintings, drawings, and prints inspired by his fascination with and commitment to politics. Many of these works reflect the tensions between his anarchist ideals and the realities of life in a capitalist society, however, most examinations of Pissarro have approached his art and politics as separate spheres. Published to accompany a major exhibition, this survey by a renowned expert on Impressionist painting offers a selection of canvases and works on paper that embody Pissarro’s pictorial humanism at the highest level. Exhaustive archival study, interviews with surviving family members, and research drawn from thousands of newly discovered letters inform this rich and authoritative book. Including individual portraits of each of the family members Pissarro so often inserted into his paintings, it also examines his relationships with fellow artists, writers, neighbors, merchants, and domestic servants. The result is a refreshing and landmark reconsideration of the artist’s magnificent body of work.

A tragic icon of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) took influences from Picasso and Mexican surrealism and developed his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing. Though his name inevitably conjures up images of the drip paintings for which he is most famous, this technique was only developed midway through his career. The progression from his earlier work to his final "action" paintings —a veritable revolution of painting as a concept—reveals the genius of this tortured artist whom many call the greatest modern American painter.

From crowded dance halls to smoky cabarets, this vibrant collection of posters from the Belle Époque explores the birth, development, and continued popularity of a graphic genre.

Thanks to innovations in color lithography, the streets of fin-de-siècle Paris were punctuated with brightly hued posters featuring bold typography and playful imagery. Many of these posters were torn down almost as soon as they were pastedup, finding their way into private homes and, eventually, museums and collections all over the world. Although many artists contributed to the affichomanie, or “poster craze,” one of the most famous among them was Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec. This gorgeous book offers exquisite reproductions of more than one hundred posters, including those by Lautrec and his contemporaries Bonnard, Picasso, Chéret and Mucha. Advertising everything from tony theater productions to the licentious cancan, bicycles to biscuits, these posters range from cheerfully exuberant to slyly decadent. In her essay, Mary Weaver Chapin captures the voices of the artists, collectors, and critics who fueled the poster craze of the 1890s. The result is a visual spectacle, a lively discourse on the value and purpose of art, and a celebration of a historically and creatively dynamic era.

The most comprehensive survey to date of the drawings, watercolours, prints and designs of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, provides a fresh and intimate picture of the most popular and enduring group in the history of British art

The book is illustrated with the most important Pre-Raphaelite drawings from public and private collections around the UK, including striking works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Edward Burne-Jones that have never before been exhibited or reproduced.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of radical young artists who banded together in London in 1848, revolutionized British art. This book explores the vital role played by drawing and design, in all its variety, in the work of the
Brotherhood and their associates.

Alongside studies for paintings of religious, literary and medieval subjects are the group’s portraits, self-portraits and caricatures, often exchanged as gifts; meticulous depictions of nature by John Ruskin and his followers; captivating drawings of the iconic Pre-Raphaelite models Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris; and original designs for stained glass, textiles and ceramics.

Art historian Colin Cruise explores the emergence of the Brotherhood’s graphic style, their theories of naturalism, their radical promotion of new subjects, and their highly original use of watercolour as a drawing medium. He also demonstrates the impact that Pre-Raphaelite drawing had upon turn-of-the-century British art movements such as Aestheticism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau, and explores the role of drawing in the work of leading Arts and Crafts designers such as William Morris, William De Morgan and Florence Camm.

Is the bride pregnant? What are clogs doing on a marriage picture? Why is just one candle burning in the chandelier? And what does the mirror in the background reveal? Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen provide answers to these and other questions about 100 world-famous works of art. Guiding our eye to revealing details, they also shed fascinating light on fashions and lifestyles, loves and intrigues, politics and people, and transform our encounter with art into exciting adventure.
Vol. 1: From Antiquity to the Renaissance
Vol. 2: From Rembrandt to Rivera

Painting the divine

Heavenly grace and human grandeur

Influenced by his contemporaries Michelangelo and Leonardo, Raphael Santi (1483-1520) became, in his own right, one of the most important artists of the High Renaissance. Though Raphael painted many important works in his Florence period, including his famous Madonnas, it was his mature work in Rome that cemented his place in history, most notably the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican featuring his School of Athens and Triumph of Religion murals.

This overview traces the life’s work of this Renaissance master who achieved the height of greatness in only two decades of creation and whose influential work paved the way for the Mannerist and Baroque movements.

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

300 full-colour illustrations

Rembrandt is revered as one of the most talented and prolific artists the world has ever known, and not without reason. His work was in high demand in Amsterdam during his lifetime, and has continued to enthral viewers ever since. The artist’s early Baroque style through to his more introspective later paintings demonstrate his incredible skill in manipulating light and mood, while his striking etchings and engravings convey the energy and spontaneity of a sketch. From portraits to biblical scenes, landscapes to self-portraits, Rembrandt was diverse in his subjects and themes. Here, both his paintings and his engravings are brought together in a highly informative and desirable box set, allowing the reader to compare and contrast the artist’s work in an abundance of beautiful images.

Rembrandt: The Drawings & Etchings. The complete XXL collection

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669) stands as one of the most important painters in Western art, but nowhere else do we encounter his inimitable talent more so than in his drawings and etchings. Hinged upon experimentation and expressive line work, they garnered him unparalleled recognition from his contemporaries.

Each portrait or quotidian scene is elevated by his masterful treatment of light, shadow, and hatching. There is another world to be accessed within Rembrandt’s etchings — one that dwells within the intangibilities of moody midnight contemplation and the twilit countryside, these elusive moments fixed to the page with every stroke. Meanwhile, Rembrandt’s drawings display his emotional state with a candor unseen in other works. Using pen and brush, silverpoint and charcoal as well as colored chalks and ink, he drew on various types of paper which he also sometimes dyed beforehand.

Commemorating the 350th anniversary of the artist’s death, this stunning XXL monograph is the first-ever collection gathering Rembrandt’s complete works on paper. Through the 708 drawings, brilliantly printed in color for the first time, and 314 etchings in pristine reproductions, we discover Rembrandt’s keen eye, deft hand, and boundless depth of feeling like never before; and above all, we witness that he was far more than just a painter.

The authors:

Peter Schatborn is emeritus head of the Rijksprentenkabinet at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He has served as guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and has curated exhibitions at the Fondation Custodia, Paris and The Frick Collection, New York. He specializes in seventeenth-century Dutch drawings.

Erik Hinterding studied art history at Utrecht University and completed his PhD on Rembrandt the etcher. He has worked on publications and exhibitions for numerous institutions among them the Fondation Custodia in Paris, the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. In 2013 he was one of two authors of the new seven-volume catalogue raisonné of Rembrandt’s etchings. Since 2012 he has been Curator of Prints at the Rijksmuseum, where he oversees the early modern print collection.

La belle vie

Impressionism’s most joyful paintings

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is universally acclaimed and celebrated: museums pride themselves on his paintings, crowds flock to his retrospectives. His work shows art at its most light-hearted, sensual and luminous. Renoir never wanted anything ugly in his paintings, nor any dramatic action. “I like pictures which make me want to wander through them when it’s a landscape,” he said, “or pass my hand over breast or back if it’s a woman.” Renoir’s entire oeuvre is dominated by the depiction of women - again and again he painted “these faunesses with their pouting lips” (Mallarmé) and invented a new image of feminine beauty and sensuality. A prolific painter - he made several thousand works in his lifetime - he is perhaps the most beloved of the Impressionists.

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

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) is so heavily associated with Impressionist painting that his last creative period has frequently been ignored. This publication devotes itself to precisely these last three creative and innovative decades, in which Renoir abandoned Impressionism.

He dedicated himself during this period to cheerful subjects such as bathers, domestic idylls, and landscapes that were influenced by both classical mythology and his move to the south ofFrance. His fluid brushstrokes and masterful use of color were much admired by the up-and-coming modernist avant-garde.

More than three hundred color illustrations graphically demonstrate the influence Renoir had on younger artists such as Bonnard, Matisse, and Picasso, as well as the ways they examined his work.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) is so closely associated with Impressionist painting that the surprising diversity of his early work is frequently forgotten. His most important model during these early years was the artist’s mistress, Lise Tréhot, with whom he had a relationship between 1865 and 1872. After posing for a large group of prominent early works, including Woman in a Garden and En été (both 1868), Lise turned her back on the Bohemian lifestyle in favor of a bourgeois marriage. The paintings created between 1864 and the end of the following decade show the broad spectrum of Renoir’s art and the development of his artistic vocabulary, including the Impressionist phase. This is the first extensive examination of the painter’s early oeuvre and the strong influence of his close friendships with other artists, such as Éd0uard Manet, Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley.

Since his work is categorized as illustration and was most famously featured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, fine art critics were slow to acknowledge the importance of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) as true artist, though his work was enormously popular during his lifetime and has endured as a crucial element in America's perception of itself in the 20th century. Through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, the 1950s and 60s, Rockwell illustrations were a part of daily life, showing, as he once said, "the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed."

The author:
Karal Ann Marling is professor of art history and American studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of numerous books on topics including American mural painting of the Depression era, illustration of the 1940s, the architecture of theme parks, and the influence of television on visual culture in the 1950s.

The editor:
Cultural anthropologist and graphic design historian Jim Heimann is Executive Editor for TASCHEN America, and author of numerous books on architecture, pop culture, and the history of the West Coast, Los Angeles, and Hollywood. His unrivaled private collection of ephemera has been featured in museum exhibitions around the world and dozens of books.

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