Series: The Great Masters of Art

Vasily Kandinsky by Hajo Düchting explores the life and work of one of the first painters of abstract art and a founding member of the Blue Rider movement. Although he trained as a lawyer, Kandinsky abandoned this career path to devote himself to art, both as a creator and an influential teacher and theorist at the Bauhaus. Over time, Kandinsky's...

The spiritually inspired pictures of Agnes Pelton (1881-1961) have their roots in the desert of California, a place where the artist settled in 1932 and where she lived until her death. She wrote of her highly symbolic paintings that her pictures were "like little windows", which opened up a view into the interior, her "message of light to the world"....

Life and work of the artist and style icon Frida Kahlo in a compact overview. Frida Kahlo has become an icon of art with her powerfully expressive work. Her pictures not only reflect a view of herself, her fears, the biography of her illness, her passions and her joie de vivre; they also take up subjects which were regarded by...

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) is the one artist whose name we associate in particular with Viennese Jugendstil and the "Golden Age". As a sought-after painter of frescoes and the founding president of the Vienna Secession, as the portraitist of fashionable ladies and as an illustrator of unashamed eroticism, Klimt was both the enfant terrible and the darling of Viennese society. He...

His paintbrush set everything in motion: the landscape of Provence, the colourful still lifes, his portraits and the picturesque coast of southern France. More than any other artist, Paul Cézanne, the "Father of Modernism", captured the light and the play of colours of the South in his pictures and lent them through his new pictorial language a liveliness and dynamism...

The youngest member of the Blauer Reiter group was overshadowed for a long time by fellow painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, and Paul Klee. But in recent years, Heinrich Campendonk has enjoyed an unparalleled rediscovery and a new critical assessment of his extensive oeuvre. Biermann described Campendonk's early work as a unique symphony of colour and...

Henri Matisse created an oeuvre that is unparalleled in its brilliance and originality. His colourfully luminescent paintings are a sweeping affirmation of joie de vivre, levity, and sensitivity. Featuring well-researched texts and numerous illustrations, this volume offers fascinating insights into the life and artistic development of Henri Matisse, one of the preeminent pioneers of modern art. When people think of...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Alfons Mucha went to the United States for four years as a lecturer, the world-famous poster designer, Art-Nouveau book illustrator, designer, photographer, and painter was greeted with enthusiasm. Mucha is regarded as one of the most important representatives of Jugendstil; he knew how to move between the various genres more skilfully than...

"I was thrilled", was Andy Warhol's enthusiastic reaction to the pictures of Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944). Many of the elements of her work inspired his Pop Art. During Stettheimer's life, her sensuous and ironic paintings with their numerous figures were valued highly by artists and curators, although the general public remained largely unaware of their merits. Only after her death did...

The painter Hans Purrmann (1880-1966) ranks among the most important colourists of twentieth-century art. Drawing on Henri Matisse and the expressionists, he developed a distinct and acclaimed artistic practice over the course of a life lived in places from Munich to Paris to Berlin to Florence to Switzerland. Part of the secret of Hans Purrmann's art is that in his...

Vivid descriptions provide an insight into his painterly work: "... At the moment I am immersed in my work with the clear-sightedness or blindness of a man in love. This mixture of colours is something that is quite new for me and when I see it I am beside myself ..." It is not for nothing that the letters are...

I want to have an effect at this time, in which people are at such a loss and so much in need of help. Käthe Kollwitz is the woman artist from 20th-century Germany whose works are best-known internationally. She also enjoys the highest esteem beyond the boundaries of Europe. The inimitable, touching language of her graphic and sculptural works is...

Max Beckmann (1884-1950), the outstanding Expressionist painter, is regarded as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. His works, jostling with figures and full of colour, are packed with highly symbolic messages. They are critical of the times in which he lived and bear witness to Beckmann's struggle with existential questions and his constant search for truth....

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), painter, photographer, Bauhaus teacher, and founder of the New Bauhaus and the School of Design in Chicago, is one of the most important artist personalities of the modern age. As one of the first artists to work in multiple media—practising painting, sculpture, photography, film, and design as equally valid art genres—he set standards that are still relevant...

When Paula Modersohn-Becker's artist friends examined her extensive estate a few weeks after her death, they were overwhelmed. They only gradually realised that in the painter, who had died so young, they had had an outstanding artist in their midst. Modersohn-Becker was largely unrecognised during her lifetime but is regarded today as one of the pioneers of Expressionism. The sculptor...

Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918) is nowadays regarded as one of the leading pioneers of Modernism in Austria. Although he already enjoyed some success during his lifetime and came to be considered Austria's greatest artist following his death, his outstanding importance for art was recognised only in the early 1950s. Rudolf Leopold, the early collector of Schiele who first became...

In 1926, 22-year-old Dutchman Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) travelled to the USA on a British freighter—without papers and hidden in the machine room. The young art student eked out a living by painting houses, signs, and façades, before he was able, after eight years, to dedicate himself entirely to painting. In the United States, he established contacts with the art...

Conrad Felixmüller (1897–1977) is regarded as one of the most important representatives of the Second Generation of German Expressionism. He celebrated initial major successes with his art during the Weimar Republic. This volume illustrates the life and work of this unusual artist, whose creative career reflects more than half a century of art and contemporary history. In January 1919, Felixmüller...

Admired by contemporaries as an artistic "jack-of-all-trades", Koloman Moser (1868-1918) is regarded today as one of the most important representatives of the Viennese Secession of around 1900. As a graphic artist and designer, Moser was unparalleled in his artistic diversity, creating furniture, textiles, and objects— for the Wiener Werkstätte among others— that are icons of Modernism, as well as leaving...

Elegant sailing ships, expansive seascapes, crystal-clear spread-out views of architecture— with his unique pictorial language and range of subjects, Lyonel Feininger became one of the most important artists of Classic Modernism, whose works remain very popular to this day. It was in Paris that Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) abandoned his successful career as a caricaturist and began a life as an...

In 1883, Paul Gauguin abandons his prominent banking career and decides that ‘from now on I will paint every day’. The co-founder of Synthetism and trailblazer of Expressionism turns his back on the bourgeois world, leaves his wife and children, and, in 1891, sets out for the South Sea, financing his journey through the sale of thirty paintings. His thoughts...