Swiss artist HR Giger (1940 - 2014) is most famous for his creation of the space monster in Ridley Scott's 1979 horror sci-fi film Alien, which earned him an Oscar. In retrospect, this was just one of the most popular expressions of Giger's biomechanical arsenal of creatures, which consistently merged hybrids of human and machine into images of haunting power and dark psychedelia. The visions drew on demons of the past, harking back as far as Giger's earliest childhood fears as well as evoking mythologies for the future. Above all, they gave expression to the collective fears and fantasies of his age: fear of ... |
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Scottish architect, designer, and painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 - 1928) was one of the earliest pioneers of modern architecture and design. While he did not receive much recognition in his hometown of Glasgow during his lifetime, his bold new blend of simplicity and poetic detail inspired modernists across Europe. Mackintosh's avant-garde approach embraced a variety of media as well as fresh stylistic devices. His multi-faceted oeuvre incorporated architecture, furniture, graphic design, landscapes, and flower studies. He embraced strong lines, elegant proportions, and natural motifs, combining an ... |
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Emerging amid the brutality of World War I, the revolutionary Dada movement took disgust with the establishment as its starting point. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, and New York launched a radical assault on the politics, social values, and cultural conformity which they regarded as complicit in the devastating conflict. Dada artists shared no distinct style but rather a common wish to upturn societal structures as much as artistic standards and to replace logic and reason with the absurd, chaotic, and unpredictable. Their practice encompassed experimental theater, games, ... |
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Filling notebook after notebook with sketches, inventions, and theories, Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) not only stands as one of the most exceptional draftsmen of art history, but also as a mastermind and innovator who anticipated some of the greatest discoveries of human progress, sometimes centuries before their material realization. From the smallest arteries in the human heart to the far-flung constellations of the universe, Leonardo saw nature and science as being unequivocally connected. His points of inquiry and invention spanned philosophy, anatomy, geology, and mathematics, from the laws of optics, ... |
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As cryptic as they are compelling, the masterpieces of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 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 tradition, Bosch developed a highly subjective, richly suggestive style to render both the celestial bliss of heaven and the grotesque tortures of hell, most famously and meticulously excecuted in The Garden of ... |
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The unfading popularity of Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918) attests not only to the particular appeal of his luxuriant painting but also to the universal themes with which he worked: love, feminine beauty, aging, and death. The son of a goldsmith, Klimt created surfaces of ornate and jewel-like luminosity which show influence of both Egyptian and Japanese art. Through paintings, murals, and friezes, his work is defined by radiant color, fluid lines, floral elements, and mosaic-like patterning. With a number of subjects dealing with sensuality and desire as well as anxiety and despair, all this iridescence is also suffused ... |
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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 Hollywood's most famous faces to the packaging of consumer products, the latter epitomized by Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans. As well as challenging the establishment with the elevation of such popular, banal, and kitschy images, Pop ... |
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Painter, sculptor, writer, film-maker, and all-round showman Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics. One of the first artists to apply the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to art, he is celebrated in particular for his surrealist practice, with such conceits as the soft watches or the lobster telephone, now hallmarks of the surrealist enterprise, and of modernism in general. Dali frequently described his paintings as "hand-painted dream photographs". Their tantalizing tension and interest resides in the precise rendering of bizarre elements and ... |
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Louis Isadore Kahn (1901 - 1974) treated each building like a temple. Across the United States, in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Israel, his designs combined the sleek, utilitarian surfaces of modernism with a devotion to geometric forms and a reverence for natural light that suffused his structures with a monumental and breathtaking spirituality. This essential introduction brings together 17 of Kahn's most important buildings across his cultural, governmental, religious, and residential repertoire. Plans, views, descriptions, and quality photographs trace the context and development of each project, while an ... |
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Pioneered by Picasso and Braque, Cubism has been described as the first avant-garde art movement of the 20th century. With inspiration from African and Native American art and sculpture, its practitioners deconstructed European conventions of viewpoint, form, perspective to create flattened, fragmented, and revolutionary images. Picasso's celebrated painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is typically regarded as the original cubist work, with its radical fracturing of objects and figures into distinct areas, corresponding to multiple different viewpoints. Cubism thereafter developed two distinct trends: Analytical ... |
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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 ... |
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The art of ancient Egypt that has been handed down to us bears no names of its creators, and yet we value the creations of these unknown masters no less than the works of later centuries, such as statues by Michelangelo or the paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. This book introduces some of the most important masterpieces, ranging from the Old Kingdom during the Third millennium BC to the Roman Period. The works encompass sculptures, reliefs, sarcophagi, murals, masks, and decorative items, most of them now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but some occupying places of honor as part of the World Cultural Heritage in museums ... |
