Taschen Abstract Expressionism Hess Barbara

Abstraction shook Western art to its core. In the early part of the 20th century, it refuted the reign of clear, indisputable forms and confronted audiences instead with vivid visual poems devoid of conventional representational imagery and characterized by allegories of emotion and sensation • This radical artistic adventure established new artistic means, as much as narratives. Expression became characterized by shocking juxtapositions of color, light, and line. Artists abandoned the conventions of brush and easel and played with new materials and methods of artistic gesture: commercial paints and housepainter's brushes, working on unstretched and unprimed canvases, moving the canvas to the floor, and applying paint with hands • This essential introduction spans the international breadth, conceptual depth, and seismic impact of abstract art with a thorough survey not only of the big names such as Picasso, Klee, Kline, Rothko, and Pollock, but also lesser-known figures who made equally significant contributions, including Antoni Tapies, K

Провозглашенный первым художественным движением американского происхождения, оказавшим всемирное влияние, абстрактный экспрессионизм обозначает непредставительное использование краски как средства самовыражения. Он появился в Америке в 1940-х годах, и его главными героями были Джексон Поллок, Филип Гастон, Роберт Мазервелл, Марк Ротко и Виллем де Кунинг. Абстрактный экспрессионизм породил множество различных стилистических направлений, но две особенно заметные подкатегории: живопись действия, представленная де Кунингом и Поллоком, и живопись цветового поля, ставшая наиболее известной благодаря Ротко. На протяжении всего своего творчества абстрактные экспрессионисты стремились передать эмоции и идеи с помощью рисунков, форм, текстур, оттенков и особого качества мазков кисти

Modern matters: A blow-by-blow account of groundbreaking modernism The modern art adventure began roughly 150 years ago in Paris. A circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, began painting pictures with rapid, often impasto, strokes. They turned to everyday street life for subjects, instead of overblown heroic scenes, and they escaped the power of the establishment salon by organizing their own independent exhibitions. After this first assault on standard academic practice, there was no holding back. In a constant desire to challenge, innovate, and inspire, one modernist style supplanted the next: Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Abstract Art, renewed Realism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art

Sharp angles, strange forms, lurid colors, and distorted perspectives are classic hallmarks of Expressionism, the twentieth century movement that prioritized emotion over objective reality. Though particularly present in Germany and Austria, the movement’s approach flourished internationally and is today hailed as one of the most influential shifts in art history. With leading groups Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), and key players such as Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, and Emil Nolde, the Expressionists disowned Impressionism, which they regarded as “man lowered to the position of a gramophone record of the outer world”, to depict instead a raw and visceral experience of life as it was felt, rather than seen on the surface

Painting outside the box. The founder of abstract art. The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who later lived in Germany and France, is one of the pioneers of twentieth-century art. Nowadays he is regarded as the founder of abstract art and is, moreover, the chief theoretician of this type of painting. Together with Franz Marc and others he founded the group of artists known as the Blauer Reiter in Munich. His art then freed itself more and more from the object, eventually culminating in the First Abstract Watercolour of 1910. In his theoretical writings Kandinsky repeatedly sought the proximity of music; and just as in music, where the individual notes constitute the medium whose effect stems from harmony and euphony, Kandinsky was aiming for a pure concord of colour through the interplay of various shades

The XXL exploration, now in a condensed handbook • The works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude are monuments of transience. Gigantic in scale, they are always temporary, created to exist only for a limited time and to leave unique, unrepeatable impressions. “From the smallest of the Packages made in Paris in the early 1960s, to the delicate pattern of hundreds of branches embraced by a translucent fabric veil... in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works there is nothing abstract, nothing imagined; it is all there—corporeal and tangible.” (Lorenza Giovanelli) • Part biography, part critical analysis, part catalogue, this updated edition brings back TASCHEN’s best-selling Collector’s Edition. It spans Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s entire work, from early drawings and family photos to plans for future projects

August Macke (1887–1914) achieved notoriety at an early age, only to be killed at the tender age of 27 at the start of World War I. Despite his brief career, the artist left a remarkable oeuvre in his wake, in which his obsessions with color reflected aspects of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Expressionism • Through his engagement with these diverse schools of art, Macke assimilated disparate influences and approaches into a style entirely his own. Grouped with the Blaue Reiter movement, but eschewing the mysticism that often pervaded the works of its artists, Macke returned time and again to color-led interpretations of beauty, whether the kaleidoscopic watercolor Hat Shop (1913), or the shimmering hues of Woman in a Green Jacket (1913)

In the German city of Dresden on June 7, 1905, the foundation of the Die Brücke artists’ group (1905–1913) is widely regarded as the birth of Expressionism. Led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, the group sought to reject the limits of academia and, as their name suggested, to bridge the path to an artistic future. Their manifesto, printed with woodblock, insisted on absolute freedom from convention in their work as well as their lives • This new, liberated art incorporated portraits, landscapes, and city scenes, but substituted an objective rendering of reality with an expression of interior geography. In paintings, as well as their favored wood and linocut prints, the artists of Die Brücke would fill pictorial space with jagged lines, crude forms, and clashing colors, all to express their subjective experience of the world

The king of the contemplative landscape • The beauty of nature and man’s loneliness are dominant themes in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). The artist often places a small human figure in a broad landscape, as in his famous paintings Monk by the Sea and The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. For a long time the importance and influence of this great Romantic painter were underestimated. When he died, Friedrich had already been forgotten by his contemporaries and was only rediscovered in the early 20th century. Today he is considered to be the most important German painter of his generation and a precursor of Expressionism • Once Friedrich gave the following advice to an artist-colleague of his who was constricted by academic rules: “Shut your physical eye so that you first see your painting with your spiritual eye

Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is widely acclaimed as the most influential architect of the 20th century. From private villas to mass social housing projects, his radical ideas, designs, and writings presented a whole-scale reinvention not only of individual structures, but of entire concepts of modern living. Le Corbusier s work made distinct developments over the years, from early vernacular houses in Switzerland through dazzling white, purist villas to dynamic syntheses of art and architecture such as the chapel at Ronchamp and the civic buildings in Chandigarh, India. A hallmark throughout was his ability to combine functionalist aspirations with a strong sense of expressionism, as well as a broader and empathetic understanding of urban planning

An encounter with Gerhard Richter, the German artist who widened horizons in the relationship between painting and reality. From early photographic paintings, along with his famous RAF cycle, to late abstract paintings, experiencing Richter's work always offers us the unexpected and unseen. Where he once set out to liberate the medium from ideological ballast, today, faced with the overwhelming presence of digital images, he shows us the unsurpassed impact and intensity of painting. A definitive introduction to one of the greatest artists of our time spanning not only his entire career, but also 50 years of cultural, economic, and political events

Whether it's Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, or The Big Sleep, roam a screen world of dark and brooding elegance with this essential handbook to Film Noir. From private eyes and perfect crimes to corrupt cops and doomed affairs, editors Paul Duncan and Jurgen Muller examine noir's key themes and their most representative movies from 1940 to 1960.Copiously illustrated with film stills as well as original posters, this book offers page after page of noir's masterful visual compositions while exploring the narrative paradigms of this cryptic, compelling, and evolving genre. If that weren't enough to tickle your cinematic appetite, the volume concludes with TASCHEN's top 50 pick of noir classics • Brimming with the enigmatic dames, desperate gangsters, and psycho killers that continue to cast a long and captivating shadow over cinema, this is a must-have handbook for noir aficionados and amateurs alike