Hatje Cantz Verlag

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Vienna was one of the six largest cities in the world, recently transformed by rapid industrialization, and by successive waves of immigration from various corners of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its lively cabaret and coffeehouse culture was abuzz with creative zeal and played host to the most exciting developments in European culture, from psychoanalysis to the earliest incarnations of Austrian modernism, above all the Viennese Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. Hatje Cantz's opulent publication on turn-of-the-century Vienna examines the years 1890-1918, placing at the center of those maelstrom decades the openly sexual portraits and landscapes of Gustav Klimt and the erotically contorted figurations of his protégé, Egon Schiele. Also profiled are the portraits of the young Oskar Kokoschka, self-portraits by Richard Gerstl, paintings by composer and painter Arnold Schönberg and works by many other artists, architects, furniture designers and craftspeople from the Secession, the Werkstätte and beyond: Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner, Koloman Moser, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann. Essays by Christian Meyer, Franz Smola, Barbara Sternthal and Beate Susanne Wehr set this motley assembly of artists and craftsmen in historical and theoretical context, showing how they paved ways for the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements to come. (20110901)

The image of Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grate as her dress is blown above her knees--from The Seven-Year Itch is so deeply embedded in popular consciousness that it's easy to forget a single stills photographer was responsible for it. The photographer's name was Sam Shaw (1912-1999), and he portrayed virtually every major Hollywood star of his day--Marlon Brando (Shaw created the photograph of Brando in a ripped t-shirt for A Streetcar Named Desire), Paul Newman, Audrey Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, Monroe and countless others. Born and raised on New York's Lower East Side, and closely identified with the city's visual iconography, Shaw shot countless cover pictures for Life and Look in the 1950s and 60s, and later also took the still photographs for movies that he produced himself, initially for Paul Newman on Paris Blues, but most notably for movies directed by John Cassavetes, including Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night, Gloria and Love Streams. This fantastic survey of Shaw's work has been assembled and edited by Lorie Karnath, who contributes to the volume a personal remembrance of her longtime friend.

The first African-American artist to attain art superstardom, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) created a huge oeuvre of drawings and paintings (Julian Schnabel recalls him once accidentally leaving a portfolio of about 2,000 drawings on a subway car) in the space of just eight years. Through his street roots in graffiti, Basquiat helped to establish new possibilities for figurative and expressioni...

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 1919) is so heavily associated with Impressionist painting that his last creative period has frequently been ignored. This publication devotes itself to precisely these last three creative and innovative decades, in which Renoir abandoned Impressionism. He dedicated himself during this period to cheerful subjects such as bathers, domestic idylls, and landscapes that were influenced by both classical mythology and his move to the south ofFrance. His fluid brushstrokes and masterful use of color were much admired by the up-and-coming modernist avant-garde. More than three hundred color illustrations graphically demonstrate the influence Renoir had on younger artists such as Bonnard, Matisse, and Picasso, as well as the ways they examined his work.

Russian avant-garde artist Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) left behind an extensive and complex body of work. Inspired by the folklore and art of her country, in her early years she produced colorful, strongly ornamental paintings. Her religious paintings, which were influenced by icons, were highly controversial. She began working with Cubism during herMoscow period, providing the Russian avant-garde with an important impetus for linking tradition with modernity. Reading her letters and notes, one becomes aware of this non-conformist’s often biting, ironic tone. In 1917, Goncharova settled permanently in Paris, where she designed costumes and sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In exile, however, the artist fell on hard times. This publication illuminates the details of Goncharova’s life and work and assigns the oeuvre of this unconventional artist—who to this day has not yet been properly recognized in her own country—the status it deserves.

Georges Seurat (1859–1891), a man of consistently proper disposition, was called “the notary” by his painter colleagues, and yet he was a trailblazing avant-garde artist. No other visual theme so well illustrates the tremendous innovations in Seurat’s paintings and drawings as the focus of this volume: the figure in space. The artist’s dense weave of pencil strokes cover the paper, making his indeterminate, floating motifs either stand out or disappear, while distinct light and dark contrasts surround and accentuate the figures. In his paintings, Seurat transposed his subjects into his technique, Pointillism, as well as into his innovative compositions. In later pieces, he even repeated and varied human forms within a single work. For his increasingly geometrical visual composition, which subordinates the individual elements to a system, he earned the admiration of the Bauhaus.

Gardens are refuges, ideal and protected places, almost always enclosed, often artificial, occasionally wild. An artist's view of a garden, his own garden, will show it to be a special place, a locus amoenus, as well as a source for smaller pleasures--single plants to be depicted with botanical precision in all of their beauty. The spectrum of work gathered here ranges from medieval gardens of Eden, depicted by Albrecht Durer and his contemporaries, to Peter Paul Rubens's courtly, gallant games in a royal park, Van Gogh's gnarled trees in the courtyard of a sanatorium and a video installation by Fischli & Weiss. Each is more than a mere landscape. It is a view of an artist's ideal, as imagined and experienced in the world and drawn in finished work--a view of the soul. Includes work by Max Beckmann, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Max Ernst, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Lucien Freud, Caspar David Friedrich, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Klee, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edward Munch, Emil Nolde, Peter Paul Rubens, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Antoine Watteau. All told, 400 blooming dreams, opulently illustrated.

Painting—its principles, boundaries, and possibilities—is the central theme of the extensive body of work by Gerhard Richter (*1932 in Dresden), an oeuvre has been characterized by stylistic contrasts since the very beginning. This elegant volume of color plates featuring profound essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Beate Söntgen, and Gregor Stemmrich focuses on the artist’s abstract paintings, which have comprised a dominant portion of his collective works since the eighties. The book does not trace the development of form and content in the paintings, but concentrates instead on the paintings that thematically comprise a homogenous body of work. It is based on the assertion that Richter’s abstract paintings are the results of various painterly processes that are not guided in a particular direction by a content-related precept. The featured paintings were produced between 1986 and 2006 and place emphasis on large-format paintings characterized by a prodigious painterly density.

There seems to be an endless number of deceptively real objects depicted in still lifes: dewdrops on fragile flower petals, reflections of light on glass goblets and precious silver dishes, candied sweets in Chinese porcelain, the fine hairs on a peach, the soft feathers of a songbird, the sallow tinge to a skull. However, the details of this genre are not exhausted in the delicate rendering of varying surfaces, because each pictorial element can also symbolize religious or moral content or be a reference to the irretrievability of time gone by—»tempus fugit»! This volume presents, on large-format plates, a splendid selection of works by some of the principal masters of the still-life genre, such as Jan Brueghel the Elder, Georg Flegel, Sebastian Stoskopff, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Abraham Mignon, and Jean Siméon Chardin. These choice treasures of German, Netherlandish, Flemish, and French still-life painting exemplify nearly all of the different ways of playing with this genre.

Discover Venice in a splendid volume of masterpieces by artists such as Canaletto, William Turner, Paul Signac, and Claude Monet. Thanks to its unique qualities—the beguiling interplay of light, water, and atmosphere—Venice was elevated to a magical “laboratory of perception” in the nineteenth century. Like many other artists, Claude Monet also sojourned in the city with its lagoons and islands, where he was inspired to create his famous Venice cycle in the autumn of 1908. His Venetian paintings mark a turning point in his work as he adopted an increasingly abstract pictorial vocabulary, demonstrating that Venice made a considerable, albeit little noted, contribution to the emancipation of painting, just as it was poised on the threshold of modernity. This splendid volume, filled with large-format color illustrations, is the first to provide a comprehensive examination of Venice’s image in European and American painting of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the center of this well-informed exploration is Monet’s Venice cycle, supplemented by masterpieces by his predecessors and contemporaries, ranging from Canaletto to Turner to Paul Signac.

Andreas Gursky (*1955 in Leipzig) is one of the most important artists in the world to use large-format photographs as a means of expression. The Düsseldorf-based photographer is especially interested in congregations of people and the sites of their gatherings, ranging from the Tokyo Stock Exchange to mass raves. The realistic appearance of Andreas Gursky’s final images—the elements of which are adeptly reduced and digitally restructured—also allow for conceptual interpretation; they are always based on the interplay between accurate reproduction and abstraction. This opulent publication focuses on the artist’s most recent creations, which is on display at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Two new groups of works in particular, reflecting on Formula One races and the famous Arirang Festival, a meticulously choreographed mass spectacle in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, will be shown alongside the landscapes.

Paul Klee (1879 1940) produced a unique, extraordinarily popular group of works; higher beings not only stand for spirituality, but also for skepticism and doubt toward religion and questions of faith. This is the reason for their popularity: Klee s angels are trapped in human form; they have weaknesses and blemishes, are forgetful and ugly, worried or playful occasionally even satanic. To the artist, good and evil do not negate but creatively complement one another. About eighty depictions of angels, most of them created during the final years of Klee s life, reflect both the fear of death and the physical fragility of the incurably ill as well as the artist s sage wit, sense of humor, cheerfulness, and quiet manner. Besides the biographical references and iconographic phrases, the publication sheds light on individual works, such as Angelus Novus, which inspired Walter Benjamin to develop his legendary concept of the Angel of History.

Almost singlehandedly, Leipzig school painter Neo Rauch has renewed the possibilities of allegory, politics and surrealism in contemporary painting. His epic canvases, with their disjunct components, resemble collages as much as painting, populated with characters seemingly plucked from momentous historical occasions — protestors, eminent-looking statesmen, soldiers, workers — as well as ordinary people engaged in bizarre, enigmatic actions of no apparent political/historical consequence whatsoever. The protagonists of these works, surrounded by floating symbols, abstract blobs and fragments of buildings and interiors, collide as if in some grand trans-historical continuum in which all eras come together. Realized in loud, garish hues partly informed by the artist's early exposure to Socialist Realism, Rauch's enigmatic pictorial narratives never vanish into explanation: «My paintings have something vital about them, like an animal, a living thing,» he says. «You don't have to understand them, just to feel that this creation, to the greatest possible extent, is at peace with itself.» Following major solo exhibitions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2007), the Pinakothek in Munich (2010) and the Leipzig Museum of Art (2010), this new major Rauch monograph accompanies an exhibition at Bozar Expo in Brussels, and provides the most up-to-date overview of his accomplishment. The best-known exponent of the Leipzig school of painting, Neo Rauch (born 1960) was born, reared and trained as an artist in Leipzig, where he continues to live. In August 2005, Rauch was awarded the chair of painting at Leipzig University. In 2010, he received a major museum retrospective, held jointly at the Leipzig Museum of Art and the Pinakothek. In 2011, a selection of the works from this retrospective then traveled to the Zach?eta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland.

This volume displays a collection of watercolours painted by Emil Nodle in the seclusion of his house in Seebull between 1938 and 1945 after his works in the museums had been confiscated by the Nazis and he had been forbidden to paint.