Basic Art Series #2
This article gives information about The Blaue Reiter, Brücke, Cézanne, Chipperfield books. These art books are part of the Basic Art Series published by TASCHEN. The art books in this article contain comprehensive information for an artist or designer.
Each book in the Essential Art Series contains comprehensive information about an important artist, architect or designer. TASCHEN art publications provide a detailed chronological summary of the lives and work of artists. Analyze the historical significance and cultural heritage of artists. Essential for any library, the Essential Art Series is the perfect TASCHEN art book.
The Blaue Reiter: Riders On The Storm – The Charge of 20th-Century Expressionism
Join the heady ride of Der Blaue Reiter, the group of artists who galloped just three years of the early 20th century together, but in their rejection of established standards and charge into a new artistic realm marked a major step in the evolution of European Expressionist and abstract art.
Although it only lasted three turbulent years, the afterburn of the Blaue Reiter (1911–1914) movement exerted a tremendous influence on the development of modern European art. Named after a Kandinsky painting, The Blue Rider, this loose band of artists, grouped around Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky and German painter Franz Marc, sought to reject establishment standards and charge into a new artistic unknown.
Articulating spiritual values and concerns in an era of rapid industrialization, the artists of the Blaue Reiter were connected by a shared interest in painting, woodcuts, and prints, as well as the symbolic values of color and spontaneous approaches to artwork. Key pieces such as Franz Marc’s Blue Horse I (1911), Kandinsky’s Picture with a Black Arch (1912), and August Macke’s Woman in a Green Jacket (1913) reveal varying subjects, but all channel distorted perspectives, crude lines, and an emphatic, expressionist use of color.
The Blaue Reiter was abruptly truncated by the onset of the First World War, which killed two of its leading artists, along with growing dissent between the group’s protagonists. This book reveals the movement’s remarkable influence despite its brevity, presenting key works, artists, and their reverberating effects.
The author: Hajo Düchting studied art history, philosophy, and archaeology in Munich, where he gained his doctorate in 1981 with a thesis on Robert Delaunay’s Windows series. After working in museum and adult education, he moved on to teaching posts and guest professorships at the universities of Munich, Kassel, Leipzig, Saarbrücken, and Mainz.
Düchting has published numerous articles on the art of the modern era, color theory, and the teaching of art, and has authored a number of TASCHEN titles, including Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and Georges Seurat.
The Blaue Reiter, Hajo Düchting / Hardcover, 21 x 26 cm, 96 pages. Basic Art Series TASCHEN.
Brücke: Bridging The Gap – The Onset of Expressionism
Vivid colors, woodcut flatness, crude figures, and unsettling sexual scenes: This essential introduction to 20th-century artist group Die Brücke reveals a revolutionary movement that sliced up images with ragged lines and decimated the mores of the age.
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. Like the Fauves, the artists took the stylistic lead from non-Western traditions of Oceanic and African arts, while also reviving the print and painting techniques of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder.
This richly illustrated book introduces this essential expressionist movement. We examine Die Brücke’s key works and protagonists; its varied, international inspirations; and its crucial influence on later 20th-century art. Along the way, we find candid nudes, crowded street views, and blissful bathing idylls, each of them vivid with energy and intent on a new kind of art.
The author: Ulrike Lorenz is Director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim and former director of Art Forum East German Gallery in Regensburg. She studied art history and archeology at the University of Leipzig and received her doctorate from the Bauhaus University in Weimar.
Brücke, Ulrike Lorenz / Hardcover, 21 x 26 cm, 96 pages. Basic Art Series TASCHEN.
Cézanne: Paintwork Pioneer – The Anchorman of Modernism
Through apples, pears, and experimental new perspectives, explore the defining oeuvre of Paul Cézanne, the artist identified by both Matisse and Picasso as “father of us all.” From still life compositions to scenes of his beloved Montagne Sainte-Victoire, this book traces the artist’s bold new approaches to form light, space, and form.
In the latter half of the 19th century, in the verdant countryside near Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), busily plied his brush to landscapes and still lifes that would become anchors of modern art. With compact, intense dabs of paint and bold new approaches to light and space, he mediated the way from Impressionism to the defining movements of the early 20th century and became, in the words of both Matisse and Picasso, “father of us all.”
This fresh artist introduction selects key works from Cézanne’s oeuvre to understand his development, innovation, and crucial influence on modern art. From compositions of fruits and pears to scenes of outdoor bathers, we trace his experimentation with color, perspective, and texture to evoke “a harmony parallel to nature,” as well as the very process of seeing and recording.
Along the way, we discover Cézanne’s celebrated Card Players, his layering of warm and cool hues to build up to form and surface, and the geometric rigor of his landscapes from the vicinity of Aix-en-Provence, as bright with the light of southern France as they are bold with a radical new rendering of dimensions and depth.
The author: Ulrike Becks-Malorny studied painting in Geneva and art history in Bochum, Germany. Since gaining her doctorate in 1990, she has worked as an exhibition organizer and freelance author. She lives in Bonn, Germany.
Cézanne, Ulrike Becks-Malorny / Hardcover, 21 x 26 cm, 96 pages. Basic Art Series TASCHEN.
Chipperfield: Understated Excellence – The Architect of The Extraordinary Ordinary
Ideas, integrity, and pure spatial experience combine in the works of David Chipperfield, one of the most understated architectural maestros of our time. From Berlin to Beirut, traverse Chipperfield’s most striking projects to discover how his drive to reject “starchitecture” and instead expose the remarkable concealed in “ordinariness” has put him on the global stage.
From Berlin to Beirut, David Chipperfield (born 1953) aspires to architecture founded on collaboration, ideas, and excellence. His buildings are intended as physically immediate spaces in which “a sort of ordinariness” becomes remarkable, and by which the individual structure coexists with broader concepts of city-building.
Chipperfield’s vision has driven major projects around the globe, from the famed rebuilding of the Neues Museum in Berlin, Germany, to the Amorepacific Headquarters in Seoul. His architectural practice has won many international competitions and numerous awards and citations for design excellence. In vivid images and accessible texts, this book covers Chipperfield’s most striking projects to introduce the architect suspicious of “starchitecture,” but nevertheless a global star on the architecture stage.
The author: Philip Jodidio studied art history and economics at Harvard and edited Connaissance des Arts for over 20 years. His TASCHEN books include the Architecture Now! series and monographs on Tadao Ando, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Oscar Niemeyer, and Zaha Hadid.
Chipperfield, Philip Jodidio / Hardcover, 21 x 26 cm, 96 pages. Basic Art Series TASCHEN.
Texts and images published on this page are quoted from the official website of Taschen. If you think there is copyright infringement regarding the publications on this page, send a message to the email address on this page.
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