The creations of Jeff Koons (born 1955) are at once immediately accessible and eloquently art historical. From basketball tanks to flower puppies, his instantly recognizable work frolics with banal imagery as much as it integrates cultural references such as Surrealism and Pop Art.
Koons’ art revels in visual pleasure, but also in the power to affront. He has made his name as much for stainless-steel rabbits as he has with his sinister sculpture of Michael Jackson, or his sexually explicit photographic series with then-wife Cicciolina. The result is mega-artist status. An indisputable king of contemporary visual culture, Koons is lauded by collectors, institutions, and the public alike.
With landmark works and concise texts by Katy Siegel, Hans Werner Holzwarth, and Eckhard Schneider, this book offers the complete Koons at a glance, introducing an art world giant from his early inflatable flowers through to today.
A unique language of symbols, literature, and light
With meticulous theories and many thousands of paintings, drawings, and watercolors, 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, color, 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 color. After the war, he taught at the esteemed Bauhaus school, where his lectures, like his emerging practice, emphasized the symbolic potential of shade, line, and geometry.
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 naïveté 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 colorful.
Paul Gauguin’s Pacific visions radiate with color and sunshine
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) was not cut out for finance. Nor did he last particularly long in the French Navy, or as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen who did not speak Danish. He began painting in his spare time in 1873 and in 1876 took part in the Paris Salon. Three years later, he was exhibiting alongside Pissarro, Degas, and Monet.
A querulous, hard-drinking individual, Gauguin often called himself a savage. His close but fraught friendship with the similarly temperamental Vincent van Gogh climaxed in a violent incident in 1888, when van Gogh purportedly confronted Gauguin with a razor blade, and later cut off his own ear. Shortly afterwards, following the completion of a midcareer masterpiece Vision After the Sermon (1888), Gauguin took himself to Tahiti, with the intention of escaping “everything that is artificial and conventional…”
On Tahiti, Gauguin’s unfettered joy in the island’s nature, native people, and figurative images soared, spurring a prolific output of paintings and prints. In works such as Woman with a Flower (Vahine no te Tiare, 1891) and Sacred Spring: Sweet Dreams (Nave Nave Moe, 1894), he developed a distinct, Primitivist style that positively oozed with sunshine and color. In the tradition of exotic sensuality, his thick, buttery lashings of paint lingered in particular over the curves of Tahitian women.
Gauguin died alone, on Tahiti’s neighboring Marquesas Islands, with many of his personal papers and belongings dispersed in a local auction. It was not until a smart art dealer began curating and showing Gauguin’s work in Paris that the artist’s profound influence began making itself felt, especially to the new breed of French avant-garde artists, such as Picasso and Matisse.This book offers the essential introduction the artist’s truly colorful life, from the Impressionist salons of 1870s Paris to his final days in the Pacific, productive and passionate to the end.
The painterly gestures of personal feelings
Hailed as the first American-born art movement to have a worldwide influence, Abstract Expressionism denotes the non-representational use of paint as a means of personal expression. It emerged in America in the 1940s, with lead protagonists including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
Abstract Expressionism spawned many different stylistic tendencies but two particularly prominent sub-categories: action painting, exemplified by de Kooning and Pollock, and color field painting, made most famous by Rothko. Throughout, Abstract Expressionists strove to convey emotions and ideas through the making of marks, through forms, textures, shades, and the particular quality of brushstrokes. The movement favored large-scale canvases, and embraced the role of accident or chance.
With featured works from 20 key Abstract Expressionist artists, this book introduces the movement which shifted the center of art gravity from Paris to New York and remains for many the golden moment of American art.
Making sense of revolutionary new forms
Abstraction shook Western art to its core. In the early part of the 20th century, it refuted the reign of clear, indisputable forms and confronted audiences instead with vivid visual poems devoid of conventional representational imagery and characterized by allegories of emotion and sensation.
This radical artistic adventure established new artistic means, as much as narratives. Expression became characterized by shocking juxtapositions of color, light, and line. Artists abandoned the conventions of brush and easel and played with new materials and methods of artistic gesture: commercial paints and housepainter’s brushes, working on unstretched and unprimed canvases, moving the canvas to the floor, and applying paint with hands.
This essential introduction spans the international breadth, conceptual depth, and seismic impact of abstract art with a thorough survey not only of the big names such as Picasso, Klee, Kline, Rothko, and Pollock, but also lesser-known figures who made equally significant contributions, including Antoni Tàpies, K. O. Götz, Ad Reinhardt, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
Portrait of an Artist
A comprehensive chronicle of David Hockney’s life and work
Pop artist, painter of modern life, landscape painter, master of color, explorer of image and perception—for six decades, David Hockney has been known as an artist who always finds new ways of exploring the world and its representational possibilities. He has consistently created unforgettable images: works with graphic lines and integrated text in the Swinging Sixties in London; the famous swimming pool series as a representation of the 1970s California lifestyle; closely observed portraits and brightly colored, oversized landscapes after his eventual return to his native Yorkshire. In addition to drawings in which he transfers what he sees directly onto paper, there are multiperspective Polaroid collages that open up the space into a myriad of detailed views, and iPad drawings in which he captures light using a most modern medium—testaments to Hockney’s enduring delight in experimentation.
This special edition has been newly assembled from the two volumes of the David Hockney: A Bigger Book monograph to celebrate TASCHEN’s 40th anniversary. Hockney’s life and work is presented year by year as a dialogue between his works and voices from the time period, alongside reviews and reflections by the artist in a chronological text, supplemented by portrait photographs and exhibition views. Together they open up new perspectives, page after page, revealing how Hockney undertakes his artistic research, how his painting develops, and where he finds inspiration for his multifaceted work.
Temporary Projects, Eternal Impressions
The XXL exploration, now in a condensed handbook
The works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude are monuments of transience. Gigantic in scale, they are always temporary, created to exist only for a limited time and to leave unique, unrepeatable impressions. “From the smallest of the Packages made in Paris in the early 1960s, to the delicate pattern of hundreds of branches embraced by a translucent fabric veil... in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works there is nothing abstract, nothing imagined; it is all there—corporeal and tangible.” (Lorenza Giovanelli)
Part biography, part critical analysis, part catalogue, this updated edition brings back TASCHEN’s best-selling Collector’s Edition. It spans Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s entire work, from early drawings and family photos to plans for future projects. Hundreds of photographs and original works trace the couple’s projects from the past 10 years, including The Floating Piers and The London Mastaba, as well as works in progress such as The Mastaba, Project for the United Arab Emirates and L’Arc de Triomphe Wrapped, Paris.
Together with the comprehensive photographic documentation by Wolfgang Volz this book is a celebration of the work of two artists whose imagination has affected the landscape of every continent.
Tadao Ando’s complete works from 1975 until today
Discover the unique aesthetic of Tadao Ando, the only architect ever to have won the discipline’s four most prestigious prizes: the Pritzker, Carlsberg, Praemium Imperiale, and Kyoto Prize.
This collection spans the breadth of Ando’s entire career, including such stunning new projects as the Shanghai Poly Grand Theater and the Roberto Garza Sada Center in Monterrey, Mexico. Each project is profiled through photographs and architectural drawings that explore Ando’s unprecedented use of concrete, wood, water, light, space, and natural forms.
Featuring designs from award-winning private homes, churches, museums, and apartment complexes to cultural spaces throughout Japan, South Korea, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, and the USA, this compact edition brings you up close and personal with a Modernist master.
The winners of the Pentawards package design competition 2019–2020
Wherever you shop, be it online or in a brick-and-mortar store, the first thing you notice about a product is its packaging. The quality of the packaging has a significant influence on whether or not a customer decides to buy a product. In fact, packaging has become more important than ever in recent years: Unboxing videos are watched by millions of followers on social media platforms, college Packaging Design courses are full to bursting, more and more agencies are specializing in this area, and companies are investing ever greater sums of money in the outward appearance of their products. Packaging design has long since grown to become not just part of our everyday lives, but a powerful marketing tool as well. High-quality packaging can increase the value of an entire brand.
With over 500 projects from more than 45 different countries, the sixth edition of TASCHEN’s The Package Design Book celebrates the 14th anniversary of the Pentawards, one of the industry’s most important international competitions. We will be casting our spotlight on all the winners from 2019 and 2020. With awards in six major categories – Beverages, Food, Body, Luxury, Other Markets, and Packaging Concepts – this spectacular and inspiring collection presents an array of unusual, intelligent and charming packaging concepts, demonstrating once again the importance of this design discipline.
This striking and innovative collection of jazz covers presents the designs that defined a sound. Containing record covers from the 1940s through to the early 1990s, each reproduction is accompanied with essential background information. Spanning photographic and illustrative works, these album artworks are a marriage of music and design and a remarkable history of jazz.
All the best photos (and some tasty new ones) from the original Big Butt Book, ranging from petite Pam Anderson to robust Serena Williams, plus interviews with Coco Austin, Buffie the Body, Tinto Brass, John (Buttman) Stagliano, and Brazil's Watermelon Woman reconfigured into a chunky, 512-page Bibliotheca Universalis edition.
Renaissance man in extremis
Michelangelo, in pursuit of the beautiful and sublime
Italian-born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475 1564) was a tormented, prodigiously talented, and God-fearing Renaissance man. His manifold achievements in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and engineering combined body, spirit, and God into visionary masterpieces that changed art history forever. Famed biographer Giorgio Vasari considered him the pinnacle of Renaissance achievement. His peers called him simply Il Divino ( the divine one ).
This book provides the essential introduction to Michelangelo with all the awe-inspiring masterpieces and none of the queues and crowds. With vivid illustration and accessible texts, we explore the artist s extraordinary figuration and celebrated style of terribilita (momentous grandeur), which allowed human and biblical drama to exist in compelling scale and fervor. Through the power hubs of Renaissance Italy, we take in his major commissions and phenomenal capacity for compositional schemes, whether the famous Medici library in Florence, or the extraordinary 500-square-meter ceiling (1508 1512) in the Vatican s Sistine Chapel.
From the towering David to the aching grief and faith of The Pieta and the vivid drama of the Sistine Chapel s Last Judgment, this is a succinct, dependable reference to a true giant of art history and to some of the most famous artworks in the world.
In the German city of Dresden on June 7, 1905, the foundation of the Die Brücke artists’ group (1905–1913) is widely regarded as the birth of Expressionism. Led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, the group sought to reject the limits of academia and, as their name suggested, to bridge the path to an artistic future. Their manifesto, printed with woodblock, insisted on absolute freedom from convention in their work as well as their lives.
This new, liberated art incorporated portraits, landscapes, and city scenes, but substituted an objective rendering of reality with an expression of interior geography. In paintings, as well as their favored wood and linocut prints, the artists of Die Brücke would fill pictorial space with jagged lines, crude forms, and clashing colors, all to express their subjective experience of the world. Like the Fauves, the artists took stylistic lead from non-Western traditions of Oceanic and African arts, while also reviving the print and painting techniques of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder.
This richly illustrated book introduces this essential expressionist movement. We examine Die Brücke’s key works and protagonists; its varied, international inspirations; and its crucial influence on later 20th century art. Along the way, we find candid nudes, crowded street views, and blissful bathing idylls, each of them vivid with energy and intent on a new kind of art.
From impossible staircases to tesselated birds, Dutch artist M.C. Escher (1898-1972) crafted a unique graphic language of patterns, puzzles, and mathematics. Dense, complex, and structured by intricate principles, his work is at the same time decorative and playful, toying constantly with optic illusions and the limitations of sensory perception. For mathematicians and scientists, Escher is a mastermind. For hippies, he was the pioneer of psychedelic art.
Born in Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands in 1898, Escher's early works focused on nature and landscapes, with regular exhibitions in Holland, and some international recognition. It was on a trip to the Alhambra Palace in Spain in the 1920s, however, that Escher found his niche. Sketching the patterns of the palace's Moorish architecture, Escher became captivated by the codependency of forms within and next to each other.
Working mainly with lithographs and woodcuts, Escher went on to explore the relationships among shapes, figures, and space with a near-obsessive delight. He reveled in quirky vantage points, multiple perspectives, the transition from paper flatness to illusory volume, and intricate mathematical puzzles such as the Moebius strip, a seemingly infinite loop which twists and recoils on itself in a contortion of apparent physical impossibility.
This introductory book from TASCHEN Basic Art 2.0 taps into Escher's brilliant mind with key works from his restless investigation of image and perception. Along the way, you'll find fish morphing into birds, lizards crawling off the page, masterful reflections, infinite mazes, and some of the most mind-bending images of 20th-century art.
Featuring Julie Bell, Philippe Druillet, Frank Frazetta, H.R. Giger, The Brothers Hildebrandt, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Rodney Matthews, Moebius, Rowena Morrill, Sanjulian, Boris Vallejo, Michael Whelan, plus 99 more. This monster-sized tome features original paintings, contextualized by preparatory sketches, sculptures, calendars, magazines, and paperback books for an immersive dive into this dynamic, fanciful genre.
Ever since Henry David Thoreau’s described his two years, two months, and two days of refuge existence at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, in Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854), the idea of a cabin dwelling has seduced the modern psyche. In the past decade, as our material existence and environmental footprint has grown exponentially, architects around the globe have become particularly interested in the possibilities of the minimal, low-impact, and isolated abode.
This Bibliotheca Universalis edition of Cabins combines insightful text, rich photography, and bright, contemporary illustrations by Marie-Laure Cruschi to show how this particular architectural type presents special opportunities for creative thinking. In eschewing excess, the cabin limits actual spatial intrusion to the bare essentials of living requirements, while in responding to its typically rustic setting, it foregrounds eco-friendly solutions. The cabin comes to showcase some of the most inventive and forward-looking practices of contemporary architecture, with Renzo Piano, Terunobu Fujimori, Tom Kundig, and many fresh young professionals all embracing such distilled sanctuary spaces.
The book showcases the variety of cabins in use and geography. From an artist studio on the Suffolk coast in England to eco-home huts in the Western Ghats region of India, this collection is as exciting in its international reach as it is in its array of briefs, clients, and situations. Constant throughout, however, is architectural innovation, and an inspiring sense of contemplation and coexistence as people return to nature and to a less destructive model of being in the world.
Byzantine empresses, French revolutionaries, and Spanish generals: history’s most impressive figures stare boldly out of the canvases in this collection of formidable paintings. Each individual represented in these images radiates with strength and splendor; be they an aristocratic widow in mourning, a murdered politician, or a jovial group of Ukrainian rebels.
Authors Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen tease out the stories and secrets of 13 masterpieces by artists including Goya, Titian, Velázquez, and Ilya Repin. Regal, holy, and wise, the men and women in these works will inspire you with their conquests and resilience.
TASCHEN reproduces these masterworks in stunning quality, working in collaboration with esteemed art collections all over the world, including in Brussels, St. Petersburg, New York, and Naples. Combining astute analysis with magnified painting details, this book is a unique historical investigation in tribute to the movers and shakers of the past.
After Egon Schiele (1890–1918) freed himself from the shadow of his mentor and role model Gustav Klimt, he had just ten years to inscribe his signature style into the annals of modernity before the Spanish flu claimed his life. Being a child prodigy quite aware of his own genius and a passionate provocateur, this didn’t prove to be too big a challenge.
His haggard, overstretched figures, extreme depiction of sexuality and self-portraits, in which he staged himself with emaciated facial expressions bordering between brilliance and madness, had none of the decorative quality of Klimt’s hymns of love, sexuality and yearning devotion. Instead, Schiele’s work spoke of a brutal honesty, one that would upset and irreversibly change Viennese society.
Although his works were later defamed as “degenerate” and for a time were almost forgotten altogether, they influenced generations of artists—from Günter Brus and Francis Bacon to Tracey Emin. Today, his then misunderstood oeuvre continues to fetch exorbitant prices on the international art market.
This monograph, first published in an XL edition, is now available in a slightly abridged, more compact edition to celebrate TASCHEN’s 40th anniversary and features the paintings and drawings that retrace the fertile last decade of Schiele’s life. These works are accompanied by essays introducing his life and oeuvre, situating the Austrian master in the context of European Expressionism and charting his extraordinary legacy.
It was an age of mighty heroes, misunderstood monsters, and complex villains. With the publication of Fantastic Four No. 1 in November 1961, comics giant Marvel inaugurated a transformative era in pop culture. Through the next two decades, the iconic Hulk, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the X-Men leapt, darted, and towered through its pages. Captain America was resurrected from his 1940s deep-freeze and the Avengers became the World’s Greatest Super Heroes. Daredevil, Doctor Strange, and dozens more were added to the pantheon, each with their own rogues’ gallery of malevolent counterparts. Nearly 60 years later, these thrilling characters from the 1960s and ’70s are more popular than ever, fighting the good fight in comics, toy aisles, and blockbuster movies around the world.
In The Marvel Age of Comics 1961–1978, legendary writer and editor Roy Thomas takes you to the heart of this seminal segment in comic history—an age of triumphant character and narrative innovation that reinvented the super hero genre. With more than 500 images and insider insights, the book traces the birth of champions who were both epic in their powers and grounded in a world that readers recognized as close to their own; relatable heroes with the same problems, struggles, and shortcomings as everyone else. By the ’70s, we see how the House of Ideas also elevated horror, sword and sorcery, and martial arts in its stable of titanic demigods, introducing iconic characters like Man-Thing, Conan, and Shang-Chi and proving that their brand of storytelling could succeed and flourish outside of the capes and tights.
Behind it all, we get to know the extraordinary Marvel architects whose names are almost as familiar as the mortals (and immortals!) they brought to life—Stan “The Man” Lee, Jack “King” Kirby, and Steve Ditko, along with a roster of greats like John Romita, John Buscema, Marie Severin, Jim Steranko, and countless others. The result is a behind-the-scenes treasure trove and a jewel for any comic fan’s library, brimming with the innovation and energy of an invincible era for Marvel and its heroes alike.
omadic homes come in all shapes and sizes. They are for the wealthy and the poor, the trendy and the out-of-luck. Changing one’s place of residence is an endeavor that is as old as humanity, for reasons of season, or, more recently, to better occupy leisure time.
Written and edited by Philip Jodidio, this volume with illustrations by Russ Gray contains some of the most remarkable examples of homes on the move. Starting with totally revamped Airstream mobile homes, and going on to spectacular moveable vacation houses of the Epic Retreats “pop-up boutique hotel” in Wales, this book doesn’t stop moving, surveying the best in campers and tents, and going on to extravagant marine dwellings like BIG’s Urban Rigger, or the Manta Underwater Room in Zanzibar. At the other end of the spectrum, we find refugee housing for those forced into a life on the move, including shelters designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban.
What we discover throughout is that the nomadic spirit of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is very much alive in the modern world. Where architecture has often sought stability and thus the lack of movement, modernity has brought a sense of the finite, and a good deal of modesty about posterity and longevity. What more contemporary thought could there be than to seek nothing so much as to move, to grow perhaps, but always to move. “A good traveler,” said the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu “has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” As this book ably shows, it is the journey that counts.
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