Hatje Cantz Verlag

Robert Kennedy was the most imposing politician he ever met. And Johnny Depp is incredibly photogenic. Steve Schapiro (*1934 in Brooklyn) ought to know, because he has actually photographed them all: his expressive portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammad Ali, Barbara Streisand, Marlon Brando, David Bowie, Jodie Foster, and Robert de Niro are part of our collective visual memory. Besides his work with the stars, Schapiro and his camera accompanied the greatest political and social upheavals of the sixties and seventies. These photographs have also achieved iconic status. This volume includes a selection of photos taken over a period of more than fifty. In the accompanying essays, Schapiro explains how they were created, describing his experiences in a lively, humorous way. Along with previously unpublished photographs, the book also features new works by the old master.

Influenced by Futurism, Fauvism, and Cubism, printmaker, set designer, and designer Vladimir Tatlin (1885 1953) made painting his artistic basis. Referencing Pablo Picasso s assemblages, Tatlin developed his Counter Reliefs, three-dimensional sculptural constructions out of wood, cardboard, metal, and wire. With these, he unhinged the laws of painting, creating his own genre of art as well as a new understanding of the materials he used. His visionary, unrealized project of building a tower to propagate the ideals and aims of the Russian Revolution left its mark on generations of architects, artists, and authors. Tatlin exploded the boundaries of artistic activity and brought rhythm and motion to sculpture. This publication provides systematic insight into his oeuvre and reflects the most current research, starting with the young artist s revolutionary élan.

Alongside his development of a revolutionary abstract style, Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) demonstrated an ambition to go beyond conventional easel painting. His famous large paintings with musical and theatrical associations transformed into veritable environments. The catalogue explores the evolution of a Gesamtkunstwerk in the work of Kandinsky including essays by leading Kandinsky scholars on painting as a total work of art, or the artist’s interest in music and theatre. Separated into three sections, it illustrates how Kandinsky’s fascination for the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the principles of synesthesia developed into large-scale painting within the context of the two highly significant artistic groups Blaue Reiter and Bauhaus, as well as in response to the changing historical circumstances, last but not least, culminating in his large-scale decorative utopian murals and installations.

During the final years of his life, Ferdinand Hodler (1853 1918) continued to develop his painting, creating some of his most important and touching masterpieces. In series and variations he lent new, liberated form to his life s great themes: the beauty of the Swiss mountains and lakes, his fascination for women, the examination of his own life, and the confrontation with death. This is the first publication to provide an extensive overview of Hodler s late works from the years 1913 to 1918. They include self-portraits, the impressive series about the suffering and death of his lover, Valentine Godé-Darel, and numerous gorgeous panoramas of the Alps and Lake Geneva, painted in close-up or at a distance at various times of the day and year. One highlight is his group of figures, View to Infinity, a monumental mural.

Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) was one of the leading figures of the Russian avant-garde. His heterogeneous body of work ranges from paintings, costume and set designs for the theatre, and the invention of a new genre — the counter-relief — to architectural designs for a tower to propagate the ideals and goals of the October Revolution and the utopian flying machine known as the Letatlin. This publication is a summary of an interdisciplinary symposium that took place in late September 2012 at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, where researchers from around the world were invited to take stock of and reexamine the artist’s creative methods and his impact. The publication affords systematic insight into Tatlin’s oeuvre and reflects the current state of research.

The oeuvre of El Greco (1541-1614) was first introduced to a broad German audience in 1910, through Julius Meier-Graefe's The Spanish Journey. Numerous artists subsequently caught Greco fever when they first saw larger groups of his works in the exhibitions that followed in Munich in 1911 and Dusseldorf in 1912. In his disregard for the Renaissance rulebook of painting, his love of dramatic mood and emphasis on emotive color and form, El Greco provided acrucial precedent for painters such as Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer, Ludwig Meidner and especially members of the Blaue Reiter (August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch and others). El Greco and Modernism presents more than 40 paintings by El Greco, gathered from the most famous museums around the world, and sets them alongside the work of the modernists he influenced. Describing his critical role in such currents as Symbolism, Cubism, Expressionism and abstract art, this catalogue offers a richly illustrated account of how an artist who, in his time, had no imitators and virtually no pupils, would become a flexible lens for artistic self-discovery and one of the fathers of modernism in the early years of the twentieth century.

In light of the popular, beautiful paintings of his Impressionist phase, it is easy to lose sight of the complexity of the oeuvre of Edgar Degas (1834 1917). All his life, the artist experimented with printing techniques and drawing as well as photography and sculpture. In his late work (1890 1910/12), the delicate, detailed painting of his mature period yields to a unique pleasure in technical experimentation and an obsessive creativity, which increasingly liberated the means of depiction from its reproductive function. As if in a dreamlike state, the present and past, things seen and remembered, are united, resulting in nude studies, ballet scenes, landscapes, and portraits. This is the first publication to present a comprehensive view of the technical diversity and wide range of themes in Degas oeuvre.

Willem de Kooning is celebrated in the United States as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century and a leading Abstract Expressionist. In Europe, however, the artist has yet to be fully recognized, particularly with regards to his work of the 1960s and 1970s, when he retreated from urban life to live and work on Long Island. This segment of de Kooning's oeuvre bears the imprint of a fundamental experience of the landscape, for it was in these Long Island works that he developed a new style of figuration, characterized by a transformed sense of color and energetic gesture. This period of vigorous, pioneering creativity is illuminated for the first time in this volume, which features a concentrated selection of large-format paintings. In images and essays by Klaus Kertess, Harold Rosenberg, and others, the book illustrates how de Kooning's paintings--although recognizable as landscapes--grew abstract under the influence of his intense experience of nature.

Genius of the large-format camera, the long exposure and the silverprint, New York-based photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has made pictures that seem to contain whole aeons of time within themselves, and suggest an infinite palette of tonal wealth in blacks, grays and whites. Many of these images have now become a part of art culture's popular image bank (as U2's use of Sugimoto's «Boden Sea» for the cover of their 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon, demonstrated), while simultaneously evoking photography's earliest days: «I probably call myself a postmodern-experienced pre-postmodern modernist» he once joked to an interviewer. This absolutely exquisite retrospective is an expanded edition of Hatje Cantz's 2005 volume. It is the first to feature works from all of Sugimoto's series to date: his celebrated portraits of wax figures, his incredible seascapes that seem to suggest a person's first conscious view of the ocean, the extremely long exposures of theaters which elevate the white, luminescent cinema screen and transform it into a magical image of an altar and the fascinating dioramas of scientific display cases, which invite us to travel far into the past. Additions to the original edition are two new groups of works, «Lightning Fields» (2006) and «Photogenic Drawings» (2007). Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at St. Paul's University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA. He currently lives in New York City.

Widely admired for his artfully shaped mounds of vibrantly colored powder pigment, Bombay-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor won the Turner Prize in 1991. Since the 1970s, Kapoor--through poetically abstract works in materials as diverse as stone, steel and glass--has explored the themes of spirituality and transcendence, a preoccupation that has its roots in his native India. This volume introduces three performative wax pieces, unlike any he has previously produced: a technician loads a nine-foot-long cannon, which sends a 40-pound blood-red wax blob shooting into the corner. The resulting trace has been described as «a giant gunshot wound.» Also included is an essay by Vito Acconci, and published together here for the first time are Kapoor's works in wax from 1992 to the present and his print work from 1987 onward, enabling a closer exploration of the interplay between painting and sculpture in his oeuvre.

Trained sociologist and photographer Marrigje de Maar (born 1944) seeks out those magical households in which families have come together for generations — where life has worn itself into a house. Over the course of five trips to China, she photographed housing in Chinese communes that had been scheduled for demolition, finding within them a surprising diversity of types and uses of classical living spaces.

Editor and P.S. 1/MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach credits the late Susan Sontag with sparking the idea for this survey of Body and Action art in the course of their conversations about artistic approaches that describe and question the human condition. «Into Me / Out of Me» gathers work focused on the imagined, descriptive and performative acts of passing into, through and out of the human body — explorations and visualizations of the wet and the dry, the inner and the outer — and the physical exchange of the body with the material world. Spanning over 40 years and featuring an international group of more than 130 artists, it addresses the primordial relationship between the internal and the external in three chapters: «Metabolism» (eating, drinking, excreting); «Reproduction» (intercourse, conception, birth); and «Violence» (shooting, impaling, perforation). Featured works range from Hannah Wilke's unflinching self-portraits in illness to Matthew Barney's performance-based installations to Kara Walker's antebellum figures. Artists include Chris Burden, Valerie Export, Bruce Nauman, Carolee Schneemann, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol, Vito Acconci, Patty Chang, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Mona Hatoum, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ana Mendieta, Paul McCarthy, John Miller, Frank Moore, Carolee Schneemann, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Marina Abramovic, among many others.

Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov (born 1957) is a storyteller who roots his themes in melancholic, humorous reflections on everyday life. His ambitious new installation at Ikon Gallery in the U.K. combines drawings, paintings, video and objects, and includes works made prior to 1989 (when Bulgaria was under Communist rule) alongside later pieces for which he is better known.

The work of Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov (born 1957) balances political and social critique with deliberate naivete. The artist's activities incorporate small-scale drawing, sculpture and installation, translating his lived experiences under a totalitarian Communist regime into universally relatable expressions of anxiety and thwarted hope.

The Russian-Armenian painter Ivan Konstantinovitch Aivasovski (1817–1900) enjoyed international fame and rose to become a legend in his own lifetime, yet in the West only few are familiar with his work today. Although raised in ordinary circumstances, he even advanced to become court painter to Czar Nicholas I. On the basis of a selection of the painter’s most famous seascapes, this monograph provides the reader with insight into Aivasovski’s extensive oeuvre, relating it both to Netherlandish maritime as well as Romantic European landscape painting. The ship on the high seas in Aivasovski’s paintings is always an allegory of some kind: calm, watery surfaces reflecting light from the sun or moon alternate with roaring storms and tumultuous surf-palpable symbols for life’s perils. Coastlines and stretches of land, shipwreck motifs, mythological scenes, as well as highly dynamic images of waves that virtually catapult the viewer straight into the picture are also part of his repertoire.

Which institutions are on the cutting edge? Which gallery scene is the most vital? Which site-specific artworks should not be missed? Which biennials are scheduled for the coming years? Contemporary Europe is a concise, up-to-date and insightful presentation of European museums, art institutions, galleries, art fairs, biennials and public artworks.

In her digitally manipulated photographs and installations, German artist Claudia Rogge (born 1968) deconstructs social roles by dramatizing them. Taking such cliches as the innocent child, the grim executioner and the masked temptress, Rogge replicates their images ad nauseam until all meaning is drained from them.

Fernand Leger (1881-1955) is one of the few Modernist artists that can be said to have anticipated both American Abstraction and American Pop, and to have made a deliberate relationship with American culture: He visited the U.S. several times, and during the Second World War, from 1940 to 1945, he lived in exile in New York. In America, Leger found much to admire--above all, a dynamic embrace of industry sympathetic to his own quasi-Futurist love of technological energies. An early critic of Leger described him as more of a «Tubist» than a Cubist, noting the cool metal cylinders that fill his early work. It was through such motifs that the artist approached modern life, viewing industry as a force for the good and its translation into art as a Modern vernacular. «Our pictures are our slang», he optimistically declared towards the end of his stay in New York. During that time, Leger had produced some of his most important works, which found a ready audience in the younger American artists surrounding him. Paris-New York covers the artist's entire oeuvre, from the Cubist-influenced early work to the later, cheerful large-format paintings. Special attention is paid to the American dimension of Leger's oeuvre, and the volume traces his impact on American artists--primarily on Roy Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, but also on other late twentieth-century artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Al Held, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

Nicknamed «Le Douanier» («the customs officer»), Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) was in his early forties when he finally embraced his metier in painting, arriving with his independently achieved realism fully formed. Like Erik Satie, whom he resembles in what Roger Shattuck memorably called «tranquil self-confidence», Rousseau straddles the Parisian avant gardes at the turn of the century, admired by Redon, Gauguin, Jarry and Degas at the outset of his career, and championed by Picasso, Apollinaire and Delaunay towards its close. Rousseau's style was derisively dubbed «Primitivism» by the press, but its lucid unity of limpid color and eerily serene definition was sophisticated in its simplicity, as his early advocates knew. Happily, Rousseau was so steeped in his vision that he could not be diverted from it--Apollinaire wrote that «Rousseau had so strong a sense of reality that when he painted a fantastic subject, he sometimes took fright and, trembling all over, had to open the window.» With 80 color illustrations, this book commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the artist's death, placing at its core Rousseau's fascination with the frictions between a domesticated West and an untamed imaginary natural world. Previously unpublished records of early encounters with his works dimensionalize Rousseau within the lively milieu of his time, and show him to have been, from the start, a much beloved artist.

Jeff Koons' spectacular October 2008 exhibition at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie presented the infamous series of sculptures and paintings known collectively as Celebration, a project whose fabrication has involved so much labor (both manual and computer-aided) that Koons seemed to almost vanish from the art world radar in the 1990s, when he first undertook the series. At present, Celebration's best-known work may be the 10-foot-tall, stainless-steel «Balloon Dog», typical of the outsize scale and remarkably clean sheen of Koons' sculptures, in which the sensory joys of childhood object relations are revisited and espoused. Such works wear their playroom origins on their sleeves, but their gargantuan proportions, with their attendant sense of menace, establish them firmly in the adult world as infant objects retrieved and rebuilt with adult strength. «The work tries to gain support from the confidence of the gesture», Koons says, «to be kind of in the moment, and to have confidence within the self.» Inasmuch as such observations could be true of much art, Koons is unusually open about what drives his work, all the while preserving its self-sufficiency as art. This monograph documents these mammoth installations in the Neue Nationalgalerie's Upper Hall, an exhibition that without doubt constitutes a milestone in the artist's career.

Iranian photography reveals a radical aesthetic, embracing both beauty and political resistance, that is shared by practitioners based in Iran--who have devised innovative responses to that country's political restrictions--as well as Iranians in exile--who have been able to create politically and culturally provocative works for the past 30 years. Shirin Neshat and Kaveh Golestan are perhaps the best-known photographers featured in this publication, which also introduces the work of 34 equally accomplished artists--including Reza Aramesh, Parastou Forouhar, Abbas Kiarostami, Amiral Ghasemi and Shadi Ghadirian. Along with images of their work, some of which has rarely been seen, each photographer contributes a narrative about their life and artistic practice, creating a definitive document on the state of contemporary Iranian photography that transcends Western cliches and misconceptions about the culture of this singular country.

During his lifetime, painter Sebastiano del Piombo (ca. 1485-1547) was considered, along with Giorgione, the great hope of the Venetian School. Sebastiano later became Raphael's biggest competitor in Rome--he was, in fact, the only Renaissance artist capable of painting in the style of both the Venetian and the Central Italian Schools, taking cues from Giorgione, Da Vinci and Michelangelo to create a uniquely discerning and colorful style. Sebastiano was an innovator as well--he was the first to discover a technique that made it possible to paint with oil on stone, which Michelangelo deemed only for «women and lazybones like Sebastiano.» Michelangelo's poor opinion of the painter's abilities has perhaps shrouded Sebastiano's reputation for centuries. In his Lives of the Artists (1550), Giorgio Vasari reiterated Michelangelo's chastisement. A rediscovery of this Venetian portraitist is long overdue.

n David Goldblatt received the world-renowned Hasselblad Award in 2006, he had been making photographs of the South African landscape and culture for more than 50 years. Born in 1930 in a gold-mining town near Johannesburg, his parents were Jewish refugees from Lithuania, and they raised him with an emphasis on tolerance and antiracism. In 1975, at the height of apartheid, Goldblatt explored white nationalist culture in Some Afrikaners Photographed, and in the 80s he observed workers on the Kwandebele-Pretoria bus, many of whom traveled eight hours every day to work and back. His late-90s solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art focused on architectural work, and showed off Goldblatt's uncanny ability to discover a society through its buildings and landscapes. His photographs of architectural structures revealed the ways that ideology had defined his home country's landscape.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was one of the Bauhaus' most influential teachers; his photographic skills, as well as his writing on the subject, helped to secure the medium's integral place in modern art. One of Moholy-Nagy's most notable contributions was his extensive exploration--from 1922 through 1943--of the aesthetic possibilities of the photogram (he coined the term). These ghostly traces of objects placed on photographic paper during exposure are part of a prolific legacy that included painting, sculpture and stage design. Moholy-Nagy's photograms have become emblematic of the medium, though they have yet to be fully critically explored. This well-illustrated catalogue raisonne is the first to feature all of his known photograms--nearly 450--in chronological order. This exhaustive volume examines the artistic, technical and biographical circumstances under which the works were created, places them in relation to other parts of Moholy-Nagy's practice and analyzes selected pieces at length. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) taught at the Bauhaus for five years, founding The School of Design in Chicago, which became the Illinois Institute of Technology, in 1939.