A key contributor to Nouveau Réalisme in early 1960s Paris, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) worked alongside artists such as Arman, Yves Klein, and Jean Tinguely, scavenging real objects in place of traditional art materials. She connected art to life by instrumentalizing household items, machine parts, and even toys for her early assemblages. Saint Phalle created her first shooting painting, or Tir, in 1961, and went on to conduct these performances in such varied locations as the Impasse Ronsin in Paris, a garden in Amsterdam, a sandpit outside Stockholm, and the Malibu Hills. Reliefs made of plaster, small objects, paint, wood, and wire were punctured by the bullets of a gun.
This book provides an introduction to Saint Phalle’s work, highlighting some of her most important contributions to 20th century art. From birthing mothers to harbingers of death, she created sculptures that celebrated and exposed the female form in works such as Pink Birth (1964) and Hon En Kathedral (1966). She also u
Messaging on a Mission
A vivid history of 150 years of graphic design
Through the turbulent events of the last century-and-a-half, graphic design—with its vivid, neat synthesis of image and idea—has distilled the spirit of each age. It surrounds us every minute of the day, from minimalist packaging to colorful adverts, environmental graphics to sleek interfaces: graphic design is as much about reflecting society’s aspirations and values as it is about transmitting information.
Now published as part of our popular Basic Art series, this vibrant compendium lays out the evolution of graphic design from its inception in the 1890s up until the present day. Using his sweeping knowledge of the field, author Jens Müller has curated hundreds of examples from across the globe, arranged by decade.
Each chapter also includes thumbnails of significant movements and influential publications, plus concise biographies of design masterminds like Massimo Vignelli (New York subway wayfinding), Otl Aicher (Lufthansa identity), Paula Scher (Citibank identity), Milton Glaser (I Love New York), Louise Fili (packaging), and Stefan Sagmeister (handwritten posters).
This succinct but authoritative collection reflects on the development of a creative field that is constantly changing and challenging itself. The design classics Müller has curated act as coordinates, helping to trace the incontrovertible influence of graphic design on our daily lives. It’s both a handy primer and an informed exploration of how graphic design shapes our choices, from the products we buy and the media we consume, to how we behave and think of ourselves.
From Edouard Manet’s portrait of naturalist writer Émile Zola sitting among his Japanese art finds to Van Gogh’s meticulous copies of the Hiroshige prints he devotedly collected, 19th-century pioneers of European modernism made no secret of their love of Japanese art. In all its sensuality, freedom, and effervescence, the woodblock print is single-handedly credited with the wave of japonaiserie that first enthralled France and, later, all of Europe—but often remains misunderstood as an “exotic” artifact that helped inspire Western creativity.
The fact is that the Japanese woodblock print is a phenomenon of which there exists no Western equivalent. Some of the most disruptive ideas in modern art—including, as Karl Marx put it, that “all that is solid melts into air”—were invented in Japan in the 1700s and expressed like never before in the designs of such masters as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige in the early 19th century.
This volume lifts the veil on a much-loved but little-understood art form by presenting the most exceptional Japanese woodblock prints in their historical context. Ranging from the 17th-century development of decadent ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” to the decline and later resurgence of prints in the early 20th century, the images collected in this edition make up a record not only of a unique genre in art history, but also of the shifting mores and cultural development of Japan.
We discover the four pillars of the woodblock print—beauties, actors, landscapes, and bird-and-flower compositions—alongside depictions of sumo wrestlers, kabuki actors, or enticing courtesans—rock stars who populated the “floating world” and whose fan bases fueled the frenzied production of woodblock prints. We delve into the horrifying and the obscure in prints where demons, ghosts, and otherworldly creatures torment the living—stunning images that continue to influence Japanese manga, film, and video games to this day. We witness how, in their incredible breadth, from everyday scenes to erotica, the martial to the mythological, these works are united by the technical mastery and infallible eye of their creators and how, with tremendous ingenuity and tongue-in-cheek wit, publishers and artists alike fought to circumvent government censorship.
This edition compiles the finest extant impressions from museums and private collections across the globe, accompanied by descriptions to guide us through this frantic period in Japanese art history.
The roaring twenties in Berlin
It was the decade of daring Expressionist canvases, of brilliant book design, of the Bauhaus total work of art, of pioneering psychology, of drag balls, cabaret, Metropolis, and Marlene Dietrich’s rising star in theater and silent film. Between the paroxysms of two world wars, Berlin in the 1920s was a carpe diem cultural heyday, replete with groundbreaking art, invention, and thought.
This book immerses readers in the freewheeling spirit of Berlin’s Weimar age. Through exemplary works in painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic design, photography, and film, we uncover the innovations, ideas, and precious dreams that characterized this unique cultural window. We take in the jazz bars and dance halls; the crowded kinos and flapper fashion; the advances in technology and transport; the radio towers and rumbling trams and trains; the soaring buildings; the cinematic masterworks; and the newly independent women who smoked cigarettes, wore their hair short, and earned their own money.
Featured works in this vivid cultural portrait include Hannah Höch's The Journalists; Lotte Jacobi’s Hands on Typewriter; Otto Dix's Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden; Peter Behrens's project of theAlexanderplatz; and Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, starring Dietrich as cabaret performer Lola Lola. Along the way, we explore both the utopian yearnings and the more ominous economic and political realities which fueled the era's escapist, idealistic, or reactionary masterworks. Behind the bright lights and glitter dresses, we see the inflation, factory labor, and fragile political consensus that lurked beneath this golden era and would eventually spell its savage end with the rise of National Socialism.
Largely self-taught as an artist, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) developed a unique ability to transform interior and unconscious impulses into figurative forms and intensely claustrophobic compositions.
Emerging into notoriety in the period following World War II, Bacon took the human body as his nominal subject, but a subject ravaged, distorted, and dismembered so as to writhe with intense emotional content. With flailing limbs, hollow voids, and tumurous growths, his gripping, often grotesque, portraits are as much reflections on the trials and the traumas of the human condition as they are character studies. These haunting forms were also among the first in art history to depict overtly homosexual themes.
Often imitated but never equaled, Jan van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) left an indelible impression on Renaissance art and paved the way for future realist painters. With its unprecedented precision and masterful use of color, Arnolfini Double Portrait, depicting the wedding of a young couple, is testament to the mastery of the Flemish painter and leader of the Early Netherlandish school. Van Eyck painted both secular and religious subject matter, emphasizing a naturalism and realism that moved seamlessly between 15th-century everyday life and poetic, heavenly settings. Working with oil paint, he innovated the medium, allowing for great intensity and depth of color.
Trace the artist’s impressive oeuvre in this hardcover survey of his work, including altarpieces, religious figures, and commissioned portraits. Featuring enlarged details and close analyses of masterpieces like the Ghent Altarpiece, this publication also offers a chronology of van Eyck’s production, including the output of his workshop which continued even after his death.
Meet the artist whose majestic breaking wave sent ripples across the world. Hokusai (1760–1849) is not only one of the giants of Japanese art and a legend of the Edo period, but also a founding father of Western modernism, whose prolific gamut of prints, illustrations, paintings, and beyond forms one of the most comprehensive oeuvres of ukiyo-e art and a benchmark of japonisme. His influence spread through Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and beyond, enrapturing the likes of Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Vincent van Gogh.
Hokusai was always a man on the move. He changed domicile more than 90 times during his lifetime and changed his own name through over 30 pseudonyms. In his art, he adopted the same restlessness, covering the complete spectrum of Japanese ukiyo-e,“pictures of the floating world”, from single-sheet prints of landscapes and actors to erotic books. In addition, he created album prints, illustrations for verse anthologies and historical novels, and surimono, which were privately issued prints for special occasions.
Hokusai’s print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, published between c. 1830 and 1834 is the artist’s most renowned work and, with its soaring peak through different seasons and from different vantage points, marked the towering summit of the Japanese landscape print. The series’ Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known simply as The Great Wave, is one of the most recognized images of Japanese art in the world.
Discover how scenes of daily life and delicate dabs of color shocked the art world establishment. In this TASCHEN Basic Art introduction to Impressionism, we explore the artists, subjects, and techniques that first brought the easel out of the studio and shifted artistic attention from history, religion, or portraiture to the evanescent ebb and flow of modern life. As we tour the theaters, bars, and parks of Paris and beyond, we take in the movement's radical innovations in style and subject, from the principle of plein air painting to the rapid, broken brushwork that allowed the Impressionists to emphasize spontaneity, movement, and the changing qualities of light. We take a close look at their unusual new perspectives and their fresh palette of pure, unblended colors, including many vividly bright shades that brought a whole new level of chromatic intensity to the canvas. Along the way, we recognize Impressionism's established greats, such as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro, as well as many associated artists worthy of closer attention, including Marie Bracquemond, Medardo Rosso, and Fritz von Uhde.
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 real-surreal 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 the 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.
Where’s the Point?
Georges Seurat’s revolutionary dots
Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was only 31 when he died, but during his short life he created hundreds of drawings, oil sketches, and paintings on canvas that introduced a fresh perspective in European painting.
As a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he carefullly observed the work of Delacroix and became fascinated with the interplay between light and color. In doing so, he developed Divisionism, using small dabs of paint from the point of the brush to create pointilist images that shimmered with luminescence and hinted at movement.
In this accessible introduction to Seurat, meet an artist driven by a need to capture nature and the simple pleasures of life through a new language of painting.
One of the key figures in the New York art world of the 1980s, Keith Haring (1958–1990) created a signature style that blended street art, graffiti, a Pop sensibility, and cartoon elements to unique, memorable effect. With thick black outlines, bright colors, and kinetic figures, his public (and occasionally illegal) interventions, sculptures, and works on canvas and paper have become instantly recognizable icons of 20th-century visual culture.From his first chalk drawings in the New York City subway stations, to his renowned “Radiant Baby” symbol, and his commissions for Swatch Watch and Absolut Vodka, Haring’s work was both emblematic of the manic work ethic of 1980s New York, yet distinctive for its social awareness. Belying their bright, playful aesthetics, his pieces often tackled intensely controversial socio-political issues, including racism, capitalism, religious fundamentalism, and the increasing impact of AIDS on New York’s gay community, the latter foreshadowing his own death from the disease in 1990.In this vivid introduction to Haring’s work, we explore the dynamic life and innovative spirit of this singular artist, who spent little more than a decade in the spotlight, but through the accessibility of his visual vocabulary and the strength of his political commitment became one of the most significant artists to emerge from New York’s vibrant, downtown community.
Although it only lasted three turbulent years, the afterburn of the Blaue Reiter (1911–1914) movement exerted a tremendous influence on the development of modern European art. Named after a Kandinsky painting, The Blue Rider, this loose band of artists, grouped around Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky and German painter Franz Marc, sought to reject establishment standards and charge into a new artistic unknown.
Articulating spiritual values and concerns in an era of rapid industrialization, the artists of the Blaue Reiter were connected by a shared interest in painting, woodcuts, and prints, as well as the symbolic values of color and spontaneous approaches to artwork. Key pieces such as Franz Marc’s Blue Horse I (1911), Kandinsky’s Picture with a Black Arch (1912), and August Macke’s Woman in a Green Jacket (1913) reveal varying subjects, but all channel distorted perspectives, crude lines, and an emphatic, expressionist use of color.
Ten produkt jest zapowiedzią. Realizacja Twojego zamówienia ulegnie przez to wydłużeniu do czasu premiery tej pozycji. Czy chcesz dodać ten produkt do koszyka?
