Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle traces the relationships between the modernist artists in Werefkin's circle, including Erma Bossi, Elisabeth Epstein, Natalia Goncharova, Elizaveta Kruglikova, Else Lasker-Schuler, Marta Liepina-Skulme, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, and Maria Marc. The book demonstrates that their interactions were dominated not primarily by national ties, but rather by their artistic ideas, intellectual convictions, and gender roles; it offers an analysis of the various artistic scenes, the places of exchange, and the artists' sources of inspiration. Specifically focusing on issues of cosmopolitan culture, transcultural dialogue, gender roles, and the building of new artistic networks, the collection of essays re-evaluates the contributions of these artists to the development of modern art. Contributors: Shulamith Behr, Marina Dmitrieva, Simone Ewald, Bernd Fathke, Olga Furman, Petra Lanfermann, Tanja Malycheva, Galina Mardilovich, Antonia Napp, Carla Pellegrini Rocca, Dorothy Price, Hildegard Reinhardt, Kornelia Roeder, Kimberly A. Smith, Laima Lauckaite-Surgailiene, Baiba Vanaga, and Isabel Wunsche

This important publication accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London, of paintings by Edvard Munch, one of the world's greatest modern artists. The exhibition and catalogue showcase 18 major works from the collection of KODE Art Museums in Bergen. The works span the most significant part of Munch's artistic development and have never before been shown as a group outside of Scandinavia. KODE houses one of the most important collections of paintings by Edvard Munch (1863-1944) in the world. The collection was assembled at the beginning of the 20th century by the Norwegian industrialist, mill owner and philanthropist Rasmus Meyer (1858-1916), who was one of the first significant early collectors of Munch's work. Meyer knew Munch personally and was astute in acquiring major canvases by the artist that chart his artistic development. Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen explores this group of remarkable works in detail and considers the important role of Rasmus Meyer as a collector. The exhibition and publication include seminal paintings from Munch's early 'realist' phase of the 1880s, such as Morning (1884), which was made when the artist was just twenty years old, and Summer Night (1889), a pivotal work that shows the artist's move towards the expressive and psychologically charged work for which he became famous. These paintings launched Munch's career and set the stage for his renowned, highly expressive paintings of the 1890s when his compositions became powerful projections of his emotions and imaginative states. Such works are a major feature of the exhibition that includes remarkable canvases from Munch's famous 'Frieze of Life' series, such as Evening on Karl Johan (1892), Melancholy (1894-96) and At the Death Bed (1895). Through his 'Frieze of Life' works, Munch intended to address profound themes of human existence, from love to death. The artist used his own experiences as source material to make visceral depictions of the human psyche, which he hoped would help others understand their own life. Munch's powerful use of colour and form to convey his subjects marked him out as one of the most radical painters at the turn of the 20th century. This fully illustrated publication includes a catalogue of the works, with contributions by leading experts in their fi eld from KODE and The Courtauld.

This volume commemorates the 100th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh's death. Major van Gogh scholars present essays that reexamine the painter's place in the art world of his time, the phenomenal growth in his reputation, and his influence on later art movements and individual artists. At the time of his death and for some years after, there was a question as to whether van Gogh's approach would gain recognition. Today, he is seen as one of the most popular and recognized of the world's artists, and his impact on 20th-century art is unquestioned. How and why this occurred is a major theme throughout this essay collection.

Among the topics examined are iconography; van Gogh's poetry as well as the literature that influenced him and that he, in turn, influenced; psychological and religious aspects of van Gogh's painting and self-imaging; and how van Gogh has been interpreted. A section on his legacy in art concludes this major reassessment of van Gogh's place in art history. An important collection for art scholars and researchers as well as public library patrons.

This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today. -- .

Address book companion to the exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. Produced in partnership with the National Gallery, this stunning address book features Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers. Vincent van Gogh painted a series of pictures depicting sunflowers, having first been inspired by the yellow flowers in Paris when he saw them growing in the gardens of Montmartre. Sunflowers were symbolic of life and hope to the artist, and could also be associated with his concept of the sun - glowing, yellow and hopeful.

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates that the exotic, as reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy and art that inspires it, provokes central questions about the modern self and the spaces it inhabits. Exotic spaces in the writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Simmel and the art of German Expressionism, are shown to present alternatives to the landscape and experience of modernity. In an examination of the concept of the exotic and of spatial experience in their cultural, subjective, and philosophical contingencies, Gosetti-Ferencei shows that exotic spaces may contest and reconfigure the relationship between the familiar and the foreign, the self and the other. Exotic spaces may serve not only to affirm the subject in a symbolic conquering of territory, as emphasized in post-colonial interpretations, or project the fantasy of escapism to a lost paradise, as utopian readings suggest, but condition moral, aesthetic, or imaginative transformation. Such transformation, while risking disaster or dissolution of the self as well as endangerment of the other, may promote new possibilities of perceiving or being, and reconfigure the boundaries of a familiar world. As exotic spaces are conceived as mystical, liberating, erotic, infectious, frightening or mysterious, several possibilities for transformation emerge in their exposure: re-enchantment through epiphany; the collapse of the rational self; liberation of the imagination from the confines of the familiar world; and aesthetic transformation, revealing the paradoxically 'primitive' nature of modern experience. In strikingly original readings of canonical authors and compelling rediscoveries of forgotten ones, this study establishes that exotic experience can evidence the fragility of the European or Germanic self as depicted in modernist literature, revealing the usually unconsidered boundaries of the subject's own familiar world.

An extraordinary and inventive graphic biography, Steffen Kverneland's Munch explores the relationships and obsessions that drove the artist behind 'The Scream'. Using text drawn from the writings of Edvard Munch and his contemporaries, this extensively researched and beautifully drawn graphic novel debunks the familiar myth of the half-mad expressionist painter - anguished, starving and ill-treated - to reveal the artist's neglected sense of humour and optimism. Born out of a life-long fascination with all things Munch, Kverneland's award-winning seven-year project is the funniest and most entertaining portrait yet of a complex man and a pioneering artist. "Munch is a dazzling use of sequential storytelling... Rarely have I read a more entertaining biography." The Comics Journal

During the period in which Expressionist artists were active in central Europe, art historians were producing texts which also began to be characterized evocatively as 'expressionist', yet the notion of an expressionist art history has yet to be fully explored in historiographic studies of the discipline. This anthology offers a cross-section of noteworthy art history texts that have been described as expressionist, along with critical commentaries by an international group of scholars. Written between 1912 and 1933, the primary sources have been selected from the published scholarship of both recognized and less-familiar figures in the field's Germanic tradition: Wilhelm Worringer, Fritz Burger, Ernst Heidrich, Max Dvorak, Heinrich Woelfflin, and Carl Einstein. Translated here for the first time, these examples of an expressionist turn in art history, along with their secondary analyses and the book's introduction, offer a productive lens through which to re-examine the practice and theory of art history in the early twentieth century.

Now available again, this visually stunning collection of Gustav Klimt's landscape paintings brings to light a lesser-known aspect of the Viennese painter's oeuvre. While Gustav Klimt is largely revered for his opulent, symbolladen portraits of the Viennese bourgeoisie, these works were just one aspect of his artistic expression. His landscapes represent an important facet of his career and are a valuable contribution to the school of European nature painting. For many years the artist travelled to the Austrian and Italian countryside during the summer, where he took advantage of the extraordinary light and spectacular hues to paint and sketch landscapes. Among the most exquisite of Klimt's landscapes are those in which he experimented with composition and style. Accompanied by scholarly essays, the images reproduced in this book comprise all extant landscapes from this brilliant artist, proving that his mastery extends beyond portraiture and revealing themes that appeared throughout his life's work.

Over the course of his artistic career, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) transformed not only his own style, but the course of art history. From early figurative and landscape painting, he went on to pioneer a spiritual, emotive, rhythmic use of color and line and is today credited with creating the first purely abstract work. As much a teacher and theorist as he was a practicing artist, Kandinsky's interests in music, theater, poetry, philosophy, ethnology, myth, and the occult, were all essential components to his painting and engraving. He was involved with both the influential Blaue Reiter and Bauhaus groups and left a legacy not only of dazzling visual work, but also of highly influential treatises such as Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Key tenets included the connections between painting, music and mystical experience, and the purification of art away from material realism and towards an emotional expression, condensed in particular by color. This book presents key Kandinsky works to introduce his repertoire of vivid colors, forms, and feelings. Tracing the artist's radical stylistic development, it shows how one painter's progression paved the way for generations of abstract expression to come. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

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 Brucke 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 Brucke, 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. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

'My art is a self-confession - in it I seek to clarify my relationship with the world. But at the same time I have always thought and felt that my art could also clarify other people's quest for the truth' Edvard Munch Why do people travel from across the world to see Edvard Munch's artworks? Munch painted emotions in a way that nobody had ever seen before, depicting love, friendship and the darker sides of life. This book gives readers the opportunity to become better acquainted with Edvard Munch and his oeuvre. It takes a close look at the artworks and explores the stories behind some of the most famous paintings in the world, such as Madonna and The Scream.

Throughout his career, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner employed a highly inventive and original use of colour. He favoured novel applications of paint in unusual matte finishes. For Kirchner, colour was of primary importance, coupled with technique and style. He was one of the leading Expressionist painters of the time and was one of the founding members of the Brucke. In his deeply personal depictions, he focused on the places where he lived and worked and his close friends and associates. This book, accompanying a major exhibition at the Neue Galerie New York, provides a visual survey of Kirchner's oeuvre and offers an in-depth analysis of different aspects of the artist's output. Essays by leading experts examine Kirchner's approach to colour, his interest in the decorative arts, how electric light affected his treatment of colour, the impact of Nietzsche on his work, and how he was profoundly changed by World War I. This book includes illustrations of nearly 40 paintings, 30 prints, as well as drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, and decorative work.

The celebrated survey of female Abstract Expressionist artists revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work The artists Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and many other women played major roles in the development of Abstract Expressionism, which flourished in New York and San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s and has been recognized as the first fully American modern art movement. Though the contributions of these women were central to American art of the twentieth century, their work has not received the same critical attention as that of their male counterparts. Women of Abstract Expressionism is a long-overdue survey. Lavishly illustrated with full-color plates emphasizing the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of the movement, this book features biographies of more than forty artists, offering insight into their lives and work. Essays by noted scholars explore the techniques, concerns, and legacies of women in Abstract Expressionism, shedding light on their unique experiences. This groundbreaking book reveals the richness of the careers of these important artists and offers keen new reflections on their work and the movement as a whole. Published in association with the Denver Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C. (10/22/16-01/22/17) Palm Springs Art Museum (02/18/17-05/28/17)

Else Lasker-Schuler, a pivotal figure in German Expressionism, presided over avant-garde cafe life in pre-World War I Berlin in much the same way Gertrude Stein did in Paris around the same time. Her poetry, prose, plays and graphic art are not very well known in the English-speaking world, but her work has been enjoying a critical and popular revival since she was rediscovered in the 1960s. Else Lasker-Schuler's life and work as a Jew, a woman, and a writer and artist in Nazi Germany and in other locations after Hitler's takeover are chronicled in this book. It begins with her flight to Switzerland, after receving Germany's top literary prize, and then goes back to her childhood and follows her life through to its end in Jerusalem, where she died five months before Germany surrendered to the Allies. It covers her marriages to Dr Berthold Lasker, brother of the world chess champion, and to Herwarth Walden, founder of the avant-garde periodical, gallery and publishing house ""Der Sturm"" (The Storm), and her friendships with Martin Buber, Karl Kraus, Franz Marc, Gottfried Benn and Gershom Scholem.

During 1889, Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949) painted a monumental canvas that would be his magnum opus: The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889. The work is one of the most complex paintings ever painted. It was only 40 years after its completion that the monumental canvas was first publicly exhibited at the James Ensor retrospective at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1929. Needless to say, therefore, that the exhibiting of Ensor's work in 1929 was for many a revelation. Until then it had been seen and was known only to a limited group of visitors and insiders. Between 1889 and 1929, a veritable revolution had taken place in the visual arts. Before and during World War I, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Dadaism all came into being. Few explanations can accommodate the full daring and frenzy of such a painting which chaotic composition and barbaric style seem revolutionary, and look far beyond the early 20th century. Since the purchase of the work in 1987 by the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), The Entry has acquired cult status. No other work depicts the notion of belgitude so aptly as The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, and yet the painting can in the first place be regarded as a somewhat quirky but striking representation of Ensor's vision of humanity.

This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today. -- .

A penetrating reevaluation of the period in which the German Expressionist George Grosz created his best-known, most searing satirical works This overdue investigation of George Grosz's (1893-1959) most compelling paintings, drawings, prints, and collages offers a reassessment of the celebrated German Expressionist during his years in Berlin-from his earliest artistic endeavors to the trenchant satirical images and searing depictions of moral decay between the World Wars for which he is known today. Menacing street scenes, rowdy cabarets, corrupt politicians, wounded soldiers, greedy war profiteers, and other symbols of Berlin's interwar decline all met with the artist's relentless gaze, which exposed the core social issues that eventually led to Germany's extreme nationalist politics. Featuring masterpieces as well as rarely published works, this book provides further insight into the artist's creative pinnacle, reached during this critical and ominous period in German history. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (November 18, 2022-February 26, 2023)

Forgacs examines the development of the Bauhaus school of architecture and applied design by focusing on the idea of the Bauhaus, rather than on its artefacts. What gave this idea its extraordinary powers of survival? Founded in 1919, with the architect Walter Gropius as its first director, the Bauhaus carried within it the seeds of conflict from the start. The duration of the Bauhaus coincides very nearly with that of the Weimar Republic; the Bauhaus idea - the notion that the artist should be involved in the technological innovations of mechanization and mass production - is a concept that was bound to arouse the most passionate feelings. It is these two strands - personal and political - that Forgacs so cleverly interweaves. The text has been extensively revised since its original publication in Hungarian, and an entirely new chapter has been added on the Bauhaus's Russian analogue, VkhUTEMAS, the Moscow academy of industrial art.

The artists as explorers: the Expressionist artists Kirchner and Nolde studied non-Western lifestyles and incorporated them into their artistic projects. Between "armchair anthropology" practised in the museums and "field-work anthropology", which also took place in the colonies, both artists contributed to the construction of an (imagined) "other", offering an alternative to bourgeois, "civilised" society in Germany. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde both spent time between 1910-11 studying objects and materials in ethnographic museums, but before long they expanded their investigations to include travels to colonial regions (Nolde) and the staging of "exotic" studio environments (Kirchner). The publication examines how both approaches evolved through an interplay between art, early German anthropology and colonial enterprise within the German Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. It contains not only paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, posters and documents, but also a variety of texts offering a broad overview as well as relating a specific narrative. Languages: English, Dutch, Danish

'As fresh, poignant and individual as his paintings' Lucy Beckett, TLS, Books of the Year 2018 'Here is my soul. Look for me here; here I am, here are my pictures, my roots' Marc Chagall, one of the twentieth century's most popular artists, grew up in a close-knit, bustling Russian-Jewish community, the son of a herring seller. In his colourful, dreamlike autobiography, written as he was about to leave his homeland for good in 1922, he vividly brings to life the memories and places that fed into his unique work, from his shtetl childhood to revolutionary Russia and Belle Epoque Paris. Filled with Chagall's own evocative illustrations, My Life is as warm, joyful and humane as his art. 'Chagall writes as whimsically as he paints: lovingly ofother people, humorously and lovingly of himself' Daily Mail 'Anyone who likes Chagall's paintings will enjoy this book:the work of an unteachable, unspoiled folk artist' Evening Standard