GENERAL ARTISTS
This title is a Taschen 25 - Special edition! This title focuses on one of the Germany's greatest Renaissance artist. Though most famous for his engravings, Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) was also a master painter and draftsman whose work exemplifies the spirit of German art. Durer's importance in the German High Renaissance was such that he can be considered to embody the movement entirely. His visits to Italy (where he studied most notably with Giovanni Bellini) had a profound effect on his artistic development and enabled him to combine both German and Italian influences in his work. In his later life, Durer's passion for knowledge and progress led him to research and write on the subjects of art theory and mathematics, making him not only the greatest Northern European artist of his time, but also one of its leading thinkers. This overview of Durer's entire oeuvre - covering his oil, tempera, and watercolor paintings, copper and wood engravings, and his drawings and sketches - is the perfect introduction to his work. Every book in Taschen's "Basic Art Series" features: a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist; approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions; and, a concise biography.
The name of John Singer Sargent evokes paintings of marvelously gowned Edwardian belles, of brooding aristocrats and princes of industry-insightful portraits executed with dazzling virtuosity. Sargent's enduring popularity has prompted a thoughtful reappraisal by prominent art critic Carter Ratcliff, who shows us the surprising breadth of the artist's work. Never before has a book so thoroughly represented that variety: 110 lavish color plates and more than 200 halftones convey the brillance of his portraits, the exuberance of his watercolors, the stately pomp of his murals. It is perhaps the watercolors that are most exciting to contemporary eyes-bold, spontaneous, and vividly hued, they have a breathtaking immediacy. Born in Florence in 1865 to American parents, Sargent spent a nomadic childhood before going to Paris to study painting. He learned quickly and by the 1880s had begun the steady climb to fame that ultimately placed him at the center of his world, with a circle of friends and rivals that included Henry James, Claude Monet, and James McNeill Whistler. When Sargent died in 1925, a childhood companion wrote in her memorial that "the summing up of a would-be biography must, I think be: He painted."
Vermeer: The Complete Paintings
This title is a Taschen 25 - Special edition! This title deals with Vermeer's women, their duties and unspoken dreams. The 35 paintings that have come down to us from the hand of Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) place him beside Rembrandt and Frans Hals as one of the great masters of the golden age of Dutch art. Little is known of Vermeer's early life and training, though we can be certain that he never knew great success or acclaim during his lifetime, and after his death - reputedly in part because of the stress of his debts - his work was almost completely forgotten for the best part of two centuries. And yet today he is acknowledged as an exquisitely talented and highly original artist. Most of his pictures (all of which are reproduced in this book) show middle-class women about their daily business. Vermeer records the tasks and duties of these women, the imperatives of virtue under which their lives were lived, while also evoking their dreams and their contrasting inner worlds. Every book in Taschen's "Basic Art Series" features: a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist; approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions; and, a concise biography.
This is a very manageable intro to Matisse - work, life etc. Good illustrations and clear text. Good value too.
Bruegel: The Complete Paintings
At a time when artists were still primarily occupied with religious or mythological subject matter, the great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525-1569) turned his eye on the everyday. Most of Bruegel's 45 surviving works, which are all reproduced in this book, record the facts of 16th century life in rural or small town communities. In this title in the Basic Art Series, Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen outline the artist's account of his society and times, and the relevance that account has for us today.
Influenced by his contemporaries Michelangelo and Leonardo, Raphael Santi (1483-1520) became, in his own right, one of the most important artists of the High Renaissance. Though Raphael painted many important works in his Florence period, including his famous Madonnas, it was his mature work in Rome that cemented his place in history, most notably the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican featuring his School of Athens and Triumph of Religion murals. This overview traces the life's work of this Renaissance master who achieved the height of greatness in only two decades of creation and whose influential work paved the way for the Mannerist and Baroque movements. More for less Available in over 20 languages, TASCHEN's Basic Art Series offers budget-minded readers quality books on the greatest artists of all time. The neat, slick format and nice price tag make Basic Art books fun to collect. Basic Art titles feature: detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist over 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions concise biography.
This much acclaimed book, newly available in paperback, is the definitive retrospective of the most popular serious artist in the world today. Covering all media over almost fifty years, and presented thematically to show the evolution and diversity of Hockney's prolific paintings, drawings, watercolours, prints and photography, it also features quotes from the artist himself that illuminate the passionate thinking behind his work. Its huge international success confirms and reinforces Hockney's position as the world's most popular living artist.
James Turrell: Geometry of Light
Nobody who has experienced an installation by James Turrell forgets the encounter--he makes light tangible in ways that boggle perception and almost seem to defy physics, as if you could reach into the space you see when you close your eyes. A lifelong explorer of perceptual psychology, Turrell is undoubtedly the most influential contemporary light artist, as well as one of America's most popular artists. In "Geometry of Light," the first significant Turrell survey in many years, an extraordinary body of work covering several decades is assessed. At the book's center is the series of works known as "Sky Spaces," a signature Turrell conception in which the sky is made to seem "on top of" the room's ceiling, and which has become a mini-genre unto itself within light art. Academic, philosophical and art-historical essays explicate these perceptual spaces, whose evolution is closely allied to Turrell's development of the Roden Crater Project in the Arizona desert, where he began constructing an observatory in 1974. Also included is the latest installation, "Skyspace/Camera Obscura Space," which Turrell conceived for the Zentrum fur Internationale Lichtkunst in Unna, Germany.
This book is an excellent introduction to the life and work of Roy Lichtenstein. It is about half text and half colour illustrations. The text is accessible and easy for someone with a casual interest in art to follow. Readers interested in a detailed and rigorous academic analysis will prefer a more comprehensive book, but for people looking for an accessible introduction it can't be beaten, particularly given the low price.
This is TASCHEN's 25th anniversary - special edition! This is a large-format hardcover edition at a new low price. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), scion of an ancient aristocratic family, was a crippled dwarf. His family's wealth gave him financial security, and he chose to become an artist. In Paris he was drawn to the world of the red-light district around Montmartre. In the cafes, cabarets, dance halls and brothels he observed 'the theatre of life', viewing this world not from the moralising standpoint of the 19th-century bourgeoisie, but with the eyes of one for whom all inhibitions had long since vanished. Lautrec recorded what he saw without the arrogance of a social superior, but also without "spurious pity - like a reporter with a 'photographic paintbrush'. He transferred his observations to paper and canvas with sensitive understanding and a sharp eye, creating the real atmosphere and live character studies of a world where middle-class morals do not count, in which elegance and baseness mix, as do the ingenuous and the sinful. Lautrec had the gift of painting life as it is. No one else has captured the entertainment world of the belle epoque in so unadulterated, so masterful and so timelessly true a manner as did Lautrec in his paintings, lithographs and posters. This monograph sets out to examine the close relations between Lautrec's work and life. It thereby offers the reader a lively impression of Lautrec's art, and at the same time provides an understanding of his private life and of the magnificent Paris of the belle epoque.
Renoir's timelessly charming paintings are the embodiment of happiness, love, and beauty; it is no doubt because of this that he is the most popular of the impressionists. TASCHEN's Renoir, the most complete retrospective book of this painter's work, examines in detail the history and motivation behind the legend. For this monograph, we have chosen 600 of his masterpieces that best demonstrate his immense talent and historical importance. With a complete chronology, bibliography, and index of works, as well as photos and sketches illustrating Renoir's life and work, TASCHEN's Renoir is the essential reference book for this painter of happiness and poet of love. Oh, and did we mention the gorgeous, large-format colour reproductions?
Friedrich Becker: Kinetic Jewellery
Movement came to be the main theme of Friedrich Becker's artistic work. In the early 1960s, he began to create the first kinetic jewellery objects that remain constantly in motion due to natural body movements. Becker is the inventor of kinetic jewellery. The ideas behind his small sculptures, having the intention of a constructivist language of forms, are also translated into his large-scale sculptures. This documentation is the first survey of the many-sided oeuvre of this significant artist: all areas of his work are represented from the 1950s to his unexpected death in May 1997. Text in English and German.
Whether painting a mysterious bearded figure floating on a flat wash of blue or a winter landscape glimpsed through a thick web of branches, Peter Doig harnesses the materiality of his medium to create what he calls 'abstractions of memories', distilling recollected sensations into moments of pure sentience, like scenes in a series of mysterious narratives. In "Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre" (2000-2) two costumed figures stand guard at a low stone wall while behind them a reservoir reflects a twinkling starry sky. The young man bundled up against the cold in "Blotter" (1993) contemplates his reflection in a frozen pond, while in "Red Boat (Imaginary Boys)" (2004) six men in white shirts navigate upstream through a dense tropical landscape. Doig's work has been exhibited at the world's top museums, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and has been selected for contemporary art's most important international exhibitions, such as the SITE Santa Fe Biennial (2006), the Tate Triennial (2003 and 2006) and the Venice Biennale (2003). Although his work has had an enormous impact on contemporary painting, paving the way for a whole generation of idiosyncratic figurative painters, his painted worlds are without parallel.