The legend of Jean-Michel Basquiat is as strong as ever. Synonymous with 1980s New York, the artist first appeared in the late 1970s under the tag SAMO, spraying caustic comments and fragmented poems on the walls of the city. He appeared as part of a thriving underground scene of visual arts and graffiti, hip hop, post-punk, and DIY filmmaking, which met in a booming art world. As a painter with a strong personal voice, Basquiat soon broke into the established milieu, exhibiting in galleries around the world. Basquiat's expressive style was based on raw figures and integrated words and phrases. His work is inspired by a pantheon of luminaries from jazz, boxing, and basketball, with references to arcane history and the politics of street life-so when asked about his subject matter, Basquiat answered "royalty, heroism and the streets." In 1983 he started collaborating with the most famous of art stars, Andy Warhol, and in 1985 was on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. When Basquiat died at the age of 27, he had become one of the most successful artists of his time. First published in an XXL edition, this unprecedented insight into Basquiat's art is now available in a compact, accessible volume in celebration of TASCHEN's 40th anniversary. With pristine reproductions of his most seminal paintings, drawings, and notebook sketches, it offers vivid proximity to Basquiat's intricate marks and scribbled words, further illuminated by an introduction to the artist from editor Hans Werner Holzwarth, as well as an essay on his themes and artistic development from curator and art historian Eleanor Nairne. Richly illustrated year-by-year chapter breaks follow the artist's life and quote from his own statements and contemporary reviews to provide both personal background and historical context. 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.

Throughout his international career spanning more than thirty years, artist and writer David Batchelor has long been preoccupied with colour. ‘Colour is not just a feature of [my] sculpture or painting,’ he notes, ‘but its central and overriding subject.’ This new publication is devoted to an ongoing series of sculptures titled Concretos. First made in 2011, Concretos combine concrete with a variety of brightly coloured – and often found – materials. The publication features a text by Batchelor charting the origins and development of Concretos. He reveals that the first Concreto was made after encountering coloured glass shards embedded in a concrete wall in the back streets of Palermo. Over time these Concretos, their title a nod to the Latin American art movement to which Batchelor’s work is much indebted, have become more complex adventures in layering, pattern and process. Elements such as acrylic plastic, spray and household gloss paint, steel, fabric and found objects all find themselves set in a concrete base. The most recent works, titled Extra-Concretos (2019–) retain much of the simplicity of the early pieces while working on a much larger scale. In an essay commissioned for the publication, curator Eleanor Nairne considers Concretos in light of their material possibilities. Nairne’s vivid text draws connections between the sculptures and a wide range of art historical and literary references. Some of the playful and sensual characteristics of Batchelor’s artistic vocabulary are considered in relation to floral bouquets, sewing-machines, ice cream and poetry. Architectural historian Adrian Forty’s essay discusses concrete’s physical qualities and relationship with modernity. He notes that the imperfect nature and apparent neutrality of the material is key to its enduring place within architecture, design and in Batchelor’s case, contemporary sculpture. ‘In the Concretos,’ asserts Forty, ‘concrete plays a necessary part in allowing colour to be itself. Present, but at the same time part of the barely noticed, half-invisible infrastructure of the city, concrete’s very neutrality performs an unexpectedly active part in these works.’ The publication is edited by David Batchelor and Matt Price, designed by Hyperkit, printed by Park, London, and published by Anomie, London. The publication coincides with the first large-scale survey exhibition of Batchelor’s work taking place at Compton Verney, Warwickshire in 2022. The publication has been supported by Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and Arts Council England. David Batchelor was born in Dundee in 1955 and lives and works in London. In 2013, a major solo exhibition of Batchelor’s two-dimensional work, ‘Flatlands’, was displayed at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and toured to Spike Island, Bristol. Batchelor’s work was included in the landmark group exhibition ‘Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015’ at Whitechapel Gallery, London. ‘My Own Private Bauhaus’, a solo exhibition of sculptures and paintings by Batchelor was presented by Ingleby Gallery during the Edinburgh Art Festival, 2019. Between 2017 and 2020 a large-scale work by Batchelor was displayed in the collection of Tate Modern. He is represented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, and Galeria Leme, São Paulo. Batchelor’s portfolio also includes a number of major temporary and permanent artworks in the public realm including a chromatic clock titled ‘Sixty Minute Spectrum’ installed in the roof of the Hayward Gallery, London. ‘Chromophobia’, Batchelor’s book on colour and the fear of colour in the West, was published by Reaktion Books (2000), and is now available in ten languages. His more recent book, 'The Luminous and the Grey' (2014), is also published by Reaktion. In 2008 he was commissioned to edit ‘Colour’ an anthology of writings on colour from 1850 to the present published by Whitechapel/MIT Press.

The legend of Jean-Michel Basquiat is as strong as ever. Synonymous with New York in the 1980s, the artist first appeared in the late 1970s under the tag SAMO, spraying caustic comments and fragmented poems on the walls of the city. He appeared as part of a thriving underground scene of visual arts and graffiti, hip hop, post-punk, and DIY filmmaking, which met in a booming art world. As a painter with a strong personal voice, Basquiat soon broke into the established milieu, exhibiting in galleries around the world. Basquiat's expressive style was based on raw figures and integrated words and phrases. His work is inspired by a pantheon of luminaries from jazz, boxing, and basketball, with references to arcane history and the politics of street life-so when asked about his subject matter, Basquiat answered "royalty, heroism and the streets." In 1983 he started collaborating with the most famous of art stars, Andy Warhol, and in 1985 was on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. When Basquiat died at the age of 27, he had become one of the most successful artists of his time. This book allows an unprecedented insight into Basquiat's art, with pristine reproductions of his most seminal paintings, drawings, and notebook sketches. In large-scale format, the book offers vivid proximity to Basquiat's intricate marks and scribbled words, further illuminated by an introduction to the artist from editor Hans Werner Holzwarth, as well as an essay on his themes and artistic development from curator and art historian Eleanor Nairne. Richly illustrated year-by-year chapter breaks follow the artist's life and quote from his own statements and contemporary reviews to provide both personal background and historical context.

In 1940s occupied Paris, Jean Dubuffet began to champion a progressive vision for art; one that rejected classical notions of beauty in favor of a more visceral aesthetic. Taking a pioneering approach to materiality and technique, the artist variously blended paint with sand, glass, tar, coal dust and string. At the same time, he began to assemble a collection of art brut-work that was made outside the academic tradition of fine art- even visiting psychiatric wards from 1945 to collect work by patients. This book features texts from leading scholars and is accompanied by images that illuminate Dubuffet's attempts to move beyond the artistic expectations of his time. The works are grouped into six thematic sections that focus on specific series, from his graffiti-inspired "Walls" and his notorious portrait series, "People are Much More Beautiful Than They Think" to the "Corps de dames", a controversial series of "female" landscapes, and his anthropomorphic sculptures, "Little Statues of Precarious Life." Exquisitely produced, this celebration of Dubuffet's work embraces his world view that art is for everyone, not just the elite.

Alice Neel was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century and a pioneer among women artists. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Neel was never fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements. “One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by,� she explained, “right hot off the griddle.� This beautifully designed volume takes a unique approach to the exhibition catalog, highlighting Neel’s understanding of the fundamentally political nature of how we look at others, and what it means to feel seen. Long a favorite of portrait lovers, Neel has recently gained an even wider 21st-century audience appreciative of the searing candor with which she viewed the world, the depth of her humanity, and her championing of the underdog. This beautifully produced catalog features a thoroughly modern design, as well as an essay by renowned critic Hilton Als and poetry by Daisy Lafarge.

This exhibition and accompanying book offers the first opportunity to appreciate the resonances between the studio practices of Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke. Growing up in Jewish emigre homes, both artists found themselves drawn to unconventional materials, such as latex, plastics, erasers, and laundry lint, which they used to make work that was viscerally related to the body. They shared an interest in repetition to amplify the absurdity of their work. These repeated forms--whether Hesse's spiraling breast or Wilke's labial fold--sought to confront the phallo-centricism of twentieth-century sculpture with a texture that might capture a more intimate, psychologically charged experience. Eleanor Nairne, the curator of the exhibition, writes the lead essay, followed by texts by Jo Applin and Anne Wagner. An extensive chronology by Amy Tobin includes primary-source materials, which bring a new history of how both artists' work sits in relation to the wider New York scene. Also included are excerpts of both artists' writing.