Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011) was interested in the telling of truths. Always operating outside the main currents of 20th-century art, the esteemed portrait painter observed his subjects with the regimen and precision of a laboratory scientist. He recorded not only the blotches, bruises, and swellings of the living body, but also, beneath the flaws and folds of flesh, the microscopic details of what lies within: the sensation, the emotion, the intelligence, the bloom, and the inevitable, unstoppable decay. Despite rejecting parallels between him and his renowned grandfather, the correlation between Lucian Freud's ... |
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While anchoring his practice in the traditions of antiquity and the Renaissance, Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917) paved the way for modern sculpture. From a very early stage, he was interested in movement, the expression of the body, chance effects, and the incomplete fragment. It was these elements that gave shape, and the impression of life, to such famous works as The Kiss and The Thinker. Produced in collaboration with the Musée Rodin, this "Taschen" Basic Art introduction examines the formative years of Rodin's training as well as the key stages of his subsequent career. It retraces the genesis of his ... |
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From the towering Sagrada Família to the shimmering, textured façade of Casa Batlló and the enchanting landscape of Park Güell, it's easy to see why Antoni Gaudí (1852 - 1926) gained the epithet "God's architect." With fluid forms and mathematical precision, his work extols the wonder of natural creation: columns soar like tree trunks, window frames curve like flowering branches, and ceramic tiling shimmers like scaly, reptilian skin. Window frames curve like flowering branches and ceramic tiling shimmers like reptilian skin in the fervent architectural imagination of Antoni ... |
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The self as a subject is one of the most fascinating and fruitful of artistic enterprises. From the 15th century to today, this collection brings together some of the best examples of self-portraiture to explore the genre's evolution over the centuries as well as the enduring questions of selfhood and self-representation that have besieged human experience for centuries before social media and the selfie. Is a self-portrait of an artist a medium of reflection? Or is it merely a black void, the "false mirror", as the Surrealist René Magritte entitled his 1928 painting of an eye? How much does it impart ... |
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Multilingual Edition. ... The idea of climbing a tree for shelter, or just to see the earth from another perspective, is as old as humanity. In this neat "Taschen" edition, take a tour of some of our finest arboreal adventures with 50 of the most beautiful, inventive, and enchanting tree houses around the world. From romantic to contemporary, from famed architects to little-known craftsmen, you'll scale the heights to visit all manner of treetop structures, from a teahouse, restaurant, hotel, and children's playhouse to simple perches from which to contemplate life, enjoy the view, and discover that ... |
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Though numbering just 35 known works, the œuvre of Johannes Vermeer (1632 - 1675) is hailed as one of the most important and inspiring portfolios in art history. His paintings have prompted a New York Times bestseller, a film starring Scarlett Johansson, and record visitor numbers at art institutions from Amsterdam to Washington. Vermeer's subjects focus on daily domestic activities, from letter writing to music playing to preparations in the kitchen. The scenes astound with their meticulous detail, majestic planes of light, and with Vermeer’s extraordinary ability to draw out narrative intrigues. In such ... |
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The Hermetic Museum takes readers on a magical mystery tour spanning an arc from the medieval cosmogram and images of Christian mysticism, through the fascinating world of alchemy to the art of the Romantic era. The enigmatic hieroglyphs of cabalists, Rosicrucians, and freemasons are shown to be closely linked with the early scientific illustrations in the fields of medicine, chemistry, optics, and color theory. Even for those with no knowledge of the fascinating history of alchemy, this book is a delight to explore. Each richly illustrated chapter begins with an introduction and quotes from alchemists by specialist ... |
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The arresting pictures of Frida Kahlo were in many ways expressions of trauma. Through a near-fatal road accident at the age of 18, failing health, a turbulent marriage, miscarriage and childlessness, she transformed the afflictions into revolutionary art. In literal or metaphorical self-portraiture, Kahlo looks out at the viewer with an audacious glare, rejecting her destiny as a passive victim and rather intertwining expressions of her experience into a hybrid surreal-real language of living: hair, roots, veins, vines, tendrils and fallopian tubes. Many of her works also explore the Communist political ideals which ... |
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Over the course of his artistic career, Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944) transformed not only his own style, but the course of art history. From early figurative and landscape painting, he went on to pioneer a spiritual, emotive, rhythmic use of color and line and is today credited with creating the first purely abstract work. As much a teacher and theorist as he was a practicing artist, Kandinsky's interests in music, theater, poetry, philosophy, ethnology, myth, and the occult, were all essential components to his painting and engraving. He was involved with both the influential Blaue Reiter and Bauhaus groups and ... |
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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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Четириезично издание на английски, френски, немски и руски език. ... The published matter are articles and studies of Bulgarian folk music. They mostly concern theoretical issues and different aspects of relation "folklore - contemporaneity". These are lectures on folklore problems that were given on international conferences and simposia. ... |
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A key figure in the international avant-garde, Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944) was at once an extraordinary painter and leading art theoretician whose influence resonates to this day. Coining the term "Neo-plasticism", he pursued a style of painting composed only of primary colors against a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines and a white base background. Mondrian's vision was that this essential painting would help to achieve a society in which art as such has no place, but rather exists for the total realization of "beauty". With stints in Amsterdam, Paris, London, and New York, Mondrian drew ... |
