Few photographers have created such a legacy as Edward Weston (1886–1958). After a decade of successfully making photographs with painterly soft-focus techniques, he became the driving figure behind a group of West Coast artists dubbed Group f/64, which pioneered the sharp, precise school of “Straight Photography.” With that stylistic leap, Weston’s career moved into high gear, creating photographs of extraordinary sensual realism, perfectly poised between compositional stillness and searing intensity.
With nudes, nature studies, and myriad perspectives on the dramatic Californian landscape, Weston’s works aimed to locate the “very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.” In this concise monograph, we gather some of the finest Weston works to explore how he pursued and achieved this aim whether with a landscape, shell, or naked body.
The rebel hero of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) careened through his life like a firework across the American art landscape. Channeling ideas from sources as diverse as Picasso and Mexican surrealism, he rejected convention to develop his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing.
Pollock's most famous works are his drip paintings, where he dripped and poured household enamel paint over the canvas with a variety of instruments, from sticks to syringes, hardened brushes to broken bits of glass. The splattered results pulsate with energy, replacing the refinement of easel and brush with something altogether more immediate, vivid, and physical. To evade the viewer's search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and identified each work with a neutral number only.
Notoriously reclusive and volatile, struggling with alcoholism, married to fellow Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner, and killed in a car crash aged just 44, Pollock is as much a compelling celebrity icon as an artistic pioneer. This essential artist introduction explores both his work and his fame to shed light on masterpieces of the modernist story, and the making of a cultural icon.
Most commonly associated with the birth of the Impressionist movement in mid-19th-century Paris, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in fact defied easy categorization and instead developed a unique style, strongly influenced by Old Masters, the body in motion, and everyday urban life.
The elder scion of a wealthy family, Degas cofounded a series of exhibitions of “Impressionist” art, but soon disassociated himself from the group in pursuit of a more realist approach. His subjects centered on the teeming, noisy streets of Paris, as well as its leisure entertainments, such as horse racing, cabarets, and, most particularly, ballet. With often ambitious, off-kilter vantage points, his images of ballerinas numbered approximately 1,500 works, all deeply invested in the physicality and the discipline of dance.
Through illustrations of Foyer de la Danse (1872), Musicians in the Orchestra (1872), and many more, this book provides an essential overview of the artist who created a category all his own, a world of classical resonance, bold compositions, and an endless fascination with movement, which together produced some of the most striking and influential works of the era.
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.
Resisting interpretation or classification, Mark Rothko (1903–1970) was a prominent advocate for the artist’s consummate freedom of expression. Although identified as a key protagonist of the Abstract Expressionist movement, first formed in New York City, Rothko rejected the label and insisted instead on “a consummated experience between picture and onlooker.”
Following a repertoire of figurative works, Rothko developed his now iconic canvases of bold color blocks in red, yellow, ochre, maroon, black, or green. With these shimmering, pulsating color masses, Rothko stressed that he had not removed the human figure but rather put symbols or shapes in its place. These intense color forms contained all the tragedy of the human condition. At the same time, Rothko explicitly empowered the viewer in the expressive potential of his work. He believed “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.”
From his early development through to his most famous color fields, this book introduces the intellect and influence of Rothko’s dramatic, intimate, and revolutionary work.
In a fleeting fourteen year period, sandwiched between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology to be applied across painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre, and installation.
As much an intense personal community as a publicly minded collective, the Bauhaus was first founded by Walter Gropius (1883–1969), and counted Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among its members. Between its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the school fostered charismatic and creative exchange between teachers and students, all varied in their artistic styles and preferences, but united in their idealism and their interest in a “total” work of art across different practices and media.
This book celebrates the adventurous innovation of the Bauhaus movement, both as a trailblazer in the development of modernism, and as a paradigm of art education, where an all-encompassing freedom of creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to functional and beautiful creations.
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.
We owe a great debt to Jean Baptiste Marc Bourgery (1797-1849) for his Atlas of Anatomy, which was not only a massive event in medical history, but also remains one of the most comprehensive and beautifully illustrated anatomical treatises ever published. Bourgery began work on his magnificent atlas in 1830 in cooperation with illustrator Nicolas Henri Jacob (1782-1871), a student of the French painter Jacques Louis David. The first volumes were published the following year, but completion of the treatise required nearly two decades of dedication; Bourgery lived just long enough to finish his labor of love, but the last of the treatise's eight volumes was not published in its entirety until five years after his death. The eight volumes of Bourgery's treatise cover descriptive anatomy, surgical anatomy and techniques (exploring in detail nearly all the major operations that were performed during the first half of the 19th century), general anatomy and embryology, and microscopic anatomy. Jacob's spectacular hand-colored lithographs are remarkable for their clarity, color, and aesthetic appeal, reflecting a combination of direct laboratory observation and illustrative research. Unsurpassed to this day, the images offer exceptional anatomical insight, not only for those in the medical field but also for artists, students, and anyone interested in the workings and wonder of the human body.
“Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.” ―Pierre-Auguste RenoirPierre-Auguste Renoir’s timelessly charming paintings still reflect our ideals of happiness, love, and beauty. TASCHEN’s Renoir: Painter of Happiness, the most comprehensive retrospective of his work yet published, examines the personal history and motivation behind the legend. Though he began by painting landscapes in the Impressionist style, Renoir (1841–1919) found his true affinity once he started painting portraits, after which he abandoned the Impressionists altogether. Though often misunderstood and criticized, Renoir remains one of history’s most well-loved painters―undoubtedly because his works exude such warmth, tenderness, and good cheer.
In an incisive text tracing the artist’s career and stylistic evolution, Gilles Néret shows how Renoir reinvented the female form in painting, with his everyday goddesses and their plump forms, rounded hips and breasts. This last phase in Renoir’s work, in which he returned to the simple pleasure of painting the female nude in his baigneuses series, was his most innovative and stylistically influential, and an inspiration to both Matisse and Picasso.With a complete chronology, bibliography, index of works, and 600 sumptuous large-format color reproductions, as well as photos and sketches illustrating Renoir’s life and work, this is the essential work of reference on this enduring master artist.
Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is something of an American success story, if only his success had come swifter. At the age of 40, he was a failing artist who struggled to sell a single painting. As he approached 80, Time magazine featured him on its cover. Today, half a century after his death, Hopper is considered a giant of modern expression, with an uncanny, unforgettable, and utterly distinct sense for mood and place.
Much of Hopper's work excavates modern city experience. In canvas after canvas, he depicts diners, cafes, shopfronts, street lights, gas stations, rail stations, and hotel rooms. The scenes are marked by vivid color juxtapositions and stark, theatrical lighting, as well as by harshly contoured figures, who appear at once part of, and alien to, their surroundings. The ambiance throughout his repertoire is of an eerie disquiet, alienation, loneliness and psychological tension, although his rural or coastal scenes can offer a counterpoint of tranquility or optimism.
This book presents key works from Hopper's œuvre to introduce a key player not only in American art history but also in the American psyche.
The art of ancient Egypt that has been handed down to us bears no names of its creators, and yet we value the creations of these unknown masters no less than the works of later centuries, such as statues by Michelangelo or the paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. The present volume introduces a series of such masterpieces, ranging from the Old Kingdom, or the 3rd millennium B.C., to the Late Period in the 9th century B.C. The works in question are sculptures, reliefs, sarcophagi, murals, masks, and decorative items, most of them now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but some occupying places of honor as part of the world cultural heritage in museums such as the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London, the Egyptian Museum in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Featured works include: Seated statue of King Djoser, wood relief of Hesire on a dining table, the statue of a scribe made of various materials, funerary relief of Aschait, a Sphinx of Sesostris III, a robed statue of Cherihotep, reliefs from the Temple at Carnac, sarcophagus of Queen Hatshepsut, murals from Thebes, seated figure of the goddess Sachmet, precious statue of Queen Teje, head of Akhenaten (Amenophis IV), Queen Nefertiti, golden mask of Tutankhamun, Ramses II from Abu Simbel, Horus-falcon made of granite, stone relief on the temple ambulatory at Edfu. Each book in TASCHEN's "Basic Genre" series features: a detailed introduction with approximately 35 photographs, plus a timeline of the most important events (political, cultural, scientific, etc.) that took place during the time period; and a selection of the most important works of the epoch; each is presented on a 2-page spread with a full-page image and, on the facing page, a description/interpretation of the work and brief biography of the artist as well as additional information such as a reference work, portrait of the artist, and/or citations
It might seem like the sitters and subjects of art history's greatest nude paintings have little left to show, but don't be fooled: there is more than meets the eye in these naked masterworks. Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen guide us into the secrets of the flesh, coupling extended discussions with crisp, enlarged details of 12 iconic works from the canon of art history. Biblical tales of morality or modern portrayals of leisure, works such as Tintoretto's Susanna and the Elders or Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass offer diverse visions of natural beauty. Each artwork is presented in reproductions of the highest quality, sourced directly from the original, located in collections of the Louvre, Musee d'Orsay, Uffizi, and many others. From works depicting ultimate feminine grace, like Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, to Hans Baldung's mesmerizing image of the body's decline in The Three Ages of Man and Death, these paintings are unified in their masterful rendering of the bare human form-both in life and beyond. Through this exploration into the covert secrets of nude works, they cease to be two-dimensional and come to full hot-blooded life
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