Книги по живописи

The provocative art of Jeff Koons (*1955) leaves no one cold. The “king of kitsch” is skilled at manipulating the media, exploding the boundaries of all genres with his appropriations from Pop Art and popular culture, and playing the keyboard of the art market like no other. Collectors scramble for his large collages and colossal stainless-steel balloon animals. Yet, in his eye-poppingly colorful, immaculately perfect works Koons also exposes the seductive potential of the glittering world of commodities; his ready-mades and gigantic toys are amusing and thought provoking at the same time. The American artist’s once controversial work has now been recognized for its prescience. This publication presents his oeuvre in two volumes: paintings from all of the artist’s creative phases form the core of the first volume. Koons’ sculptures are the focal point of the second volume, in which objects from the Liebieghaus collection, stemming from five thousand years of cultural history, are placed in a dialogue with his works.

"Au XIXe siècle, l’aquarelle n’était pas considérée comme un art à part entière, mais plutôt comme la technique préférée des amateurs, en particulier des dames de la bonne société, ou, pour les artistes de profession, comme des ébauches préparatrices en vue de tableaux achevés dans leur atelier. Il y avait des exceptions tout à fait notoires, en particulier au sein de l’école des aquarellistes anglais, dont J.M. W. Turner était l’un des plus éminents représentants. Mais, à la fin du siècle, Sargent devint l’un des premiers peintres dont les aquarelles furent appréciées pour leurs valeurs intrinsèques. À partir de 1910, il commença à les exposer, dans des expositions spécialisées d’abord, à Londres, à la Royal Watercolour Society entre autres, puis aux États-Unis.

(…) Homer, seul aquarelliste pouvant rivaliser avec Sargent, était très prisé pour ses valeurs américaines rustiques au détriment du style de Sargent considéré jusque-là comme trop mou et raffiné, ce que l’on imputait à ses influences européennes. Mais la puissance, la nouveauté et la vigueur de son art eurent le pouvoir de confondre toute critique et firent de lui un artiste de stature égale sinon plus grande."
Gabrielle Townsend

Choix lumineux de 60 aquarelles - marines, paysages, portraits... - exécutées par John Singer Sargent (Florence, 1856 - Londres, 1925) tout au long de ses différentes pérégrinations en Italie, en France, en Angleterre, en Espagne ou encore en Égypte...

The Italian born, American painter of the late nineteenth century, John Singer Sargent was a celebrated portraitist of the wealthy and their privileged world. Renowned for his exquisite naturalism, some of his best work also shows flirtations with Impressionism, particularly in his evocations of childhood, and the light falling on the gorgeous gowns of his female sitters. This beautiful new book also offers a wide range of his most delightful landscapes, travel scenes and watercolours.

Common symbols reinterpreted

Though his work is often categorized as Pop Art for its use of popular iconography and household objects, Jasper Johns can also be described as a Neo-Dadaist. Using wax-based paint, plaster relief, collage, and even commonplace objects such as brooms and rulers in his paintings, Johns achieves a sculptural texture in his work. He is arguably most known for his flag paintings of the 1950s (the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently paid over $20 million for White Flag), though other themes, including targets, numbers, letters, and maps, are also famously recurrent. Johns is widely considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century.

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:
Barbara Hess (b. 1964) is an art historian, critic and translator, resident in Cologne. Her numerous articles on contemporary art have featured in Camera Austria, Flash Art, Kunst-Bulletin and Texte zur Kunst. She co-curated the touring exhibition Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum/videogalerie schum at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Her TASCHEN titles include a monograph on Willem de Kooning.

The inner properties of colour and form

The artist who pioneered new dimensions of expression in art

Wassily Kandinsky was undoubtedly one of the most exciting artists of the twentieth century. He brought an equal passion and commitment to his work as a painter, a theoretician and a teacher of art. After conventional beginnings in Munich, he devoted his intellectual and artistic energies to pioneering new dimensions of expression in art. He ultimately arrived at an abstract style of painting based on the inner properties of colour and form.

Although Kandinsky may not be the first truly abstract artist, he was nevertheless the first to experiment with non-representational forms in a logical manner and to develop out of them a homogeneous style. His writings on art, including his ground-breaking work On the Spiritual in Art, have lost none of their significance, and the Compositions which caused such a furore at the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1911 are still full and dazzling today.

The author:
Ulrike Becks-Malorny studied free painting in Geneva and art history in Bochum, Germany. Since gaining her doctorate in 1990, she has worked as an exhibition organizer and freelance author. She lives in Bonn, Germany.

Painting outside the box

The founder of abstract art

The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), who later lived in Germany and France, is one of the pioneers of 20th-century art. Nowadays he is regarded as the founder of abstract art and is, moreover, the chief theoretician of this type of painting.

Together with Franz Marc and others he founded the group of artists known as the "Blaue Reiter" in Munich. His art then freed itself more and more from the object, eventually culminating in the First Abstract Watercolor of 1910.

In his theoretical writings Kandinsky repeatedly sought the proximity of music; and just as in music, where the individual notes constitute the medium whose effect stems from harmony and euphony, Kandinsky was aiming for a pure concord of color through the interplay of various shades. Gauguin had demanded that everything "must be sacrificed to pure colors." Kandinsky was the first to realize this and thus to influence a whole range of artists.

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:
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, color theory and the teaching of art, and has authored a number of TASCHEN titles, including Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert and Sonia Delaunay and Georges Seurat.

Посмотреть русскоязычное издание книги Kandinsky - Кандинский

By the time of his death from AIDS at the age of 31, Keith Haring (1958-1990) was already a wildly successful and popular artist. Haring`s original and instantly recognizable style, full of thick black lines, bold colours, and graffiti-inspired cartoon-like figures won him the appreciation of both the art world and the general public; his work appeared simultaneously on T-shirts, gallery walls, and public murals. In 1986, Haring founded Pop Shop, a boutique in New York`s SoHo selling Haring-designed memorabilia, to benefit charities and help bring his work closer to the public and especially street kids, with whom he never lost contact.

Bursting with colour and featuring Keith Haring’s powerful messages, this collection of posters includes insightful commentary and dazzling reproductions

Whether Keith Haring was raising awareness of the AIDS epidemic and apartheid or celebrating life, music, and dance, his signature illustrations became part of the cultural landscape of the 1980s. Posters were central to Haring’s oeuvre and the perfect medium for his inclusive, accessible, and figurative style. Author Jurgen Doring offers fascinating insights into Haring’s work, providing commentary on each of the exquisitely reproduced posters. Important reference work and a vibrant celebration of a world-renowned artist, this book will delight Haring’s many fans throughout the world.

A radical innovator, a pioneer of new artistic form

German expressionist painter and graphic artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), co-founder of the Brücke movement, produced some of the most outstanding woodcuts and powerful expressionist works of the 20th century. Tragically, he committed suicide after having his work condemned as "degenerate" by the Nazis.

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:
Norbert Wolf graduated in art history, linguistics and medieval studies at the universities of Regensburg and Munich, and earned his PhD in 1983. He held visiting professorships in Marburg, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg-Erlangen, and Innsbruck. His extensive writings on art history include many TASCHEN titles, such as Diego Velázquez, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Caspar David Friedrich, Expressionism, Romanesque, Landscape Painting and Symbolism.

Bridging the gap. Expressionist pioneer Ernst Ludwig Kirchner heralded a new perspective in 20th-century painting

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German Expressionist pioneer, a prolific painter and printmaker, and cofounder of Die Brücke movement. Through vivid landscapes, stark nudes, and dynamic urban scenes, this introductory book explores his radical painting in pre–World War I Germany and his leading influence on 20th-century art.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) is regarded as one of the key figures in 20th-century European art. A Modernist to his bones, he sent seismic waves through the art world with his hard-edged, intensely colored paintings and disseminated his ideas through Die Brücke art movement and the MUIM-Institut school of modernist painting, both of which he cofounded.

Kirchner’s work reconciled past and present through an Expressionist prism, reflecting the latest avant-garde ideas in art, while exploring traditional academic approaches and subjects. His works tackled social, moral, and emotional questions with a fierce intensity. Distorted perspectives, rough lines, and unusual colors were mainstays of his practice, as well as a recurring interest in capturing the human form, whether in frenetic city vistas such as Berlin Street Scene (1913) or in his famously decadent studio.

In this introductory book, we explore the stretch of Kirchner’s career through Germany and Switzerland, including his founding of Die Brücke, and his inclusion in the Nazis’ infamous “degenerate art” exhibition in 1937. Along the way, we’ll encounter vivid landscapes, stark nudes, intense urban settings, and, above all, a persistent emphasis on the emotional experience of painter and viewer.

The author:

Norbert Wolf graduated in art history, linguistics, and medieval studies at the Universities of Regensburg and Munich, and earned his PhD in 1983. He held visiting professorships in Marburg, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg-Erlangen, and Innsbruck. His extensive writings on art history include many TASCHEN titles, such as Diego Velázquez, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Caspar David Friedrich, Expressionism, Romanesque, Landscape Painting, and Symbolism.

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

Geometrical figures and hieroglyphic elements

The delightfully unclassifiable work of a master painter

Designated as "degenerate" by the Nazis, Paul Klee (1879-1940) is today considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His works stand out for the variety in their forms of artistic expression.

His Tunisian water-colours depicting landscape, architecture and, above all, the North African light of this Mediterranean land constitute the true beginning of Klee’s painting career. Although these paintings still fall under the heading of ’objective,’ they already exhibit indications of his tendency toward abstraction and a language of forms.

Geometrical figures and hieroglyphic elements characterize the majority of these works, which for this reason seem reminiscent of ’naive’ and playful children’s painting. In reality, however, Klee’s paintings have their roots in theoretical considerations, their recurrent symbols conveying personal and at times political content.

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

Thinking eye. A unique language of symbols, literature, and light 

With careful theories and many thousands of paintings, drawings, and watercolours, Paul Klee (1879-1940) is considered one of the most cerebral and prolific leaders of 20th-century European art. Though typically small in scale, his works are remarkable for their sophisticated thought and meticulous nuances of line, colour, and tonality. Klee s stylistic formation was shaped by early affiliation with the German expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter and, in particular, by a 1914 trip to Tunisia which transformed his use of colour. 

After the war, he taught at the esteemed Bauhaus school, where his lectures, like his emerging practice, emphasized the symbolic potential of shades, lines, and geometries. Klee was also inspired by Cubism, poetry, music, literature, language, and the simplistic power of children s art. Famed for his simple stick figures, he often combined the appearance of untutored naivety with rigorous composition and intellectual significance.

This book provides a selection of key Klee works to introduce his style and influence. From sun-drenched landscapes to enigmatic wordplay, discover a world at once simplistic, symbolic, and dazzlingly colourful.

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

"A new world calls for a new man"

In the mid-Fifties, Yves Klein (1928-1962) conquered the world of art, declaring that "a new world calls for a new man". His idiosyncratic style and huge charisma set him on a youthful career in the great art capital, Paris. Soon his famous blue pictures, large-format canvases conceived as spaces for meditation, were making him a name far beyond France.

In a short but intense creative life of just seven years, Klein painted over a thousand pictures which are among the classics of modern art. This book offers an exciting sample of his work.

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

Gustav Klimt’s art is thoroughly fin de siècle. It expresses the apocalyptic atmosphere of Vienna’s upper-middle-class society - a society devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic awareness and the cult of pleasure. The ecstatic joy which Klimt (1862–1918) and his contemporaries found - or hoped to find - in beauty was constantly overshadowed by death, and death, therefore, plays an important role in Klimt’s art. Klimt’s fame, however, rests on his reputation as one of the greatest erotic painters and graphic artists of his times. Particularly his drawings, which have been widely admired for their artistic excellence, are dominated by the erotic portrayal of women. Klimt saw the world “in female form.” Author Gottfried Fliedl also discusses the Secession movement and Klimt’s role within this important group of artists.

This uniquely exhaustive survey of the leading artist of Viennese Art Nouveau style offers art lovers an irresistible opportunity: page after page of Klimt's paintings and frescoes along with illuminating commentary about his life and career.

The author presents Klimt's entire painted oeuvre on an unprecedented scale. His commentary reflects the latest academic findings, such as Klimt's newly discovered church frescoes in Istria, in chapters featuring a wide range of topics, including Klimt and women, the Viennese Secession, landscapes, portraits, and allegories.

This volume's remarkable packaging reflects the magnificence of the work within. The book's large format allows close examination of the exquisite detail and luminescent quality of the work for which Klimt is renowned, making it a perfect gift or collector's item. Best of all, it provides viewers with an all-encompassing perspective on one of history's greatest painters.