Poligrafa

One of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists and a founding figure of modern art, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) incorporated the influences of many cultures into his work. He pioneered an appreciation of the simple and primitive, traveling to Martinique, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands for inspiration. The artist's legacy is recalled in this excellent collection of 16 Gauguin masterpieces, painstakingly reproduced in sticker format. Included are Where are You Going?, Self-Portrait with Halo, Woman with a Fan, Still Life with Teapot and Fruit, Spirit of the Dead Watching, Reverie, and 10 others.

Dan Graham's body of art and theory — which dates from shortly after he moved to New York in 1964 — has become a key part of the Conceptual art canon. He is a highly influential figure in the field of Contemporary art, both as a practitioner and as a well-respected critic and theorist. Best known for his large-scale installations incorporating mirrors — in which viewers become lost in a maze of reflections that they must navigate and interpret as they simultaneously see themselves and other viewers reflected — Graham has long examined the psychological relationship between people and architecture. This volume looks at Graham's key works and incorporates a collection of his seminal writings. A second edition, this important expanded monograph contains new material not found in the first.

Color in architecture must be intense, logical and fertile, wrote Catalan architect and designer Antoni Gaudi in his diary in the late 1870s. Known for his sensuous, curving, almost surreal Art Nouveau buildings, Gaudi (1852-1926) is today one of the best known architects in the world. Over the course of four decades, he designed an incredible variety of architectural structures, including apartment houses, private residences, park complexes and religious and secular institutions, most of which were erected in or around Barcelona-such as the Park Guell, the Casa Batllo, the Casa Mila and his masterpiece, La Segrada Familia. With nearly 150 color reproductions, this volume offers a new standard overview of his extraordinary career. Here, Gaudi's undulating tiled roofs, pinnacles and towers that rise like plants or tentacles, chimneys that take on phantasmagoric shapes and colors are accompanied by plans and drawings that provide a clear picture of Gaudi's structural innovations. Luis Permanyer places the architect's ouevre within the context of Catalan and wider European developments of the time, but he also describes the more personal mystical impetus that lay at the core of Gaudi's inventions. For those already familiar with the architect's work, Melba Levick's superb and detail photographs will prove a revelation; for those just discovering Gaudi, this book is the next best thing to experiencing the buildings themselves.

Willem de Kooning arrived in the United States in 1926 as a 22-year-old stowaway from Holland--soon to become a leading figure in the emergence of Abstract Expressionist painting in New York. This volume presents over 100 illustrations from each phase of de Kooning's career, and describes the personal and art historical background behind his work and its critical reception. Sally Yard, author of «Willem de Kooning: The First Twenty-Six Years in New York,» details the progress of de Kooning's career, from his brief stint as a WPA painter, to his first one-person exhibition of abstract work in 1948. Five years later, his series of women rendered in aggressive, lashing gestures stunned contemporaries, not only for their vehemence but for their supposed reversal in direction from «pure» abstraction to figuration. Of course, the alternation, struggle and intertwining between these two tendencies remained essential to de Kooning's work over six decades (as he once commented, «I was reading Kierkegaard and I came across the phrase 'To be pure is to will one thing.' It made me sick.») Featuring some of de Kooning's most remarkable writings, interviews with Harold Rosenberg and James T. Valliere, lavish illustrations and Yard's accessible scholarly discussion, «Willem de Kooning: Works, Writings, Interviews» is invaluable for anyone seeking to understand the work and impact of this twentieth-century master.

The work of Vito Acconci is among the most influential of the last 30 years. His experiments with performance, audio and video, sculpture, and architecture from the late 1960s through the present have become points of reference for younger artists. The overriding concerns throughout his work have been self-analysis and interpersonal relationships, themes he has explored in many different ways. This monograph will be the most complete publication available on this vital American artist, and will include both extensive visual documentation from throughout his career and a wide selection of his writings.

Alberto Giacometti's early Surrealist and Cubist forms, compact volumes inspired by Africa and the Cyclades, eventually led this seminal twentieth-century Swiss artist to acknowledge a formal void that he would spend the balance of his career filling with the human figure. In the mid-1930s, influenced by the terrible social and political changes that were taking place across Europe, Giacometti began to develop heads and nudes in a signature style--they were universally elongated, skeletal, haunting, solitary and above all, transcendent. Giacometti's written testimony and reflections on his change of perspective, and on his artistic ideas and goals, are remarkable for their aptness and poetic quality. In his writings, gathered here, the artist pours out his doubts, his suffering and his creative hopes as very few artists have been capable of doing before or since.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is without doubt the most important twentieth-century French artist, and one of the great colorists of art history. His work utterly refutes the cliché that the great discoveries of Modernism were attained by a heroic and violent abandonment of the past: he was firmly grounded in tradition (albeit in a much less restless and ironic approach than Picasso's). In the 1920s, Matisse's odalisques responded to European fantasies of «Oriental splendor»; during the 1930s, more classical themes of nymphs, fauns and the dance were treated in the splendid and sober Barnes murals, illustrations to Mallarmé and James Joyce. Permanently confined to a wheelchair from 1941 (when cancer was diagnosed), he developed his most spiritually uplifting work for the interior design of the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, concurrent with his famous paper cut-outs («cutting directly into color»). Sarah Wilson of the Courtauld Institute provides an introduction to Poligrafa's primer on this Modernist giant.

Antoni Tapies was born in 1923 to a Barcelona family of publishers and booksellers. He began drawing and painting as a young man, during a convalescence, and in the end gave up studying law to concentrate on art. By the 1940s, in his 20s, Tapies was already exhibiting widely. As an early Matter painter, he added dirt and other solids to his canvases, transmuting them into art and reminding viewers of the earth to which they would return. Later, in the era of Arte Povera, he worked in foam rubber and spray, varnishes and, for creating objects or sculptures, refractory clay and bronze. Coming from a bookish family, he also produced a number of artist's books and editions, working with collaborators such as Joseph Brodsky and Jose Saramago. This collection of the artist's writings is available here for the first time in English. An interview with Manuel Borja-Villel, Director of the MACBA in Spain, completes the volume.

The career of French artist Yves Klein lasted just eight years (from 1954 to 1962), but in that short span he took Europe by storm. Working in Paris at the height of geometric abstraction and Art Informel, in an intellectual climate dominated by Existentialism, Klein presaged many developments in the postwar avant garde: performance art, Minimalism and Conceptualism (one of his mottoes pronounced, «For color! Against the line and drawing!»). As this volume demonstrates, Klein wrote prolifically, often in the form of manifestos or more ironic texts written to accompany his proto-Conceptual installations. Though Klein is best known for a series of monochromes in his trademark shade, International Klein Blue, his first public showing was of the 1954 artist's book Yves: Peintures, which featured a series of monochromes created in response to cities where he had lived, as a play on the traditional art exhibition catalogue. The medium of the book is consequently an ideal place in which to encounter his art and thought.

Widely considered one of the greatest, and certainly one of the most mysterious and erotically daring, painters of the twentieth century, Balthus, or Balthazar Klossowski, the French/Polish Count de Rola, died in his adopted Switzerland in 2001 at the age of 93. Descended from Polish aristocracy and raised among important European intellectuals like Rainer Maria Rilke, Andre Gide and Jean Cocteau, Balthus went on to consort and collaborate with many of the most influential members of the Modern avant garde-including Breton, Picasso, Artaud, Giacometti, Camus, Masson and Lacan, to name a fraction. His disturbing and often erotically charged paintings remain enduringly enigmatic. In this beautifully illustrated collection, Mieke Bal analyzes the way that the paintings emanate both reality and un-reality, creating the unique sense of eeriness at the heart of Balthus' work--which always invites viewers in and repels them at the same time. According to Bal, we are given access to a world that is in no way explained. Thus, the works must labor against assumptions of representation and appropriation, drawing us into a world we know not to exist. In Bal's interpretation, this canny fictionality renders the typical allegations of erotic appropriation naive and censorious. Rather than reduce Balthus' work to the adolescent girls, Bal focuses on additional issues such as color, space, genre and history.

Goya--the name alone evokes countless masterpieces, both painted and printed: the raw and brutal «Third of May 1808» the nightmarish Caprichos etchings (with the famous motto, «The sleep of reason produces monsters»), the compellingly erotic «Nude Maja» and «Clothed Maja» the savage Disasters of War series and, of course, the late black paintings, with their murky forebodings of public unrest and private turmoil. Although Goya's influence on his contemporaries was minimal (eclipsed as he was at the time by artists trained in the classical style of David and Ingres), it can now be traced clearly from Manet through Picasso to Surrealism, Polke, the Chapman brothers and on. Nobody expressed the ravages of warfare and the extremes of human experience like Goya; it made him the envy of Picasso, who, as a young artist, copied his signature over and over, as though to absorb the personality and abilities of his one supreme influence. And it is perhaps the wildly imaginative freedoms of Goya's late work that has kept him so contemporary--that, and the palpable emotion in his brushwork, so full of impact and sensation. Here, Jose Gudiol, renowned author of essays and monographs on Velazquez, El Greco and Spanish art, provides a serious introduction to the massive subject that is Goya.

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is without doubt one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century. Dead at the age of 44, he nonetheless bequeathed a substantial body of pioneering work to countless subsequent artists for whom he stood as a model of fearlessness, courageous improvisation and balletic grace. Throughout his life, Pollock wrote very little about his own art or that of others, but in the few completed writings that do remain, and in a few unpublished, undated notes — all of which are gathered in this volume — the concerns are remarkably consistent. Pollock routinely referred to his interest in the unconscious as the source of modern art, and in abstraction as enabling both the direct expression of an inner world, of individual feeling, and the urgencies and tensions of modern American life (famously characterized, in his words, by the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio). Pollock's most famous statement on his method exemplifies this concern with a creativity arising from an unconscious: When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. In this introduction to Pollock's art and thought, Nancy Jachec traces these and other themes across 120 color reproductions.

Perhaps no other figure exerted a greater influence on the urban transformation of Barcelona during the first third of the 20th century than Josep Puig i Cadafalch. If as an architect he constituted a perfect example of the tension posed between Modernism and Noucentisme, as a historian and archeologist he contributed to the recuperation of a significant part of Catalonia's historical and patrimonial memory. Nevertheless, it was his awareness of town planning issues which contributed to the great metropolitan transformation of Barcelona, from the opening of Via Laietana to the development of the Placa de Catalunya. This volume includes both a biography and a chronology of works and projects.

Close Distance is both an exhibition and a collaborative artist's book by Portuguese artist Julião Sarmento and British writer Adrian Searle. Searle reviews Sarmento's output in painting, sculpture, installation, performance and film, which for Searle «speaks of sex, violence, the repressed, the unconscionable and the deliberately--provocatively--inexplicable.»

From Edvard Munch to Chris Ofili, French painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) has exerted a profound influence on artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gauguin began as an Impressionist, contributing major works to the movement's groundbreaking exhibitions between 1879 and 1886. This concise, beautifully illustrated monograph collects Gauguin's most important works. In addition to his well-known paintings of Tahiti, in which the artist constructed his perfect vision of man's communion with the natural world, the book also includes powerful works that reflect the artist's contact with other seminal early modern masters such as Van Gogh and Cezanne.

Stage director Robert Wilson has devoted the greatest of efforts toward integrating multidisciplinary elements from a range of creative fields into the realm of theater. Light and movement have played an especially central role in his productions, not only as compositional elements but as symbolic features. In this publication, his wildly creative, discipline-crossing oeuvre is approached through a framework of five suggestive sections: The Deaf Man's Gaze, The Automaton's Freedom, What Marlene Dietrich Knew, The Prisms of Silence, and The Theater in Infinite Space.

Like his Dutch contemporary Vermeer, Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) had little reputation outside of his native land until the nineteenth century, when the Spanish royal painting collections became state property and were installed in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The year was in 1819, and several private and official collections in London and Paris also benefited. Unlike Vermeer, however, Velazquez had a fairly large oeuvre waiting to be rediscovered--and rediscovered it was, with great rapidity and enthusiasm. Goya and Manet are almost inconceivable without the precedent of Velazquez's portraiture, and in fact Manet even called the Spaniard «the painter of painters.» His impact on French Impressionism was colossal. And two of the twentieth century's most famous artists painted direct homages: Picasso made a version of «Las Meninas» in 1957; and Francis Bacon's «screaming popes» are based on Velazquez's 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X. From Goya until today, Velazquez's work has been recognized not only as the essential forerunner to Modern painting, but also as the greatest exponent of seventeenth-century Spanish art.

Gaudi fu una delle menti piu brillanti del periodo a cavallo tra il XIX e il XX secolo.