This magnificently illustrated book draws on the latest scholarly research to reveal new perspectives on the techniques and influences of Impressionist landscapes. This breathtaking survey takes a multi-faceted approach in its study of 90 seminal works of Impressionist art. Accompanying the inaugural exhibition of the new Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, the book features contributions by six leading scholars who examine a wide range of themes, from the use of repetition and variation to the ecological climate in which the artists worked. Underlying and unifying these perspectives is the inexorable change of the landscape itself. Poised on the brink of the Modern Era, the Impressionists documented the effects of industrialization on French landscapes. Amid these transitions, the artists used the landscape itself to advance their own explorations into the field of color theory. The book also explores the influence of modern poetry and photography on the creation of these paintings. With beautiful reproductions from the masters—including Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir—this volume takes an exciting new approach to the study of Impressionism, while introducing audiences to the holdings of a remarkable new museum.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 240

Dimensions: 240 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 01-02-2017

Featuring rarely and never-before-seen works from the collection of Picasso’s wife and muse, Jacqueline, this book celebrates the sheer force of Picasso’s creativity in his final years. In his late years, Picasso embraced painting, drawing, and sculpture with renewed vigor. His obsession with the female form grew more intense as he portrayed Jacqueline Picasso, his second wife, in hundreds of works, more than any of his other muses. This book offers the public the first chance to view neverbefore exhibited works and many that are rarely seen, all dating from the late period of Picasso’s career. Beautifully reproduced images reveal the ways Picasso continued to reinvent his art as he aged. This book also features fascinating insights into how Picasso’s contemporaries reacted to this stage of his oeuvre, his relationships with younger artists and with popular culture, and the pivotal role played by Jacqueline Picasso within the artist’s enduring legacy.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 248

Dimensions: 240 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 26-04-2019

Learn how Vincent van Gogh’s still life paintings, alive with ecstatic color and emotional exuberance, hold the key to understanding this complex artist’s life and work. From his first compositions to the colorful flower images of his late years, Vincent van Gogh repeatedly painted still lifes. In this genre, he could try out various pictorial techniques – from depicting space through light and shadow to experimentation with color. Although many of his still life compositions employed traditional approaches to the genre, he ultimately formulated an unmistakably unique artistic style. This lavishly illustrated book revisits the development of Van Gogh’s career and focuses on his still-life paintings, offering new insights into the working process and creative evolution of one of the most radical innovators in the history of modern art.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 240

Dimensions: 240 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 22-11-2019

During the 1860s, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley joined forces to revolutionize art with light- flooded landscapes that dispensed with the conventional imagery of the time. In 1874, with their penchant for working out of doors in order to capture fleeting sensory impressions directly on the canvas, they came to be known as the "Impressionists." Berthe Morisot, Paul Cezanne, and Gustave Caillebotte became affiliated with the new tendency as well. More than a decade later, artists such as Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross developed their pioneering ideas further, and in 1901, during his first year in Paris, the young Pablo Picasso too drew inspiration from the Impressionist style. No comparable collection provides such a comprehensive overview of Impressionist landscape painting and its development as the one assembled in recent decades by Hasso Plattner, founder of the Museum Barberini. On its basis, Ortrud Westheider, the director of the Museum Barberini, presents the history of French Impressionism. With its focus on the transitory moment, the artistry of the Impressionists continues to exert a powerful fascination. Guided by the interplay between light and atmosphere, they created exquisite and timeless images whose innovative spirit and vitality continue to delight viewers today.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 320

Dimensions: 240 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 22-01-2021

In the 19th century, numerous photographers chose the same motifs as Impressionist painters: the forest of Fontainebleau, the cliffs of Etretat or the modern metropolis of Paris. They, too, studied the changing light, seasons and weather conditions. From its inception, photographers pursued artistic ambitions, as evidenced by their experimentation with composition and perspective, by means of various technical procedures. Until the First World War, the relationship between photography and painting was characterized both by competition and mutual influence. The exhibition and catalogue examine these interactions and illuminate the development of the new medium from the 1850s to its establishment as an autonomous art form around 1900.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 280

Dimensions: 240 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 29-03-2022

Following World War II, Western painting went in completely new directions. A young generation of artists turned their backs on the dominant styles of the interwar period: Instead of figurative representation or geometric abstraction, painters in the orbit of Abstract Expressionism in the US and Art Informel in Western Europe pursued a radically impulsive approach to form, color, and material. As an expression of individual freedom, the spontaneous artistic gesture gained symbolic significance. Large-scale color-field compositions created a meditative space for ruminating the fundamental questions of human existence. The exhibition and catalogue examine the two sister movements against the background of a vibrant transatlantic exchange, from the 1940s through to the end of the Cold War. This lavishly illustrated volume brings together works by more than 50 artists, amongst them Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, K. O. Goetz, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Georges Mathieu, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Judit Reigl, Mark Rothko, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, and Jack Tworkov.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 256

Dimensions: 240 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 31-07-2022

For as long as humans have been making art, they have turned to the sun as the source of light, warmth and life itself. It appears as a symbol of limitless power, as the personification of gods and of Christ, and as a harbinger of change. Artists have also used the sun as a means of exploring light and color and as an entrée into discussions about climate. The first of its kind, this book investigates visual representations of the sun from antiquity to the present day. It is divided into seven roughly chronological sections that look at both epoch-spanning and period specific examples, including symbolic, allegorical representations, the iconography of mythological subjects, and mimetic qualities such as typology, phenomenology, and emotional effect. It includes more than two hundred stunning reproductions of well- and lesser-known works of art. Incisive and enlightening texts explore how solar symbolism figured in pre-Christian objects; through 17th-century depictions of the “Sun King” Louis XIV; how artists such as Rubens and Monet employed the sun in their narrative paintings; how the Impressionists first investigated the sun’s effects on a landscape; how Neo-Impressionists such as Seurat experimented with color, based on the Newtonian analysis of the solar spectrum; and how 20th-century artists incorporated a broad array of abstract, surrealistic, and transformative modes of solar representation into a variety of media.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 288

Dimensions: 240 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 23-04-2023

Discover how painters such as Van Gogh, Mondrian, and Jacoba van Heemskerck drew on the legacy of Dutch landscapes and realism to put their own spin on the Impressionist movement. Impressionism may have originated in France, but artists in late 19th- and early 20th-century Netherlands quickly made it their own. The genre’s vibrant colors and focus on light and atmosphere were a perfect complement to the country’s groundbreaking traditions of landscape painting and realism. This exhibition catalog brings together hundreds of works by nearly forty artists including Johan Barthold Jongkind, Vincent van Gogh, Jacoba van Heemskerck, and Piet Mondrian. It traces the birth of the Hague School, whose practitioners captured the changing moods of light in the coastline’s vast, grey skies. And it explores the Amsterdam Impressionists, whose cityscapes offered realistic images of modern life. Alongside vibrant reproductions of masterworks, a series of lively essays explore a diverse array of topics, including Dutch landscape painting within an international context; Dutch artist settlements and communities; and iconography in Dutch impressionism.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 312

Dimensions: 240 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 01-09-2023