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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Allegory and beauty in Florence
With the patronage of the powerful Medici family, a canon of secular and religious work, and contributions to the celebrated Sistine Chapel, Sandro Botticelli (1444/45–1510) was well placed for fame. After his death, however, his work was eclipsed for some four hundred years. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the painter began to gain major art-historical recognition.
Today, Botticelli is hailed as a towering figure of the Florentine Early Renaissance. His secular works The Birth of Venus and Primavera, mostly read as an allegory of Spring, are among the most recognized paintings in the world, resplendent in their delicate details, graceful lines, and compositional balance. His arrangements are fluid yet poised, his figures serene yet sensual. Venus, in particular, is held up as art-historical icon of beauty: pale-skinned, delicately featured, soft with fecund promise.
This essential introduction presents key works from Botticelli’s oeuvre to understand the making of a Renaissance legend. Through the painter’s most famous mythological and allegorical scenes, as well as his radiant religious works, we explore a mastery of figuration, movement, and line, which has gone on to inspire artists from Edgar Degas to Andy Warhol, René Magritte to Cindy Sherman.
Delicate illustration that defined an era
With his instantly recognizable decorative style, Czech artist and Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) defined the look of the fin-de-siècle. In evocative shades of peach, gold, ochre, and olive, his seductive compositions of patterns, flowers, and beautiful women became paradigms of the Belle Époque years.
Mucha’s work permeated illustration, posters, postcards, and the advertising designs of his day. His striking posters of star actress Sarah Bernhardt were particularly famous. Alongside this delicate decorative work, Mucha also harbored strongly felt political ideas. With his monumental cycle The Slav Epic, he expressed his staunch support for Pan-Slavism, promoting the political independence of the Czech and Slavic nations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Compiled in association with the Mucha Foundation, this book presents key works and introduces the full reach of Mucha’s œuvre from patterned decoration to his book illustrations, posters, photographs and monumental paintings.
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.
After flirtations with Realism, Impressionism, and Symbolism, Kiev-born Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) found his métier in dissolving literal, representational figures and landscapes into pure emotionally-charged abstraction. In 1915, he created what is widely lauded as the first and ultimate abstract artwork: Black Square, a black rectangle on a white background, hailed as the “zero point of painting,” a seminal moment for modern and abstract practice.
In this book, we follow Malevich’s key innovations and ideas and place his groundbreaking achievements within the context of both the Russian and global avant-garde. Through rich illustrations of his work, we explore the artist’s theory of Suprematism, based on severe geometric abstraction and “the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art”; his leading role in the development of Constructivism; as well as his interests in philosophy, literature, Russian folk art, and the fourth dimension.
A century after his death, Viennese artist Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) still startles with his unabashed eroticism, dazzling surfaces, and artistic experimentation. This monograph gathers all of Klimt’s major works alongside authoritative art historical commentary and privileged access to the artist’s archive.
With top quality illustration, including new photography of the celebrated Stoclet Frieze, the book follows Klimt through his prominent role in the Secessionist movement of 1897, his candid rendering of the female body, and his lustrous “golden phase” when gold leaf brought a shimmering tone and texture to such beloved works as The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, also known as The Woman in Gold.
Through luminous spreads and carefully curated details, the monograph traces the repertoire of Japanese, Byzantine, and allegorical stimuli that informed Klimt’s flattened perspectives, his symbolic vocabulary, and his mosaic-like textures. Drawing upon contemporary critics and voices, the book also examines the art world’s polarized reception to Klimt’s pictures as much as his own stylistic trajectory. From his landscape painting to erotic works to the controversial ceiling for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna, we see how Klimt’s admixture of tradition and daring divided the press and public—becried by some as a pornographer, hailed by others as a modern maestro.
An encounter with Gerhard Richter, the German artist who widened horizons in the relationship between painting and reality. From early photographic paintings, along with his famous RAF cycle, to late abstract paintings, experiencing Richter’s work always offers us the unexpected and unseen. Where he once set out to liberate the medium from ideological ballast, today, faced with the overwhelming presence of digital images, he shows us the unsurpassed impact and intensity of painting. A definitive introduction to one of the greatest artists of our time spanning not only his entire career, but also 50 years of cultural, economic, and political events.
Hailing from Vienna, Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887-1953) emigrated to Chicago in 1914, like his lifelong friend and rival Richard Neutra. Eventually hired by Frank Lloyd Wright to work in Los Angeles, Schindler took cues from notions found in Cubism and the International Style to shape his unique vision: a style he called "space architecture," combining geometrical shapes, bold lines, and materials such as wood and concrete, with space as a medium in its own right, one to be controlled just like color or mass. This radical approach earned Schindler little recognition in his lifetime-but today, he is hailed as one of America's most important Modernist pioneers. Discover such key projects as the Wolfe House, nestled in a steep hillside; the tree house-like Falk Apartment Building; the Lovell Beach House, recognized as one of the foremost examples of the Modernist canon in America; the Schindler/Chace House, Schindler's most crucial work and his personal practice and home, which he shared with his family and that of Neutra. From private homes to small commercial buildings, Schindler's groundbreaking designs heralded a new era of contemporary construction. This collection is complete with a map locating all of the architect's most renowned projects, detailed entries, floor plans, as well as crisp photography of each structure and its interiors.
Lucian Freud (1922 2011) was interested in the telling of truth. Always operating outside the main currents of 20th-century art, the esteemed portrait painter observed his subjects with the regimen and precision of a laboratory scientist. He recorded not only the blotches, bruises, and swellings of the living body, but also, beneath the flaws and folds of flesh, the microscopic details of what lies within: the sensation, the emotion, the intelligence, the bloom, and the inevitable, unstoppable decay.
Despite rejecting parallels between him and his renowned grandfather, the correlation between Lucian Freud's sitting process for portraiture and Sigmund Freud's psychotherapy sessions is a fascinating element to this figurative oeuvre. Despite the thickness of the impasto surfaces, Freud's portraits of subjects as varied as the Queen, Kate Moss, and an obese job center supervisor, penetrate the physicality of the body with a direct and often disarming insight. The result is as much a psychological interrogation as it is an uneasy examination of the relationship between artist and model.
This book brings together some of Freud's most outstanding and unapologetic portraits, to introduce an artist widely considered one of the finest masters of the human form.
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.
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