Bingham J.

Russian-born conceptual artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are among the most celebrated artists of their generation. Known for their pioneering large-scale environments and installations, the artists’ work fuses the everyday with the conceptual. Deeply rooted in the visual culture of Soviet society yet speaking equally to universal themes, their work is characterized by a sense of melancholia but also by ...

3080  

Little H.

1042  

Featuring some of the most exciting artworks of the 20th century, this is the first book to explore the rich history of conceptual art in Britain during a key period in innovation, from the mid-1960s to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. While the early works of this period challenged art’s traditional boundaries, by the mid-1970s, focus had shifted ...

2106  

Gautrand J. C.

Robert Doisneau (1912–1994) is best known for his magical, timeless 35 mm street portraits taken in Paris and its suburbs. Fresh, unstaged, and full of poetry and humor, his photographs portray everyday people (in everyday places, doing everyday things) frozen in time, unwittingly revealing fleeting personal emotions in a public context. Doisneau’s gift was the ability to seek out and ...

918  

Golden R.

Trace the epic story of New York through hundreds of atmospheric photographs, from the mid-19th century to the present day. This remarkable collection, now available in a popular edition, pays tribute to the extraordinary architecture, civic, social, and photographic heritage of the Big Apple.

From the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island; from ...

918  

Polaroids occupy a special place in photography, all the more so since the development of digital techniques. The instant print and absence of editing tools allows these one-of-a kind images a beguiling realness: In no other photographic medium does the moment find its material form with such sincerity and such speed.

Throughout his career, Helmut Newton used polaroids not just ...

2240  

Walther F. I.

Today, the works of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) are among the most well known and celebrated in the world. In Sunflowers, The Starry Night, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, and many paintings and drawings beyond, we recognize an artist uniquely dexterous in the portrayal of mood and place through paint, pencil, charcoal, or chalk.

Yet as he was deploying the lurid ...

1142  

Wundram M.

Art as we know it today would not exist without the Renaissance. Widely considered the most influential phenomenon in European art, architecture, literature, and science, the movement revolutionized the Western conception of reality and heralded the emergence of modernity out of the Middle Ages.

The Renaissance first gained momentum in Italy, at the end of the 14th century, spreading across ...

1154  

Metzger R., Walther F. I.

For Marc Chagall (1887–1985), painting was an intricate tapestry of dreams, tales, and traditions. His instantly recognizable visual language carved out a unique early 20th-century niche, often identified as one of the earliest expressions of psychic experience.

Chagall’s canvases are characterized by loose brushwork, deep colors, a particular fondness for blue, and a repertoire of recurring tropes including musicians, roosters, ...

1142  

Bockemuhl M.

In the work of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) lies an impact akin to a sudden acquisition of sight. His landscapes and seascapes scorch the eye with such ravishing light and color, with such elemental force, it is as if the sun itself were gleaming out of the frame.

Appropriately known as “the painter of light,” Turner worked in print, ...

1142  

Bosing W.

As cryptic as they are compelling, the masterpieces of Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) remain some of the most enduring enigmas of the art world. Their intricate, allegorical, and often startling content has captivated not only art historians, but also fashion designers, rock stars, writers, and punk rockers, as well as countless modern and contemporary artist successors.Although rooted in the Old Netherlandish ...

1142  

Duchting H.

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) n’avait que 32 ans à sa mort, mais sa courte vie, nourrie d’inspiration, de visions et de créativité, a modifié le cours de la peinture européenne.

Observateur passionné des interactions entre la lumière et la couleur, Seurat étudia en particulier Delacroix lors de sa formation à l’École des beaux-arts de Paris. Son travail le conduisit à développer ...

1042  

Martin S.

With motion and machines as its most treasured tropes, Futurism was founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, along with painters Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini. With affiliate painters, sculptors, designers, architects, and writers, the group sought to subsume the dusty establishment into a new age of sleek, strong, purified modernity.

Futurism’s place in art history ...

1154  

Kettenmann A.

Diego Rivera (1886–1957) is a loud presence on the art historical stage. With devout political principles and a turbulent romantic history, he was at once husband and paladin of Frida Kahlo, advocate and adversary of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and liberator and traitor of Leon Trotsky.

Vibrant, graphic, and often monumental, Rivera’s paintings carry the same live political and passionate charge ...

1142  

Honnef K.

Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and of what constituted an artwork.

Focusing on issues of materialism, celebrity, and media, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources, from advertising imagery to comic books, from ...

1142