Back in print, the most authoritative overview on the beloved Bauhaus Renaissance man and pioneer of abstraction, the first artist to take a line for a walk The many books on Paul Klee (1879-1940) published over the years should not obscure the fact that there has been no new, comprehensive Klee overview since Will Grohmann's oft-reprinted 1954 monograph. With Paul Klee: Life and Work, the Zentrum Paul Klee has set out to fill this gap, drawing on a wealth of new resources including the Klee family's archives, much of which is published here for the first time. Life and work are truly integrated in this massive, 344-page volume: Klee's vast body of work is surveyed chronologically, as the book narrates his life alongside the abundant reproductions of drawings, paintings, watercolors, sculptures, puppets and numerous archival documents and photographs (nearly 500 reproductions in total). The book divides Klee's career into eight periods: "Childhood and Youth"; "Munich and the Encounter with the Avant Garde"; "World War I and the Breakthrough to Success"; "At the Bauhaus in Weimar"; "Master of Modern Art"; "The Move to Dusseldorf and the Nazi Rise to Power"; "First Years of Emigration in Bern"; and "Final Years." The result of many years of research and labor, this magisterial publication demonstrates conclusively why Klee numbers among the most influential and best-loved artists of the past 100 years.

Traditionally, ideas about twentieth-century 'modernism' - whether focused on literature, music or the visual arts - have made a distinction between 'high' art and the 'popular' arts of best-selling fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas 'Fats' Waller and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the 'popularity' of popular music in order to reconsider received and seeming self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.

Pablo Picasso always maintained a complex and intense relationship with photography and with the photographers in his milieu, something that could be seen when he pretended to be a reporter one summer, when he used his image as an icon, or when he took inspired and playful self-portraits. This book, which is also the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name at the Museu Picasso of Barcelona, immerses the reader in the universe of Picasso through photography and brings together images that explore all the facets of a creator who is simultaneously the author, model, witness and viewer of his work and life.

World War I had a profound impact on American art and culture. Nearly every major artist responded to events, whether as official war artists, impassioned observers, or participants on the battlefields. It was the moment when American artists, designers, and illustrators began to consider the importance of their contributions to the wider world and to visually represent the United States' emergent role in modern global politics. World War I and American Art provides an unprecedented consideration of the impact of the conflict on American artists and the myriad ways they reacted to it. Artists took a leading role in chronicling the war, crafting images that influenced public opinion, supported mobilization efforts, and helped to shape how the appalling human toll was mourned and memorialized. World War I and American Art features some eighty artists--including Ivan Albright, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Violet Oakley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Man Ray, John Singer Sargent, and Claggett Wilson--whose paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, posters, and ephemera span the diverse visual culture of the period to tell the story of a crucial turning point in the history of American art. Taking readers from the home front to the battlefront, this landmark book will remain the definitive reference on a pivotal moment in American modern art for years to come. Exhibition schedule: * Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts November 4, 2016-April 9, 2017* New-York Historical Society May 26-September 3, 2017* Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville October 6, 2017-January 21, 2018

The first book to explore two of the biggest names in modern and contemporary art side by side, Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons

In the first half of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp redefined what we consider art and what it means to be an artist.

Many of his ideas return, transformed, in the work of Jeff Koons, born when Duchamp was 68 years old and whose own career lit up the art world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This is the first book to explore the affinities between these two highly influential artists, whose creative universes similarly question the function of objects and the allure of commodities.

International art historians, writers, and curators contribute their expertise on topics such as each artist's persona, as well as reflecting on the influence of technology and sexuality on their work.

The publication of this intriguing book coincides with an exhibition at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, opening in May 2019.

Known worldwide for his architecture and interior designs, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) was also an extremely gifted painter. Towards the end of his life, he gave up his principal career as an architect and moved to the south of France where he devoted himself to painting in watercolour. Meticulously executed and brilliantly coloured, these landscape watercolours are conceived with a sense of design and an eye for pattern in nature, which owes much to his brilliance as an architect and designer. This book charts Mackintosh's time in France and explores his career as a landscape painter, placing his work in the context of the modern movement. The forty-four paintings Mackintosh is known to have completed while in France are illustrated, and are supported by documentary photographs of the places he painted as well as extracts from his letters written to his wife and friends. This new, revised edition of an enduringly popular title on one of Scotland's best-loved artists contains a new foreword by the Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland, Sir John Leighton, and will feature a new cover design, updated to feature the popular flexicover binding.

Traditionally, ideas about twentieth-century 'modernism' - whether focused on literature, music or the visual arts - have made a distinction between 'high' art and the 'popular' arts of best-selling fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas 'Fats' Waller and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the 'popularity' of popular music in order to reconsider received and seeming self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.

Have you ever dreamt of having your own private museum tour with one of the world's most-celebrated artists? Take a walk through art history in the company of one of the pre-eminent American painters of our time, Alex Katz. Describing his personal encounters with the work of over 90 key artists, Katz's observations offer a fluent, vivid and incisive view, making Looking at Art with Alex Katz the perfect guide both for those looking for an introduction to the world of visual art, and anyone looking for a fresh view on their favorite artist. Includes entries on: Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Cezanne, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Doig, Alberto Giacometti, Philip Guston, David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Edvard Munch, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Rembrandt, Henri Rousseau, Titian, Luc Tuymans, Vincent van Gogh, Johannes Vermeer and more.

This 1998 collection is a specialised study to deal with the important question of Lewis's aggression. The eight contributors consider Lewis's career, from its inception to his final novels, within a major focus on the First World War and the interwar period. Their chapters examine Lewis's First World War art, his postwar politics and aesthetics, the new turn his painting and thought took in the 1930s and the connections between modernism, war and aggression. Overall, the volume offers a reassessment of the conventional view of Lewis as the uncontrolled aggressor of British modernism.

In Abstract Art Against Autonomy, Mark Cheetham provides a revolutionary account of abstraction in the visual arts since the decline of the formalist paradigms in the 1960s. He claims that abstract work remains a vital contributor to contemporary visual culture, but that it performs in a way that is different from its predecessors of the early and mid-twentieth century and cannot adequately be assessed without new models of understanding. Cheetham posits that abstraction has reacted to paradigms of purity with practices of impurity. By examining abstract art since the 1960s within a narrative of infection, resistance, and cure, Cheetham provides an opportunity to rethink paradigmatic genres - the monochrome and the mirror - and to link in new ways the work of artists whose work extends and complicates the tradition of abstract art, including Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Turrell, Gerhard Richter, Peter Halley. General Idea, and Taras Polataiko.

Radical Women tells an original story of British modernism from the perspective of Jessica Dismorr's career, along with the women artists - some famous, some lesser-known - she worked and exhibited with. The work of Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939) has been described as encapsulating 'the stylistic developments of twentieth-century British Art', and her oeuvre certainly encompasses some of its most exciting moments - from Rhythm in the early 1910s, through Vorticism, towards post-war modernist figuration and finally into the abstraction she shared with radical political artists groups in the 1930s. Within this period of intense creativity, which extended beyond art to literary and design accomplishments too, Dismorr was privileged to work and exhibit alongside some of the most exciting female artists of the time, including Barbara Hepworth and Winifred Nicholson, to lesser-known figures such as Dorothy Shakespear, Anne Estelle Rice and Helen Saunders. Bringing a web of fascinating connections to light for the first time, this publication provides a fresh interpretation of a pioneering period and the role women played within it.

Engaging some of the most ground-breaking and thought-provoking anime, manga, and science fiction films, "Tokyo Cyberpunk" offers insightful analysis of Japanese visual culture. Steven T. Brown draws new conclusions about electronically mediated forms of social interaction, as well as specific Japanese socioeconomic issues, all in the context of globalization and advanced capitalism. Penetrating and nuanced, this book makes a major contribution to the debate about what it means to be human in a posthuman world.

These essays on abstract painting by eleven of its most incisive critics trace the development of such critical issues as hard-edge painting, deductive and serial structure, monochrome abstraction, the psychological analogy, regionalism, and the "death of painting" in Postmodernism. The introduction and commentary by Frances Colpitt situates the essays historically and examines their philosophical sources and influences, from formalism and phenomenology to structuralism and poststructuralism. What emerges is a coherent and optimistic picture of abstract painting--the definitive contribution of modern art.

Peter Coker: Mind and Matter is a fully-illustrated catalogue presenting a selection of exceptional works by Peter Coker (1926-2004), bringing together pieces spanning the early 1950s through to the mid-1980s. The first publication focusing on Coker's works in over a decade, the catalogue will seek to reassess Coker's contribution to post-war figurative British art. Situating Coker within his contemporary British zeitgeist, Peter Coker: Mind and Matter will also focus on the significance of international artists to Coker's work, particularly Gustave Courbet and Nicolas de Stael. Undertaking modern day pilgrimages across France, Coker toured the sites favoured by the artists he revered, filtering their influence through the specificity of place. Coker was too talented an artist to mimic, but with acute sensitivity and perception, his vision of the world was constantly altered by the art that touched him. Correspondingly, his mode of depiction was subject to an ever-persistent evolution but with the materiality of paint and the primacy of process always at the heart of his practice. In Coker's words: "I think when you see exhibitions...you challenge your own thoughts, you refurbish the mind and eye, you are remoulded." The publication includes an introductory essay, a catalogue of carefully selected works with accompanying descriptions, a chronology, a bibliography, and numerous colour illustrations.

Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) has been known as the still, quiet centre around which the Bloomsbury Group revolved, renowned for her beauty, her complex romantic entanglements and, later, her domestic gravitas - and as the sister of Virginia Woolf. But Bell was also one of the most advanced British artists of her time, with her own distinctive vision, boldly interpreting new ideas about art which were brewing in France and beyond. This publication beautifully showcases Bell's pioneering oil paintings, photographs, ceramics, fabrics, decorative screens and works on paper in a revelatory affirmation of her vibrant and wideranging talent. Including more than 180 colour plates, Vanessa Bell is a definitive record of Bell's accomplishments, enhanced with photography of Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse that she occupied with creative flair alongside Duncan Grant and the rest of her unconventional family. With sections devoted to portraiture, landscape, still life, design, domestic scenes and female subjects, the book gathers together a rich chorus of voices - from renowned Bloomsbury scholars to emerging experts - delivering a fresh view of an intrepid modern artist seen clearly on her own terms at last.

Of all the giants of twentieth-century art, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was the most prolific writer. Here, available for the first time in paperback, are all of Kandinsky's writings on art, newly translated into English. Editors Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo have taken their translations directly from Kandinsky's original texts, and have included select interviews, lecture notes, and newly discovered items along with his more formal writings. The pieces range from one-page essays to the book-length treatises "On the Spiritual in Art" (1911) and "Point and Line to Plane" (1926), and are arranged in chronological order from 1901 to 1943. The poetry, good enough to stand on its literary merits, is presented with all the original accompanying illustrations. And the book's design follows Kandinsky's intentions, preserving the spirit of the original typography and layout.Kandinsky was nearly thirty before he bravely gave up an academic career in law for his true passion, painting. Though his art was marked by extraordinarily varied styles, Kandinsky sought a pure art throughout, one which would express the soul, or "inner necessity," of the artist. His uncompromising search for an art which would elicit a response to itself rather than to the object depicted resulted in the birth of nonobjective art--and in these writings, Kandinsky offered the first cogent explanation of his aims. His language was characterized by its desire for vivification, of the infusion of life into mundane things.Considered as a whole, Kandinsky's writings exceed all expectations of what an artist should accomplish with words. Not only do his ideas and observations make us rethink the nature of art and the wayit reflects the aspirations of his era, but they touch on matters vital to the situation of the human soul.

The home is, for many people, the location for their most intense relationships with visual things. Because they are constructed through the objects we choose, domestic spaces are deeply revealing of a range of cultural issues. How is our interpretation of an object affected by the domestic environment in which it is placed? Why choose a stainless steel teapot over a leopard print one? How do the images hanging on the walls of our homes arrive there? In placing contemporary art in the context of the 'ordinary' home, this book embarks on the contentious topic of whether 'high' art impacts on 'ordinary' people. What is the size and nature of the audience for contemporary art in Britain? Do people really visit more art galleries than attend football matches? What is the significance of the home in relation to such questions? Indeed, what constitutes 'art' in the home?
This book carefully unpicks these questions as well as the troubled relationship between the home as a place of comfort and reassurance and the often unsettling and challenging images offered by contemporary art. Within the art world, the home has been addressed as a subject and even used as a temporary gallery and a space for installations, and yet it is not common for works by today's avant-garde artists to be conceived and marketed to participate in the domestic lives that most people live.
Handsomely illustrated, this book unites contemporary art, craft and design, with sociology, anthropology and cultural studies to provide an unusual and forthright addition to ongoing art and culture debates.

The home is, for many people, the location for their most intense relationships with visual things. Because they are constructed through the objects we choose, domestic spaces are deeply revealing of a range of cultural issues. How is our interpretation of an object affected by the domestic environment in which it is placed? Why choose a stainless steel teapot over a leopard print one? How do the images hanging on the walls of our homes arrive there? In placing contemporary art in the context of the 'ordinary' home, this book embarks on the contentious topic of whether 'high' art impacts on 'ordinary' people. What is the size and nature of the audience for contemporary art in Britain? Do people really visit more art galleries than attend football matches? What is the significance of the home in relation to such questions? Indeed, what constitutes 'art' in the home?
This book carefully unpicks these questions as well as the troubled relationship between the home as a place of comfort and reassurance and the often unsettling and challenging images offered by contemporary art. Within the art world, the home has been addressed as a subject and even used as a temporary gallery and a space for installations, and yet it is not common for works by today's avant-garde artists to be conceived and marketed to participate in the domestic lives that most people live.
Handsomely illustrated, this book unites contemporary art, craft and design, with sociology, anthropology and cultural studies to provide an unusual and forthright addition to ongoing art and culture debates.

Many of the greatest avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century were Ukrainians or came from Ukraine. Whether living in Paris, St. Petersburg or Kyiv, they made major contributions to painting, sculpture, theatre, and film-making. Because their connection to Ukraine has seldom been explored, English-language readers are often unaware that figures such as Archipenko, Burliuk, Malevich, and Exter were inspired both by their country of origin and their links to compatriots. This book traces the avant-garde development from its pre-war years in Paris to the end of the 1920s in Kyiv. It includes chapters on the political dilemmas faced by this generation, the contribution of Jewish artists, and the work of several emblematic figures: Mykhailo Boichuk, David Burliuk, Kazimir Malevich, Vadym Meller, Ivan Kavaleridze, and Dziga Vertov.

Toward the end of his monumental career as a painter, sculptor, and lithographer, an elderly, sickly Matisse was unable to stand and use a paintbrush for long. In this late phase of his life-he was almost 80 years of age-he developed the technique of "carving into color," creating bright, bold paper cut-outs. Though dismissed by some contemporary critics as the folly of a senile old man, these gouaches decoupees (gouache cut-outs) in fact represented a revolution in modern art, a whole new medium that reimagined the age-old conflict between color and line. This edition of the first volume of our original award-winning XXL book provides a thorough historical context to Matisse's cut-outs, tracing their roots to his 1930 trip to Tahiti and continuing through to his final years in Nice. It includes many photos of Matisse, as well as some rare images by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the filmmaker F. W. Murnau, with texts by Matisse, publisher E. Teriade, the poets Louis Aragon, Henri Michaux, and Pierre Reverdy, and Matisse's son-in-law Georges Duthuit. In their deceptive simplicity, the cut-outs achieved both a sculptural quality and an early minimalist abstraction, which would profoundly influence generations of artists to come. Exuberant, multi-hued, and often grand in scale, these works are true pillars of 20th-century art, and as bold and innovative to behold today as they were in Matisse's lifetime. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

This collection of new essays addresses emotion in relation to the arts. The essays consider such topics as the paradox of fiction, emotion in the pure and abstract arts, and the rationality and ethics of emotional responses to art.

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. 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

Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was a pivotal figure in Abstract Expressionism and stands as one of the most important characters of post-war American art. This ground-breaking catalogue raisonne of paintings, which has been painstakingly researched over sixteen years, is both an invaluable scholarly resource and a celebration of Hofmann's remarkable artistic achievements. Hofmann's long and productive career began in Paris in 1904 where the young artist absorbed the manifold influences of the city's avant-garde. Drawn back to Germany due to war, Hofmann, exempt from military service, opened an innovative school for art in Munich. The school's reputation spread internationally and, as the political situation in Germany deteriorated during the 1930s, Hofmann re-located his school to New York. The city, a center for emerging artistic talent, was the perfect environment for Hofmann to continue his teaching practice, which he did until 1958, when he devoted himself entirely to painting. Throughout his American years, Hofmann enlarged the expressive language of abstraction, through his innovative use of color, materiality and structure. This impressive three-volumed catalogue marks a milestone in the scholarship and understanding of Hofmann's huge contribution to twentieth-century art. Through insightful essays, meticulous catalogue entries and supporting academic apparatus, it is shown how Hofmann's exceptional body of work often defies categorization - his was a highly personal visual language with which he endlessly explored pictorial structures and chromatic relationships. Both visually stunning and academically robust, this publication is an essential purchase for all those with a keen interest in one of the twentieth century's most significant and original artists.