How did Jackson Pollock become a cult figure for the Beat Generation? And what caused his reputation to continue to soar? This compelling and original Abrams classic, now back in print, locates the artist in the continuum of his times, recreating the social and cultural milieu of New York in the 1940s and 1950s. With extensive knowledge of Pollock's habits (much of it gained through interviews), his reading, his conversation, and the exhibitions he visited, the author retraces many of the far-flung sources of Pollock's work. A wealth of comparative photographs that illustrate paintings by artists Pollock admired further explains the work of this complex, tragic, and immeasurably influential figure. Pollock's big, bold canvases are reproduced in five colors to convey the brilliance of his network of tones, his aluminum paint, and his sparkling collage materials. Six gatefolds show his vast horizontal works without distortion and a chronology provides a summary of the major events of Pollock's life.

This title is a Taschen 25 - Special edition! This title deals with Vermeer's women, their duties and unspoken dreams. The 35 paintings that have come down to us from the hand of Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) place him beside Rembrandt and Frans Hals as one of the great masters of the golden age of Dutch art. Little is known of Vermeer's early life and training, though we can be certain that he never knew great success or acclaim during his lifetime, and after his death - reputedly in part because of the stress of his debts - his work was almost completely forgotten for the best part of two centuries. And yet today he is acknowledged as an exquisitely talented and highly original artist. Most of his pictures (all of which are reproduced in this book) show middle-class women about their daily business. Vermeer records the tasks and duties of these women, the imperatives of virtue under which their lives were lived, while also evoking their dreams and their contrasting inner worlds. Every book in Taschen's "Basic Art Series" features: a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist; approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions; and, a concise biography.

Richard Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, is generally acknowledged as one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. The luminous abstractions of his later career and the innovative figurative works of his middle years firmly established him as a master in the high tradition of modernism. This revised and expanded edition of the first comprehensive monograph on the artist presents a rich selection of the artist's oeuvre. Until the mid-1950s, he painted in the abstract expressionist tradition (synthesizing, as he has since, such disparate influences as de Kooning, Gorky, Hopper, and Cezanne) before turning (unfashionably) to figurative painting along with artists David Park and Elmer Bischoff. He then embarked on the series of large abstract paintings for which he is best known--each titled "Ocean Park" after the beachside community where he worked. Reminiscent of Matisse in color and Mondrian in geometry, these are some of the most remarkable accomplishments of twentieth-century art. The updated section of this edition follows Diebenkorn's career from the mid-1980s until his death, focusing particularly on his adventurous late works on paper. In each "phase" of his career, Diebenkorn explored the intricate interplay between formal rigor and luminous, sensual color with the same masterful hand. Along with several hundred reproductions of the artist's work, critic Gerald Nordland provides a thoughtful and informative study of Diebenkorn's life and career, an updated, comprehensive exhibition history, and a selected bibliography.

A groundbreaking work, this catalog accompanies the largest exhibition ever realized on Damien Hirst, surveying the oeuvres of the highly acclaimed British artist. Published on the occasion of Relics, Hirst's first retrospective exhibition in Doha, Qatar, this richly illustrated book offers a different perspective on the work of one of the best-known artists working today. Tracing Hirst's career from his emergence on the art scene in the Young British Artists movement to his present status as one of the most controversial and highly regarded artists of his generation, this volume offers a complete overview on his wide-ranging practice, which includes installation, painting, sculpture, and drawing and challenges the boundaries between art, science, and popular culture. The catalog gathers over one hundred works, combining historic oeuvres with more recent projects: from The Kingdom to The History of Pain, from Pharmacy to For the Love of God, to the spot, spin, and butterfly paintings.With an essay by Francesco Bonami, an interview with the artist by Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Britain, and essays by the Qatari writer Sophia Al Maria and the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, the volume offers an original point of view on Hirst's oeuvre, whose works have become collective icons of our civilization.

Berlin-based Johannes Kahrs paints suggestive, ghostly forms in shifting tones and gradations of grey and black pastel, leaving contours blurred. Detached from their original context, almost unrecognizable representational fragments emerge. With introductory text by Ralph Rugoff, director of London's Hayward Gallery, this volume provides the first comprehensive survey of Kahrs' oeuvre.

In 1968, Josef Koudelka was a thirty-year-old acclaimed theater photographer who had never photographed a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21, when Warsaw Pact tanks invaded the city of Prague, ending the short-lived political liberalization of Czechoslovakia that came to be known as the Prague Spring. Koudelka had returned home the day before from photographing gypsies in Romania. In the midst of the turmoil of the Soviet-led invasion, he took a series of photographs that were miraculously smuggled out of the country. A year after they reached New York, Magnum Photos distributed the images, credited to an unknown Czech photographer to avoid reprisals. The intensity and significance of the images earned the still-anonymous photographer the Robert Capa Award. Sixteen years would pass before Koudelka could safely acknowledge authorship.
Forty years after the invasion, this impressive monograph features nearly 250 of these searing images—most of them published here for the first time—personally selected by Koudelka from his extensive archive. Though they document a specific historical event, their transformative quality still resonates. A compelling introduction and chronology by three Czech writers provides a nuanced examination of the invasion.

All of Durer's works in three mediums are reproduced in this edition. Among them are his most famous works, "Knight, Death and Devil; Melencolia I; "and" St. Jerome in His Study." Also included are portraits of his contemporaries, including Erasmus of Rotterdam and Frederick the Wise, as well as six engravings formerly attributed to Durer.

'The execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, in 1867, was the subject of a quartet of paintings by the French Impressionist and early Modernist Edouard Manet. These works are rarely shown together, and in fact cannot be seen in their entirety, since one of them exists only in fragments, but the three intact paintings and the surviving elements of the fourth are reproduced in this publication, and will be shown at The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition in the fall of 2006. Maximilian's death was an event of great public interest in France, in part because French policies shared the responsibility for it. A European aristocrat of the Hapsburg family, Maximilian had been installed in 1864 after a trio of European powers, led by Napoleon III of France, mounted an invasion of Mexico to reclaim debts upon which the Mexican government had suspended payment. But Napoleon soon withdrew, abandoning Maximilian to his fate at the hands of a resurgent Mexican army. As news! of the execution reached Paris, Manet reacted with a group of works synthesizing the information as it came to him and drawing heavily on an earlier painting inspired by violent political events, Goya's The Third of May. In addition to analyzing and documenting the creation of these works, John Elderfield, in his text, clarifies their historical importance in the context of modern art, and in so doing, offers a capsular history of the place of current events in art.

Reprint edition of Robert Frank: The Americans, Scalo Publishers 1998.
http://www.douban.com/subject/1436918/

The Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569) is considered the first Western landscape and genre painter. He has been especially beloved through the centuries for his paintings of peasant scenes. With an illuminating text by Manfred Sellink, this superb monograph, now available at a new affordable price, reprints the first biography of Bruegel, in facsimile and translation, written by Karel van Mander around 1604. This stunning book reproduces all 40 paintings and 70 drawings attributed to Bruegel in lush full color, with numerous close-up details, as well as his 75 prints.

No photographer is more closely associated with a city than Brassai (1899-1984) is with Paris. From the moment he moved there in 1924, he devoted his life and art to immortalizing his adopted city—capturing the street life by day, the cafés and the Seine by night. A friend of Picasso and Henry Miller, Brassai knew and photographed the leading figures of his day—Giacometti, Sartre, Dalí, Matisse, and Mann among them. His most famous portraits and cityscapes, collected in this volume, form a unique vision of life in pre- and post-war Europe.
The Photofile series brings together the best work of the world’s greatest photographers in an attractive format and at an affordable price. Handsome and collectable, the books are produced to the highest standards. Each volume contains some sixty full page reproductions, a critical introduction and a full bibliography. The series was awarded the first annual prize for distinguished photographic books by the International Center of Photography.

An authoritative work on Edouard Manet, viewed by many as the father of modern painting. Few artists have created as much controversy as Manet: his avant-garde work not only challenged the traditions of art, but also addressed society as a whole. With his painting Olympia (1869), he was to become, to quote Degas, "as famous as Garibaldi." Yet how the diffident son of a bourgeois family became the father of both realism and impressionism is a complex story that has too often been overlooked. As Manet has rightly become recognized as a touchstone for historical change, his personal story has become all the more relevant to the study of art history. This lavishly illustrated volume, presented in a handsome slipcase, offers a comprehensive study of the great master.

Between 1949 and 1953, Robert Frank continually returned to Europe from his new home in New York to take photographs in France, Switzerland, Spain, and Great Britain, photographs that show the development of his uniquely humanist, poetic, and realist eye. In 1951 and early 1952, Frank visited London--"I liked the light, I liked the fog."--and set out to photograph the unique atmosphere of the city. He followed British financiers around the City, capturing them in their traditional top hats and long coats, creating images that depict them in a poetic dance with their fog-shrouded environment. He shot pictures of workers, men delivering coal, children playing on the streets, people waiting or relaxing in the parks, and images of poverty. In these photographs he juxtaposed money and work, wealth and poverty, creating a dynamic photographic project that has never been shown before in its entirety. Then, in March 1953, before the impending nationalization of the country's coal mines, Frank travelled to the town of Careau, in Wales, to photograph the coal miners whose lives revolved around their work. One miner, Ben James, and his family became the subject of a picture essay (originally published in a 1955 issue of U.S. Camera) in which Frank downplayed the classic modernist photographic moment in favor of a more provocative form that offered informal, revealing glances rather than an official document.
In Robert Frank: London/Wales, Frank returns for the first time to these old negatives. The volume explores a stylistic transformation in his work, a period of development which saw his mode of photography move from an innovative romanticism to a highly charged, metaphorical realism. These two consecutive projects, realized in London and Wales between 1951 and 1953, set the stage for his truly groundbreaking documentary, The Americans, completed just a few years later.
You got eyes. --Jack Kerouac writing about photographer Robert Frank
Introduction by Philip Brookman.
Hardcover, 9 x 11 in., 208 pages, 90 Tritones illustrations

Josef Koudelka has consistently produced images that provoke a connection to the larger questions of human existence. This volume is the first to present his most eloquent images in a single volume. Spans Koudelkaâs entire career, from his earliest work with the Semafor Theatre in 1960s Prague to his most recent landscape studies in Camargue, France.

Revered as a father of modern photography, August Sander (1876– 1964) so refined the art of portraiture that his moving images of his fellow countrymen have been heralded both as an important sociological document and a photographic masterpiece. But those images make up only a portion of this deluxe seven-volume set, which will stand as the definitive collection of Sander's considerable achievement.
The books include some 150 never-before-seen images and essays by leading experts on the German photographer's work. Praising Sander's "vision . . . his knowledge, and his immense photographic talent," the writer Alfred Döblin said: "Those who know how to look will learn from his clear and powerful photographs, and will discover more about themselves and more about others."

Book Description
Publication Date: October 24, 2011
The first volume of Vitamin P, published in 2002, inaugurated a vibrant period for painting. Since its publication, a whole new generation of painters has emerged, some inspired by the artists who appeared in that book, others taking cues from new sources. Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting introduces this new wave of painters to the world.
The vast medium of painting continues to be a central pillar of artistic practice, and Vitamin P2 presents the outstanding artists who are currently engaging with and pushing the boundaries of the medium. Over 80 international critics, artists and curators have nominated the 115 artists who have made a fresh, unique or innovative contribution to recent painting. All of the artists in Vitamin P2 have recently emerged onto the international scene, and none appeared in the first Vitamin P.
An introduction by Barry Schwabsky, who also wrote the introduction for Vitamin P, provides a broad overview of recent developments in the medium while also looking towards its future.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Barry Schwabsky is a London-based writer. Currently International Reviews Editor at Artforum and Art Critic at The Nation, he has contributed to numerous art publications, including Phaidon's Jessica Stockholder (1995) and Vitamin P (2002), and is the author of The Widening Circle: The Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (1997), as well as several volumes of poetry. He has taught at Yale, New York University and Goldsmiths, among other institutions.