Painting, according to Jean-Luc Marion, is a central topic of concern for philosophy, particularly phenomenology. For the question of painting is, at its heart, a question of visibility--of appearance. As such, the painting is a privileged case of the phenomenon; the painting becomes an index for investigating the conditions of appearance--or what Marion describes as "phenomenality" in general.
In The Crossing of the Visible, Marion takes up just such a project. The natural outgrowth of his earlier reflections on icons, these four studies carefully consider the history of painting--from classical to contemporary--as a fund for phenomenological reflection on the conditions of (in)visibility. Ranging across artists from Raphael to Rothko, Caravaggio to Pollock, The Crossing of the Visible offers both a critique of contemporary accounts of the visual and a constructive alternative. According to Marion, the proper response to the "nihilism" of postmodernity is not iconoclasm, but rather a radically iconic account of the visual and the arts that opens them to the invisible.

An in-depth look at the work and career of this fascinating artist, who is having a profound impact on contemporary painting Nigel Cooke is known for his complex paintings, which thematically explore the meeting point between creative labour, consciousness, art history, consumer culture, and nature. Primarily centred on meticulously painted, large-scale urban landscapes, which he calls 'hybrid theatrical spaces', Cooke's work employs disparate styles, often integrating trompe l'oeil miniature rocks and trees with backdrops of graffiti-marked buildings, to create scenes conveying obscure and macabre narratives. This survey of Cooke's career to date explores the artist's style, approach, and impact on contemporary art and includes his very latest works, completed shortly before publication.

This fascinating new book looks in detail at Renoir's influences, life and works. The first part begins examines his style; it covers Renoir's techniques and training: painting copies at the Louvre; his time at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; meeting his muse, Lise Trehot; working with fellow impressionist artists and his struggles for recognition. The volume then investigates Renoir's move away from Impressionism, his stay in Guernsey and also the changes to his personal life and the way in which these informed his work. It also documents his eventual success in the art world and considers the devastating series of illnesses and losses that blighted the end of Renoir's long painting career. The second part of the book is a gallery of Renoir's work in 300 glorious pictures, each accompanied by an in-depth analysis of its context within his life, his technique and his body of work as a whole.

Barry Herniman shows the reader how to capture the essence of a scene, and to inject that extra something: mood and atmosphere. This 'extra something' is what many watercolour artists seek, and it is clearly explained and beautifully demonstrated in this practical and enthralling guide to painting a variety of landscapes. This beautiful book brings Barry Herniman's stunning artwork to the fore with a sumptuous redesign, complete with new inspirational artworks and expanded sections on colour mixing and techniques.

No other artist, apart from J. M. W. Turner, tried as hard as 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 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. Whether it was through his early interest in Japanese prints, his time as a conscript in the dazzling light of Algeria, or his personal acquaintance with the major painters of the late 19th century, the work 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 was the late series of water lilies, painted in his own garden at Giverny, which, in their approach toward almost total formlessness, are really the origin of abstract art. This biography does full justice to this most remarkable and profoundly influential artist, and offers numerous reproductions and archive photos alongside a detailed and insightful commentary. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

Hailed the "Prince of the Impressionists", Claude Monet (1840-1926) transformed expectations for the purpose of paint on canvas. Defying the precedent of centuries, Monet did not seek to render only reality, but the act of perception itself. Working "en plein air" with rapid, impetuous brush strokes, he interrogated the play of light on the hues, patterns, and contours and the way in which these visual impressions fall upon the eye. Monet's interest in this space "between the motif and the artist" encompassed too the ephemeral nature of each image we see. In his beloved water lily series, as well as in paintings of poplars, grain stacks, and the Rouen cathedral, he returned to the same motif in different seasons, different weather conditions, and at different times of the day, to explore the constant mutability of our visual environment. This book offers the essential introduction to an artist whose works simultaneously reflected upon the purpose of a picture and the passage of time, and in so doing transformed irrevocably the story of art. 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

In every generation of artists, there are a few who propose a new set of ques- tions and alter the way we understand art. Peter Doig is such an artist. This handsome monograph considers the painter's entire career, beginning with the early work produced in the 1990s when Doig's enigmatic but wholly new conception of painting was first introduced to audiences. Doig was born to Scottish parents, spent several years as a child in Trinidad, later settling in Canada for his formative early teen years. He found his voice while at art school in London, albeit one that was out of step with the work of the time (much of it installation-based and dripping with neo-conceptualist leanings). He had developed a small following of fellow artists and critics when the rest of the art world caught up and took notice. In 2002, he left London for Trinidad, where he has remained. The small Caribbean island-with its own distinctive light and landscape-has deeply influenced his recent work. This volume was designed in close collaboration with the artist, with a cover and various interior elements created especially by the artist.

The Watercolour Sourcebook is a compilation of four selected titles from the What to Paint series, chosen specially to illustrate the wide range of scenes and subjects that can be captured in watercolour. The works of four master watercolourists - Geoff Kersey, Terry Harrison, Peter Woolley and Wendy Tait - are brought together in a collection of 60 beautiful, detailed projects on the subjects of trees, woodlands and forests; landscapes; hills and mountains and flowers respectively. Each project results in a full painting that is accompanied at the end of the book by a full-size outline that can be copied and applied to the artist's own watercolour paper using tracedown paper and pencil. The Watercolour Sourcebook aims to provide a wealth of inspiration to the painter who struggles to decide upon their subject matter, and arms the artist with everything they need to know about what they're about to paint, from colour palette to useful techniques.

The Education of the Eye examines the origins of visual culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It claims that at the moment when works of visual art were first displayed and contemplated as aesthetic objects two competing descriptions of the viewer or spectator promoted two very different accounts of culture. The first was constructed on knowledge, on what one already knew, while the second was grounded in the eye itself. Though the first was most likely to lead to a socially and politically elite form for visual culture, the second, it was held, would almost certainly end up in the chaos of the mob. But there was another route through these conflicting accounts of the visual that preserved the education of the eye while at the same time allowing the eye freedom to enter into the realm of culture. This third route, that of the sentimental look, is explored in a series of contexts: the gallery, the pleasure garden, the landscape park, and the country house. The Education of the Eye sets out to reclaim visual culture for the democracy of the eye and to explain how aesthetic contemplation may, once more, be open to all who have eyes to look. The book will interest historians of eighteenth-century British culture and historians of architecture, art, and landscape, as well as readers generally curious about the origins of our current visual culture.

The collections of twentieth-century paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, have developed largely through the generosity of individuals. Notable among these in the early decades of the century were Frank Hindley Smith and Mrs W F R Weldon, while since the Second World War the Museum's collections have been enriched through gifts and requests from Thomas Balston, R A P Bevan, Molly Freeman, Christopher Hewett and others. This book gives the reader a taste of the wide range of the collection, with its representative group of Camden Town and Euston Road School pictures, and important early works by Bonnard, Picasso and Matisse.

This book traces an evolution of equine and equestrian art in the United States over the last two centuries to counter conventional understandings of subjects that are deeply enmeshed in the traditions of elite English and European culture. In focusing on the construction of identity in painting and photography-of Blacks, women, and the animals themselves involved in horseracing, rodeo, and horse show competition-it illuminates the strategic and varying roles visual artists have played in producing cultural understandings of human-animal relationships. As the first book to offer a history of American equine and equestrian imagery, it shrinks the chasm of literature on the subject and illustrates the significance of the genre to the history of American art. This book further connects American equine and equestrian art to historical, theoretical, and philosophical analyses of animals and attests to how the horse endures as a vital, meaningful subject within the art world as well as culture at large. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, American art, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and animal studies.

This summer 2016 publication brings together the recent body of work by David Hockney, perhaps the most popular and versatile British artist of the last century. Following his sweeping exploration of landscape in the Royal Academy's galleries in 2012, this focused display will look exclusively at the portraits he has been painting in the last few years - the subjects of which are friends, family and art-world luminaries. After the sad events that touched his life in 2012, Hockney had stopped painting altogether. His move from Yorkshire to California coincided with his decision to revisit acrylic paints and bold colours. Vibrant, observant and full of life, these portraits mark a return to vivid, Technicolor form. Incisive text from Tim Barringer places these works within Hockney's development as a portrait painter, while curator Edith Devaney interviews the artist about the series, which he describes as 'twenty-hour exposures', in reference to the time each portrait takes to paint. The book will show the stages of each painting, from first to last mark, to give the reader a unique insight into Hockney's working method.

For Rene Magritte, painting was a form of thinking. Through paintings of ordinary objects rendered with illusionism, Magritte probed the limits of our perception-what we see and cannot see, the nature of representation-as a philosophical system for presenting ideas, and explored perspective as a method of visual argumentation. This book makes the claim that Magritte's painting is about vision and the act of viewing, of perception itself, and the process of how we see and experience things in the world, including paintings as things.

This definitive biography, 258 photographs of his work and catalog raisonne** of Walter Launt Palmer, a celebrated 20th century painter, presents his personal and creative life in great detail. The text covers the entire scope of Palmer's work, tracing his experiments with style from academicism to impressionism.

The artist Humphrey Ocean RA has painted portraits of Sir Paul McCartney and Philip Larkin, among many others. But alongside these prestigious commissions, he has always returned to drawing the simpler things in life: our 'alluringly unnatural world', as he puts it. The result is this idiosyncratic and charming collection of birds, all rendered in Ocean's unique style. With a species to discover on every page, this book is the perfect gift for any keen ornithologist, aspiring twitcher or dedicated listener to Tweet of the Day. As well as birdwatching around his home and studio in South London, Ocean regularly visits his sister, who is a nun in Nairobi and has loved birds all her life. There, he paints Kenyan birds such as the Eurasian bee-eater, the Bulbul and the Flycatcher that are 'local, a bit like our garden birds so nothing overly exotic, but of course to me they are'. They join the familiar gulls, thrushes and tits of the gardens, parks and hedgerows of the UK in this beautifully produced collection.

Memoir of a provocative Parisian art dealer at the heart of the 20th-century art world, available in English for the first time. Berthe Weill, a formidable Parisian dealer, was born into a Jewish family of very modest means. One of the first female gallerists in the business, she first opened the Galerie B. Weill in the heart of Paris's art gallery district in 1901, holding innumerable exhibitions over nearly forty years. Written out of art history for decades, Weill has only recently regained the recognition she deserves. Under five feet tall and bespectacled, Weill was beloved by the artists she supported, and she rejected the exploitative business practices common among art dealers. Despite being a self-proclaimed "terrible businesswoman," Weill kept her gallery open for four decades, defying the rising tide of antisemitism before Germany's occupation of France. By the time of her death in 1951, Weill had promoted more than three hundred artists-including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, and Suzanne Valadon-many of whom were women and nearly all young and unknown when she first exhibited them. Pow! Right in the Eye! makes Weill's provocative 1933 memoir finally available to English readers, offering rare insights into the Parisian avant-garde and a lively inside account of the development of the modern art market.

Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Andy Warhol each significantly shaped the development of art in the twentieth century. These Modern masters are the subjects of four small books, the first volumes in a series featuring important artists in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Each book presents a single artist and guides readers through a dozen of his most memorable achievements. Works are reproduced in color and accompanied by informative and accessible short essays that provide background on the artworks and on the artist himself, illuminating technique, style, subject matter and significance. Written by Carolyn Lanchner, former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum, these books are excellent resources for readers interested in the stories behind masterpieces of the Modern canon and for those who wish to understand the contributions of individual artists to the history of Modern art. This volume focuses on Matisse.

Although Vincent van Gogh's and Paul Gauguin's artistic collaboration in the South of France lasted no more than two months, their stormy relationship has continued to fascinate art historians, biographers and psychoanalysts as well as film makers and the general public. Two great 19th century figures with powerful and often clashing sensibilities, they shared a house, worked side by side, drank, caroused and argued passionately about art. Their brief venture together, richly documented in the artists' letters and paintings, would be compelling enough even if it had not culminated in the catastrophe of van Gogh's life - his ear cutting. This traumatic climax to van Gogh's and Gauguin's weeks spent in the "Yellow House" in Arles has raised profound questions about the nature of their relationship and about their behavior before and after van Gogh's self-mutilation."Van Gogh and Gauguin" explores the artists' intertwined lives from a psychoanalytic perspective in order to draw a nuanced and sophisticated picture of the artists' dealings with each other. The book also examines crucial art historical issues such as the aesthetic convictions that both united and divided the two men, and the extent to which they influenced each other's art.

From striking desert sunsets to misty mountains to fields of gorgeous wildflowers, Kolbie Blume's projects help you learn basic watercolour skills and techniques with the added bonus of resulting in beautiful paintings worthy of prominent display in your home. Each chapter teaches progressively more advanced techniques and subjects, allowing you to build upon your skills as you work through the projects. The final paintings Kolbie teaches show you how to combine all the skills you've developed in a variety of unique, exciting ways - the sky's the limit! With all the tips, tricks and techniques you need to dive into watercolor painting, this collection of brilliant watercolor projects is the perfect guide for the beginner painter and any artist looking to improve their landscape skills. This book contains 30 projects.

Painting in eighteenth-century Yangchow, a city that dominated the political and economic scene of mid-Qing China, has traditionally been viewed as the product of a group of nonconformist, "eccentric" artists who were supported by wealthy merchants.
This book, however, does not focus on the creative energy of the individual artist, the rise of the Yangchow school of painting, or patronage narrowly defined. Rather, it studies eighteenth-century Yangchow paintings as artistic products shaped by collective social and cultural experiences, and by constant exchanges between the artists and their audience. The author examines the paintings as commodities, revealing the mechanism of their exchange and the values negotiated, and she interprets the paintings in a framework that moves beyond economics into the social, political, historical, and literary contexts of their creation and appreciation.
The book begins by considering merchant patrons long associated with the Yangchow school of painting, and goes on to reveal that there were patrons from lower socioeconomic levels who were, in fact, perhaps the major consumers of Yangchow painting. The author then discusses four artists who exemplify the diversity of backgrounds and artistic traditions of Yangchow painters and patrons.
Fang Shih-shu represents the traditional scholar painter of conservative orthodox landscapes. Huang Shen, by contrast, represents painters with craftsman backgrounds who mingle the values of the literati with the technical skill of artisans. The last two painters, Cheng Hsieh and Chin Nung, represent the emergence of new types of artists who adopted painting as an occupation and commercialized both their artistic products and their personal cultural refinement and literati status.
By reconstructing the economic lives of these artists, examining their social roles, identifying their networks of patronage, and investigating their aesthetic choices, this book illuminates the process of professionalization of the scholar-artist and the commodification of literati culture in late imperial China.

Pollock and After: The Critical Debate brings together key writings on debates about Abstract Expressionism and Modernist art history. It is an essential resource for understanding post-war American art and culture. The second edition has been fully revised and updated in response to new critical approaches to post-war American art. It includes nine new articles and a substantial overview essay by Francis Frascina.
Articles are grouped into three parts, each with an introduction by Francis Frascina. Part One includes two foundational articles by the influential Modernist critic, Clement Greenberg, and represents the debate about Greenberg's work, with contributions by T.J. Clark and Michael Fried. Part Two focuses on revisionist writers, who questioned established ideas about Modernist art history, examining the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and the politics of McCarthyism and the Cold War.
The third part, which is new to the volume, is devoted to recent developments of revisionist critiques. Contributors explore the work of Greenberg's contemporaries, the relationship between critical and commercial responses to Abstract Expressionism, and perceptions of cultural value in the 1940s and 1950s, and challenge assumptions about ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the construction of the 'post-war American artist'.

Als Maler, aber auch als kunstlerischem Rollenmodell wurde Raffael im 19. Jahrhundert eine einzigartige Stellung zugesprochen. Vorbereitet durch eine lange, schon im 16. Jahrhundert einsetzende Rezeptionsgeschichte, stand die Verehrung seines Werkes wie seiner Person um die Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert auf einem Hoehepunkt. Der Raffael-Kult erfasste Kunstkritik und Kunstgeschichte ebenso wie Literatur und Musikgeschichte. Raffael wurde zum Paradigma: Auf ihn wurden nicht nur kunsttheoretische, sondern auch religioese und gesellschaftliche Vorstellungen projiziert, welche die ideale Stellung des Kunstlers und Menschen in seiner Zeit benannten. Die Raffael-Rezeption steht im 19. Jahrhundert unter einer Spannung, die sich aus dem Gegen- und Miteinander der Aktualitat eines kunstlerischen OEuvres aus dem 16. Jahrhundert und dessen Historisierung ergibt. Sie umfasst sowohl die Fortschreibung bzw. neue Entwurfe von Kunstlerlegenden als auch die Entwicklung historisch-wissenschaftlicher Methoden zu Biographie und Kunstgeschichte. Das auf den Vortragen einer trilateralen Konferenz in der Villa Vigoni im Dezember 2007 basierende Buch bildet den zweiten Band der Reihe Klassizistisch-romantische Kunst(t)raume und schliesst unmittelbar an Fragestellungen an, die im ersten Band untersucht wurden.

Janina Roider (*1986) is part of a young generation of painters whose work is positioned amid a fascination for technological progress, profound knowledge of art history, and a seismographic sensibility for current events. She confidently makes use of digital tools as well as gestural, analogue brushstrokes, which are equalised on the canvas. Fiction and reality blend on both contextual and formal levels. Make It Newer! is an ode to Gunther Foerg, the abstract artist whose spirit of invention she has adopted as a role model. The title is programmatic. The book's dimensions transport the explosive force of her paintings, which collide with each other on a large scale. Featuring essays by Florian Matzner, Hans-Joerg Clement, and Johannes Ungelenk, as well as an interview with Birgit Sonna. Text in English and German.

Over thousands of years, the art of Chinese painting has evolved, while also staying loyal to its traditional roots. Despite various schools of thought, styles and techniques, three primary categories have emerged across the discipline: landscape, figure and bird-and-flower. Using fine ink and water brush strokes on paper or silk, Chinese artists have developed a unique style-one that's famous throughout the world. This book highlights 50 Chinese paintings, pulled from museum collections in China and around the world, including: British Museum, London Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas Osaka City Museum of Art, Osaka Palace Museum, Beijing Palace Museum, Taipei Shanghai Museum, Shanghai The paintings shown are representative of the categories, historical periods and styles of this artistic tradition. Detailed professional interpretations and notes allow readers to learn more about the pieces themselves, the artists and the context in which they were created. Plus, photo enlargements of key details get readers up close to these masterpieces. As one of the world's oldest continuous art forms, Chinese painting has a truly special history. This comprehensive guide allows modern readers to travel through time, experiencing important moments in Chinese history and society through beautiful pieces of artwork.