Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns each made a tremendous impact on modern art in the 20th century. As pioneers of revolutionary movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, they are key figures in the postwar transitions that brought American art to the forefront of the international scene. These latest volumes in the "MoMA Artist Series", which explores important artists and favorite works in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, guide readers through a dozen of each artists most memorable achievements. A short and lively essay by Carolyn Lanchner, a former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum, accompanies each work, illuminating its significance and placing it in its historical moment in the development of modern art and the artists own life. These books provide a unique overview of the individuals who shaped the development of American art since mid-century and are excellent resources for readers interested in the stories behind the masterpieces of the modern canon.

English Description: Joannis Avramidis is a protagonist of modern sculpture. His geometrically severe figures show, in inimitable classicism, the human being as the measure of abstract figuration. Werner Hofmann's book covers the timeless design principles of a body of work developed from the energies of the corporeal. The formal language of the Greek sculptor Joannis Avramidis, who was born in Georgia in 1922, is based on geometric constructions that allow the eternally valid to be seen as the law-governed constant in the individual. The structures that result serve no norm, however, but integrate the variety of particularities in bodily forms of a finely nuanced structure. In the proportion of the parts to the whole, and in the basic form to its offshoots, there appear clear and concentrated figures of confident monumentality. The 'rhythm of severity' is their unmistakable distinguishing feature, and something which the artist Avramidis has made entirely his own. In this rhythm are expressed corporeality and statics, sensuality and detachment, the sophistication and immutability of the classic standard. In his book, Werner exemplifies the criteria of seeing which these works require, integrating them into the genesis of their structure and shows the totality of the uvre in the variety of its themes and ideas. In the process, the approach via the drawing shows itself to be the essential precondition for the understanding of the sculpture. This richly and sensitively illustrated book allows access to works whose classically calmed strength, through museums and numerous public places, has long been anchored in the awareness of modern art. German description: Joannis Avramidis ist ein Protagonist der modernen Plastik. Seine geometrisch strengen Figuren zeigen in unnachahmlicher Klassizitat den Menschen als Mass abstrakter Figuration. Werner Hofmanns Buch erschliesst die zeitlosen Gestaltungsprinzipien eines aus den Energien des Korperhaften entwickelten Werks

The discussion of Cologne consists of four sections that explore different elements and aspects of the movement's expression in this city. The first two sections address the origins of Cologne Dada from the post-war anger and strife that formed the movement's backdrop to the precise events that led to its birth. The third section explores the aesthetics of Cologne Dada while the last examines the fiery relationship between Dadaist politics and aesthetics that culminated with Max Ernst's departure for Paris in 1922. A section on Hanover addresses the political and social nature of the city that gave rise to a particular blend of Expressionist and Dadaist aesthetics dominated by Kurt Schwitters. Hanover supported a politically progressive climate that nurtured the development of Dada, and an avant-garde society of publishers, art collectors, art exhibitors, and theatre patrons. This volume examines lesser known aspects of Schwitter's work, such as his Merz-Evenings and the utopian Merzbau project.

When she died in 1955, Geddes was described as 'the greatest stained glass artist of our time' whose monumental directness of treatment (whatever the scale) constituted 'a revival of the mediaeval genius'. Yet a full appreciation of her powerful figurative art was limited to a relative few. Although critics praised the deeply spiritual and uncompromising skill of her craftsmanship - 'Nowhere in modern glass is there a more striking example of a courageous adventure in the medium' (her 1919 Duke of Connaught War Memorial in Ottawa), her 'power of simplifying without loss of meaning' (her great Wallsend Crucifixion window of 1922), and 'the fine sensibility and deep intelligence' of her majestic 64-light Te Deum rose window to the king of the Belgians (1934-8) - her often out-of-the-way windows need to be seen in situ. Battling with ill health, like her better-known pupil and contemporary, Evie Hone, she became a major figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement and 20th-century British stained glass revival, a medieval-modernist of rare intellect, skill and aesthetic integrity. This profusely illustrated contextual study of her life and work draws on hitherto unpublished primary sources to represent her unique artistic achievement during the turbulence of two world wars.

English Description: Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich is one of the most important German painters of the 18th Century. To mark the 300th Birthday of this extraordinary artist, this monograph of his life and work is published. Dietrich s importance has been largely forgotten in the wake of the changing artistic tastes in the 19th Century. German Description: Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich gehort zu den wichtigsten deutschen Malern des 18. Jahrhunderts. Anlasslich seines 300. Geburtstages stellt eine Monografie Leben und Werk dieses aussergewohnlichen Kunstlers erneut vor, dessen Bedeutung im Zuge des sich wandelnden Kunstgeschmacks im 19. Jahrhundert weitgehend in Vergessenheit geraten ist."

Along with Turner, no artist has sought more than Claude Monet (1840-1926) to capture light itself on canvas. Of all the Impressionists, it was the man Cezanne called "only an eye, but my God what an eye!" who stayed completely true to the principle of absolute fidelity to the visual sensation, painting directly from the object. It could be said that Monet reinvented the possibilities of color, and whether it was through his early interest in Japanese prints, his time in the dazzling light of Algeria as a conscript, or his personal acquaintance with the major painters of the late 1800s, what Monet produced throughout his long life would change forever the way we perceive both the natural world and its attendant phenomena. The high point of his explorations were the late series of water lilies, painted in his own garden at Giverny, that, in their moves towards almost total formlessness, are really the origin of abstract art. This biography does full justice to this most remarkable and profoundly influential of artists, and offers numerous reproductions and archive photos alongside a detailed and insightful commentary.

A pioneering artist, influential teacher and a crucial catalyst for Abstract Expressionism in New York, Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) is one of the most important abstract painters of the twentieth century. Following stints in Munich, Paris (where he befriended Picasso, Braque, Gris and Robert Delaunay), Hofmann established himself in the United States in 1932, setting up art schools in New York and Provincetown, where, over the next 40 years, his pedagogy was to significantly influence three generations of postwar American artists, among them Helen Frankenthaler, Red Grooms, Alfred Jensen, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson and Frank Stella. Hofmann's painting, with its loose accumulations of brushstrokes and energetic tensions of rectangles, also proved a galvanizing precedent for Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and Newman. This publication surveys Hofmann's life and work in all of its rich dimensionality, from his painting to his theoretical writings.

In the early 1920s, a group of Dutch artists and architects influenced by some of the ideas of Dada, formed a movement called De Stijl (The Style). The Story of De Stijl presents work by Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld, and the other members of this influential group, as well as archival photographs of the artists. The authors - experts in this seminal abstract style that encompassed painting, sculpture, architecture, interior design, and more - explore the evolution of the movement not just through traditional art-historical analysis, but also through anecdotes, conversations, articles, and other contemporary sources. With more than 325 colour illustrations, The Story of De Stijl makes clear the lasting importance and influence of this once avant-garde movement.

English Description: The painter Heinrich Friedrich Fueger, born in Heilbronn, the son of a clergyman, first went to Vienna in 1774, and settled there in 1783 after spending several years in Italy. In 1795 he was appointed director of the Academy, in 1806 to be head of the Imperial Picture Gallery. Rococo at the outset, his style soon developed to become Neo-classical. Fueger's portraits are outstanding. He does justice to the individuality of his sitters, and they gave him access to the aristocracy. Stylistically, his later portraits emerge into Early Realism. Rooted in his age, Fueger saw his real remit as a painter of monumental history scenes, in which he sought to get away from the models and give expression to eternally valid higher truths in the interplay of form and content. Under Fueger's leadership, the Viennese Academy flourished, achieving renown throughout Europe. But in spite of his skill, and the high regard in which he was held in his own day, he has all but disappeared from public awareness. The present overview restores his proper art-historical importance with the help of outstanding works. German description: Der bedeutende klassizistische Maler Heinrich Friedrich Fueger war seinerzeit fuer seine virtuosen Portratminiaturen beruehmt. Als Direktor der Wiener Akademie genoss er hochstes Ansehen. Die Kunsthalle Vogelmann macht sein kunstvolles Schaffen in Ausstellung wie Kuenstlermonographie erstmals wieder umfassend prasent

Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891 -1956) was one of the driving forces of the Russian avant-garde. In his works - paintings, collages, photomontages, photographs, sculptures, advertising designs and typography - he captured the dynamic social changes that took place in the years immediately following the October Revolution: the design of a new world.

Le Wiener Werkstatte ("Ateliers viennois") est un mouvement creatif moderne majeur a bien des egards. Fondee en 1903 par Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser et Fritz Waerndorfer, cette alliance progressiste d'artistes et de designers chercha en particulier a remettre en question la societe industrielle par l'artisanat individuel, en s'efforcant de reunir les differentes composantes de la vie en une oeuvre unifiee et elegante. L'atelier, compose au depart de trois petites pieces, s'est rapidement etendu pour occuper un immeuble de trois etages, divise en departements consacres a l'orfevrerie, a la maroquinerie et a l'ebenisterie, mais aussi a la reliure et a la peinture. Les artistes s'y livraient a des experiences avec divers materiaux comme l'or, les pierres precieuses ou le papier mache, et appliquaient leurs motifs simples, souvent geometriques, a des domaines aussi varies que la ceramique, le textile, la typographie, la decoration d'interieur, le mobilier et la mode. A travers des commandes architecturales comme le Purkersdorf Sanatorium et le Palais Stoclet de Bruxelles, le groupe a pu realiser son ideal de "Gesamtkunstwerk", une oeuvre d'art totale dans laquelle chaque detail d'un environnement est concu comme partie integrante d'un tout coordonne. Bien que l'atelier n'ait vecu qu'une trentaine d'annees, il a joui d'un important succes commercial, a travers des boutiques installees a Karlsbad, Marienbad, Zurich, New York et Berlin. Il a aussi integre les creations de nombreux grands artistes de l'epoque, comme Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka et Egon Schiele. Aujourd'hui, ce mouvement des Ateliers viennois est reconnu pour son approche exhaustive de la pratique artistique et l'influence stylistique qu'il a exerce sur l'Art deco et le Bauhaus.

This is the first ever monograph on the work of Enid Marx (1902-1998), a leading artist-designer, collector and writer, closely associated with the Great Bardfield group of artists, including Eric Ravilious and Eric Bawden. Marx was a leading woman designer in the first generation to make a distinctive contribution to the growing practice of industrial design in Britain. Her design work, much of it anonymous, including postage stamps, book cover patterns, wartime utility fabrics and tube train seat fabric, was, in its time, ubiquitous in British public life and as a whole, remains utterly emblematic of post-war popular visual culture. Alan Powers traces Marx's career beginning as a student at the Royal College of Art to in-demand designer of the mid-twentieth century and eventually inspirational teacher at Croydon College of Art. He considers Marx's contacts with other significant artists, including international friendships with designers in Europe, Scandinavia and America, her role in the crafts revival between the wars, her reputation in Britain and overseas, and the wider campaigns to involve artists in the design of industrially produced goods. Drawing on a wealth of research and thoroughly illustrated with high-quality reproductions of drawings, paintings, hand-blocked fabrics, linocuts and book illustrations - many previously unpublished - Alan Powers' account adds considerably to the existing body of knowledge about Enid Marx's actual production and reveals an artist whose work was perfectly poised at the intersection of traditional craft and abstract modernity.

'During the Second World War, I worked in an empty building by the Thames. It had been used by the Thames Conservancy Board. When war came, they moved out and I was moved in. I stayed there for most of the war. I never went down to an air raid shelter. I was too busy trying to make people laugh about wartime bread and sausages, instead of crying about them.' - Mabel Lucie Attwell Mabel Lucie Attwell was one of Britain's best-loved artists with her work touching generations, from those who grew up with her classic characters, Bunty and the Boo-Boos, to those who have read Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, which she famously illustrated. Her art has found its way into homes across the world through figurines, bathroom plaques and gift cards featuring her charming designs. Yet, many of her most poignant and humorous illustrations were created to cheer a world at war. She painted prolifically throughout the First and Second World Wars, with postcards featuring her child-like characters and tongue-in-cheek captions that were typical of her saucy sense of humour. Despite suffering loss and hardship herself during the wars she continued to encourage people to 'smile through the tears'. This book which brings a collection of her wartime postcards together exclusively for the first time, pays tribute to the indomitable spirit of this incredible woman and to her art that cannot fail to raise a smile today for young and old alike.

"The menace of surrealism was so frequently advertised that any reader of this book should be allowed the impudence of demanding my credentials." So opens Wayne Andrews's The Surrealist Parade, a portrait of the movement in literature and art by a man who, at the age of nineteen, began to correspond with its major figures and afterward came to know them well. Under the name of Montagu O'Reilly, Andrews wrote the surrealist fiction Pianos of Sympathy (1936), the very first New Directions book. In later years, Andrews became a social historian, art archivist, and scholar of architectural history, publishing no less than sixteen books, among them his well-known study of the cultural roots of Nazism, Siegfried's Curse, and a pungent biography of Voltaire (meanwhile, Montagu O'Reilly had made a reappearance on the ND list in 1948 with Who Has Been Tampering with These Pianos?). When Andrews died in 1987, he had completed all but the last chapter of The Surrealist Parade, his portrait of a movement in art and literature that took in such disparate temperaments as Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Salvador Dali. The book is, in the words of his lifelong friend and publisher, James Laughlin, a "little insider's history... Montagu is very much behind Wayne in these caustic yet admiring sketches."

From Dada to the Automatists, and from Max Ernst to Andre Breton, Gerard Durozoi provides the most comprehensive and fascinating history of the Surrealist movement to date. Tracing the movement from its origins in the 1920s to its decline in the 1950s and 1960s, Durozoi tells the history of Surrealism through its activities, publications and reviews, demonstrating its close ties to some of the most explosive political, as well as creative, debates of the 20th century. Unlike other histories, which focus mainly on the pre-World War II years of the movement in Paris, Durozoi covers a wider chronological and geographic range, treating in detail the postwar years and Surrealism's colonization of Latin America, the United States, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Italy and North Africa. Drawing on a staggering amount of documentary and visual evidence - including more than 1,000 illustrations, many of them in colour - he illuminates all the intellectual and artistic aspects of the movement, from literature and philosophy to painting, photography and film. All the Surrealist stars and their most important works are here - Aragon, Borges, Breton, Bunuel, Cocteau, Crevel, Dali, Desnos, Ernst, Man Ray, Soupault and many more - for all of whom Durozoi has provided brief biographical notes in addition to featuring them in the main text. For anyone who wants to know more about practically any aspect of Surrealism, from its vexed relations with communism to its exquisite corpses, Durozoi's "History of the Surrealist Movement" should be a valuable reference.