Series: Basic Art

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...

Painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and all-round showman Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was one of the 20th 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,...

It was the decade of daring Expressionist canvases, of brilliant book design, of the Bauhaus total work of art, of pioneering psychology, of drag balls, cabaret, Metropolis, and Marlene Dietrich's rising star in theatre and silent film. Between the paroxysms of two world wars, Berlin in the 1920s was a carpe diem cultural heyday, replete with groundbreaking art, invention, and...

Hailed as the "Prince of the Impressionists", Claude Monet (1840-1926) transformed expectations for the purpose of paint on canvas. Defying the precedent of centuries, Monet did not seek to render only reality, but the act of perception itself. Working "en plein air" with rapid, impetuous brush strokes, he investigated the play of light on hues, patterns, and contours, exploring how...

The creative duo Charles Eames (1907-1978) and Ray Kaiser Eames (1912-1988) transformed the visual character of America. Though best known for their furniture, the husband and wife team were also forerunners in architecture, textile design, photography, and film. The Eameses' work defined a new, multifunctional modernity, exemplary for its integration of craft and design, as well as for the use...

Meet the artist whose majestic breaking wave sent ripples across the world. Hokusai (1760-1849) is not only one of the giants of Japanese art and a legend of the Edo period, but also significantly influenced Western modernism. His prolific gamut of prints, illustrations, paintings, and beyond form one of the most comprehensive oeuvres of ukiyo-e art and a benchmark of...

From men in bowler hats, floating in the sky, to a painting of a pipe above the caption "this is not a pipe", René Magritte (1898-1967) created an echo chamber of object and image, name and thing, reality and representation. Like other Surrealist works, Magritte's paintings combine a precise, mimetic technique with abnormal, alienating configurations which defy the laws of...

With Salvador Dalí as its figurehead, the great ship of Surrealism traversed the turbulent seas of the early 20th century with sails billowing with dreams and desires. Inspired by the psychoanalytical practice of Sigmund Freud, the Surrealists championed the unconscious as the domain of truth, uninhibited by the standards or expectations of society. With techniques ranging from hypnotism to nocturnal...

Through the turbulent events of the last century-and-a-half, graphic design-with its vivid, neat synthesis of image and idea-has distilled the spirit of each age. It surrounds us every minute of the day, from minimalist packaging to colorful adverts, environmental graphics to sleek interfaces: graphic design is as much about reflecting society's aspirations and values as it is about transmitting information....

From Edouard Manet's portrait of naturalist writer Émile Zola sitting among his Japanese art finds to Van Gogh's meticulous copies of the Hiroshige prints he devotedly collected, 19th-century pioneers of European modernism made no secret of their love of Japanese art. In all its sensuality, freedom, and effervescence, the woodblock print is single-handedly credited with the wave of japonaiserie that...

One of the key figures in the New York art world of the 1980s, Keith Haring (1958-1990) created a signature style that blended street art, graffiti, a Pop sensibility, and cartoon elements to unique, memorable effect. With thick black outlines, bright colours, and kinetic figures, his public (and occasionally illegal) interventions, sculptures, and works on canvas and paper have become...

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) was one of the last great artists in the ukiyo-e tradition. Literally meaning "pictures of the floating world," ukiyo-e was a particular woodblock print genre of art that flourished between the 17th and 19th centuries. Subjects ranged from the bright lights and attractions of Edo (modern-day Tokyo), to spectacular natural landscapes. In the West, Hiroshige's prints became...

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...

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is hailed as the most important proponent of the Pop art movement. A critical and creative observer of American society, he explored key themes of consumerism, materialism, media, and celebrity. Drawing on contemporary advertisements, comic strips, consumer products, and Hollywood's most famous faces, Warhol proposed a radical reevaluation of what constituted artistic subject matter. Through Warhol, a...

Paris is the City of Light in all its facets. In the 1920s, La Ville des Lumières gleams especially bright and becomes a magnet for creative people from around the world. This is the decade of Coco Chanel and Josephine Baker, Art Deco and Surrealism, café culture and cabaret. The most famous artists of the epoch, later called Classic Modernism,...

An icon of 1980s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) first made his name under the graffiti tag "SAMO", before establishing his studio practice and catapulting to fast fame at the age of 20. Although his career lasted barely a decade, he remains a cult figure of artistic social commentary and a trailblazer in the mediation of graffiti and gallery art....

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...

Lampooned during his lifetime for his style as much as his subject matter, French painter Édouard Manet (1832-1883) is now considered a crucial figure in the history of art, bridging the transition from Realism to Impressionism. Manet's work combined a painterly technique with strikingly modern images of contemporary life, centred on the urban Paris experience. He recorded the city's parks,...

One of the leading lights of the Impressionist movement, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) remains a towering figure in art history with enduring public appeal. Sun-kissed, charming, and sensual, his work shows painting at its most lighthearted and luminous, while championing the plein air and colour innovations of his time. Renoir's oeuvre was prolific, with several thousand works completed in his lifetime....

With unparalleled artistic originality, Max Ernst (1891-1976) transformed everything he touched. By pushing the boundaries and breaking loose from the confined view of the culture of his time, he became one of the most important figures of Dadaism and Surrealism. Driven by the counter-reaction to the horrors of World War I, he became a pioneer of the Dada movement. The...

Vivid colour, organic forms, and a loathing of straight lines were just a few stalwart characteristics in the unique practice of Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000). A non-conformist hero, the artist, architect, and activist left a blazing trail of imagination and ideas in buildings, paintings, manifestos, initiatives, and more. Hundertwasser's best-known work is considered by many to be the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna,...

Hailed as the first American-born art movement to have a worldwide influence, Abstract Expressionism denotes the non-representational use of paint as a means of personal expression. It emerged in America in the 1940s, with lead protagonists including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Abstract Expressionism spawned many different stylistic tendencies, but two particularly prominent...

There are over 1,000 catalogued works by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), the 16th-century flag bearer for Baroque drama, movement, and sensuality. This essential introduction takes in the most important works from this astonishingly prolific oeuvre to explore Rubens's influences and innovations, and his remarkable visual and art historical impact. The richly illustrated survey includes Rubens's portraits, landscapes, and historical...

Abstraction shook Western art to its core. In the early part of the 20th century, it refuted the reign of clear, indisputable forms and confronted audiences instead with vivid visual poems devoid of conventional representational imagery and characterized by allegories of emotion and sensation. This radical artistic adventure established new artistic means, as much as narratives. Expression became characterized by...

In a fleeting fourteen-year period, sandwiched between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology to be applied across painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre, and installation. As much an intense personal...

Sharp angles, strange forms, lurid colours, and distorted perspectives are classic hallmarks of Expressionism, the twentieth-century movement that prioritised 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...

Discover how scenes of daily life and delicate dabs of colour shocked the art world establishment. In this TASCHEN Basic Art introduction to Impressionism, we explore the artists, subjects, and techniques that first brought the easel out of the studio and shifted artistic attention from history, religion, or portraiture to the evanescent ebb and flow of modern life. As we...

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) never left his homeland of the Netherlands but in his massive body of painting, drawing, and etching, he changed the course of Western art. His prolific oeuvre encompasses religious, historical, and secular scenes, as well as one of the most extraordinary series of portraits and self-portraits in history. Rembrandt's work foregrounds texture, light, and acute observation....

The rebel hero of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), careened through his life like a firework across the American art landscape. Channeling ideas from sources as diverse as Picasso and Mexican surrealism, he rejected convention to develop his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing. Pollock's most famous works are his drip paintings, where he dripped and poured household enamel...

With the patronage of the powerful Medici family, a canon of secular and religious work, and contributions to the celebrated Sistine Chapel, Sandro Botticelli (1444/45-1510) was well placed for fame. After his death, however, his work was eclipsed for some four hundred years. It wasn't until the 19th century that the painter began to gain major art-historical recognition. Today, Botticelli...

Largely self-taught as an artist, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) developed a unique ability to transform interior and unconscious impulses into figurative forms and intensely claustrophobic compositions. Emerging into notoriety in the period following World War II, Bacon took the human body as his nominal subject, but a subject ravaged, distorted, and dismembered so as to writhe with intense emotional content. With...

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of the Italian Baroque, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial, violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Though famed for his dramatic use of colour, light, and shadow, it was above all Caravaggio's boundary-breaking...

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 colours, a particular fondness for blue, and a repertoire of recurring tropes including musicians, roosters,...

An Expressionist before the term was coined, James Ensor (1860-1949) was the classic insider-outsider enigma. He knew all the right art-world figures but loathed most of them. His style lurched from the Gothic fantastical to the Christian visionary. He was a cosmopolitan trailblazer of modernism, but lived reclusively in an attic room in the resort town of Ostend. For all...

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) was not cut out for finance. Nor did he last particularly long in the French Navy, or as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen who did not speak Danish. He began painting in his spare time in 1873 and in 1876 took part in the Paris Salon. Three years later, he was exhibiting alongside Pissarro, Degas, and Monet....

The arresting pictures of Frida Kahlo (1907-54) 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...

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is something of an American success story, if only his success had come swifter. At the age of 40, he was a failing artist who struggled to sell a single painting. As he approached 80, Time magazine featured him on its cover. Today, Hopper is considered a giant of modern expression, with an uncanny, unforgettable, and utterly...

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, ageing, and death. The son of a goldsmith, Klimt created surfaces of ornate and jewel-like luminosity which show the influence of both Egyptian and Japanese art. Through paintings, murals,...

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is widely acclaimed as the most influential architect of the 20th century. From private villas to mass social housing projects, his radical ideas, designs, and writings presented a whole-scale reinvention not only of individual structures, but of entire concepts of modern living. Le Corbusier's work made distinct developments over the years, from early vernacular...

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 colour and line and is today credited with creating the first purely abstract work. As much a teacher and theorist as...

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 realisation. From the smallest arteries in the human heart to the far-flung...

The work of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) reflects an ongoing belief in the power of brilliant colours and simple forms. Though famed in particular for his paintings, Matisse also worked with drawing, sculpture, lithography, stained glass, and collage, developing his unique cut-out medium when old age left him unable to stand and paint. Matisse's subjects were often conventional: nudes, portraits, figures...

Italian-born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564) was a tormented, prodigiously talented, and God-fearing Renaissance man. His manifold achievements in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and engineering combined body, spirit, and God into visionary masterpieces that changed art history forever. Famed biographer Giorgio Vasari considered him the pinnacle of Renaissance achievement. His peers called him simply "Il Divino" ("the divine one")....

In endless odes to the female form, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) traced elongated bodies, almond eyes, and his own name into art history. His languid female subjects are as instantly recognizable as they are startling, sensual, and swan-necked. Modigliani's unique figuration corresponded to his own personal idea of beauty, but drew upon a rich variety of visual influences, including contemporary Cubism,...

With his instantly recognisable decorative style, Czech artist and Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) defined the look of the fin-de-siècle. In evocative shades of peach, gold, ochre, and olive, his seductive compositions of patterns, flowers, and beautiful women became paradigms of the Belle Époque years. Mucha's work permeated illustration, posters, postcards, and the advertising designs of his day. His...

With a career spanning seven decades, Catalan-born Joan Miró (1893-1983) was a polymath giant of modern art, producing masterworks across painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry, and ceramics, and embracing ideologies as varied as Fauvism, Surrealism, Dada, Magic Realism, Cubism, and abstraction. Over the course of his prodigious output, Miró evolved constantly, seeking to eschew categorisation and the approval of "bourgeois"...

In the architecture of Richard Neutra (1892-1970), inside and outside find their perfect modernist harmony. As the Californian sun glints off sleek building surfaces, vast glass panel walls allow panoramic views over mountains, gardens, palm trees, and pools. Neutra moved to the United States from his native Vienna in 1923 and settled in Los Angeles. He displayed his affinity with...

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was a major figure in modern American art for some seven decades. Importantly, her fame was not associated with shifting art styles and trends, but rather with her own unique vision, based on finding essential and abstract forms in nature. O'Keeffe's primary subjects were landscapes, flowers, and bones, each explored in successive series over several years. Certain...

While some architects have a signature style, Renzo Piano seeks to apply coherent ideas to extraordinarily different projects. His buildings impress as much for their individual impact as for their diversity of scale, material, and form. Piano rose to international prominence with his co-design of the Pompidou Center in Paris, described by The New York Times as a building that...

Often imitated but never equaled, Jan van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) left an indelible impression on Renaissance art and paved the way for future realist painters. With its unprecedented precision and masterful use of colour, the Arnolfini Double Portrait, depicting the wedding of a young couple, is a testament to the mastery of the Flemish painter and leader of the Early...

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 recognise an artist uniquely dexterous in the portrayal of mood and place through paint, pencil, charcoal, or chalk. Yet as he was deploying the lurid colours,...

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...

Zaha Hadid was a revolutionary architect, who for many years built almost nothing, despite winning critical acclaim. Some even said her audacious, futuristic designs were unbuildable. During the latter years of her life, Hadid's daring visions became a reality, bringing a unique new architectural language to cities and structures as varied as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati,...

An encounter with Gerhard Richter, the German artist who widened horizons in the relationship between painting and reality. From early photographic paintings, along with his famous RAF cycle, to late abstract paintings, experiencing Richter's work always offers us the unexpected and unseen. Where he once set out to liberate the medium from ideological ballast, today, faced with the overwhelming presence...

Acclaimed as the "father of skyscrapers," the quintessentially American icon Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was an architect of aspiration. He believed in giving cultivated American life its fitting architectural equivalent and applied his idealism to structures across the continent, from suburban homes to churches, offices, skyscrapers, and the celebrated Guggenheim Museum. Wright's work is distinguished by its harmony with humanity...

Frank Frazetta has reigned as the undisputed king of fantasy art for well over 50 years, the value of his paintings now climbing as high as his fans' admiration. Each year his works break the previous year's auction records, with the cover for Lancer books 1967 Conan bringing $13.5 million in September 2025. Born to a Sicilian immigrant family in...

From court portraits for the Spanish royals to horrific scenes of conflict and suffering, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) made a mark as one of Spain's most revered and controversial artists. A master of form and light, his influence reverberates down the centuries, inspiring and fascinating artists from the Romantic Eugène Delacroix to Britart enfants terribles, the Chapman...

French-born Jean Prouvé (1901-1984) was the 20th century's leading construction designer, a self-declared constructeur and member of the jury who oversaw the design of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. As a designer, he captured the midcentury spirit of innovation, expansion, and growth, developing techniques that united simple, striking aesthetics with practical, cost-effective materials and assembly. From vast, temporary exhibition marquees...

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...

The Case Study House program (1945-1966) was a unique event in the history of American architecture. Sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, the program sought to respond to the postwar building boom with prototype modern homes that could be both easily replicated and readily affordable to the average American. Concentrated on the Los Angeles area, the Case Study Houses included...

The beauty of nature and man's loneliness are dominant themes in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). The artist often places a small human figure in a broad landscape, as in his famous paintings "Monk by the Sea" and "The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog." For a long time, the importance and influence of this great Romantic painter...

Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti (1891-1979) is difficult to pin down. With an extraordinarily prolific output and eclectic style, his oeuvre remains one of the most diverse and groundbreaking in design history. Trained initially in architecture, Ponti soon moved into industrial and interior design, experimenting with ceramics, silverware, and glass. Ponti's key works are spread throughout this extensive overview,...

Walter Gropius (1883-1969) set out to build for the future. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, the Berlin-born architect had an inestimable influence on our aesthetic environment, championing a bold new hybrid of light, geometry, and industrial design, as dazzling today as it was a century ago. In this essential architect introduction, we survey Gropius' evolution and influence with...

Famed for his motto "less is more," Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) was one of the founding fathers of modern architecture and a hotly-debated tastemaker of twentieth-century aesthetics and urban experience. Mies van der Rohe's philosophy was one of underlying truth in pure forms and proportions. With the help of contemporary technological and material developments, he sought a stripped-down...

Most commonly associated with the birth of the Impressionist movement in mid-19th-century Paris, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) in fact defied easy categorisation and instead developed a unique style, strongly influenced by Old Masters, the body in motion, and everyday urban life. The elder scion of a wealthy family, Degas co-founded a series of exhibitions of Impressionist art but soon disassociated himself...

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 colour, 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,...

A hairless, ghostly figure on a bridge. The sky orange-red above him. His hands raised to his ears, his mouth wide in a haunting wail. In painting The Scream, Edvard Munch (1863–1944) created a Mona Lisa for our times. The shriek of his iconic figure reverberates around the world, its echo resounding in the work of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns,...

From impossible staircases to tessellated birds, Dutch artist M.C. Escher (1898-1972) crafted a unique graphic language of patterns, puzzles, and mathematics. Dense, complex, and structured by intricate principles, his work is at the same time decorative and playful, toying constantly with optic illusions and the limitations of sensory perception. For mathematicians and scientists, Escher is a mastermind. For hippies, he...

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...

In the mid-1950s, Yves Klein (1928-1962) declared that "a new world calls for a new man." With his idiosyncratic style and huge charisma, this bold artist would go on to pursue a brief but bountiful career, producing more than 1,000 paintings over seven years in an oeuvre now considered a mainstay of postwar modernism. Klein made his name above all...