The idea of climbing a tree for shelter, or just to see the earth from another perspective, is surely as old as humanity. Tree houses are chronicled in ancient civilizations and their lore crosses through the history of every part of the world where trees grow. This stunningly illustrated study offers a tour of the best tree houses in the world, some designed by architects, others the work of unknown craftsmen. A teahouse, a restaurant, a hotel, a playhouse for children, or a perch from which to contemplate life—the tree house can take as many forms as the imagination can offer. In times of concern for sustainability and ecological responsibility, the tree house may also be the ultimate symbol of life in symbiosis with nature. Whether rustic or contemporary in style, tree houses make the most of space. Climb into this trove of tree houses and enjoy a new perspective on the world.
50 tree houses from around the world
Covers all different styles, from romantic to modern
Every house is depicted in several photos as well as one illustration by artist Patrick Hruby from Los Angeles (who also created the book’s cover artwork)
Helpful short biographies of all architects
In the mid-1950s, Yves Klein (1928–1962) declared that “a new world calls for a new man.” With his idiosyncratic style and huge charisma, this bold artist would go on to pursue a brief but bountiful career, producing more than 1,000 paintings over seven years in an oeuvre now considered a mainstay of postwar modernism.
Klein made his name above all with his large monochrome canvases in his own patented hue of blue. International Klein Blue (IKB), composed of pure pigment and binding medium, is at once rich and luminous, evocative and decorative, and was conceived by Klein as a means of evoking the immateriality and infinitude of the world. The works of this “Blue Revolution” seem to draw us into another dimension, as if hypnotized by a perfect summer sky. Klein was also renowned for his deployment of “living brushes,” in which naked women, daubed in International Klein Blue, would make imprints of their bodies on large sheets of paper.
This Basic Art introduction presents key Klein works to introduce an artist who was at once a showman, inventor, and pioneer of performance art. With page after page of the ever-alluring International Klein Blue, it is both an essential guide to a modern art master and a meditation on the unique effects of a single color.
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.
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.
In endless odes to the female form, Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) traced elongated bodies, almond eyes, and his own name into art history. His languid female subjects are as instantly recognizable as they are startling, sensual, and swan-necked.
Modigliani's unique figuration corresponded to his own personal idea of beauty, but drew upon a rich variety of visual influences, including contemporary Cubism, African carvings, Cambodian sculptures, and 13th-century painting from his native Italy. Although most renowned for his nude females, he applied similar stylistic techniques to portraits of male artistic contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Chaïm Soutine.
With key works from his highly individualistic repertoire, this book introduces Modigliani's brief but revered career at the heart of Paris’s early modernist hotbed.
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.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) was a major figure in modern American art for some seven decades. Importantly, her fame was not associated with shifting art styles and trends, but rather with her own unique vision, based on finding essential and abstract forms in nature.
O’Keeffe’s primary subjects were landscapes, flowers, and bones, each explored in successive series over several years. Certain works went on for decades, producing 12 or more variations of an original image. Among these, O’Keeffe’s magnified pictures of calla lilies and irises are her most famous. Enlarging the tiniest petals to fill an entire canvas, O’Keeffe created a proto-abstract vocabulary of shapes and lines, earning her the moniker “mother of American modernism.” In 1946, O’Keeffe became the first female artist to be given a solo show at the MoMA in New York.
This introductory book from TASCHEN Basic Art 2.0 traces O’Keeffe’s long and luminous career through key paintings, contemporary photographs, and portraits taken by Alfred Stieglitz, to whom O’Keeffe was married. We follow the artist through her pioneering innovations, major breakthroughs, and her travels and inspirations in Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and, above all, New Mexico, where she was particularly inspired by the majestic landscapes, vivid colors and exotic vegetation.
“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.
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
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