Few artists are as universally beloved as the German printmaker, draftsman, and sculptor Kathe Kollwitz, whose powerful images of mothers and children and of protest against social injustice have long been admired by both critics and the public. Kollwitz, a woman in a field dominated by men, steadfastly adhered to a figurative style in the era of abstraction and depicted socially engaged subject matter when it was unfashionable. Kollwitz is largely known through political posters and restrikes of her prints. Her reputation has to some extent been dominated by an emphasis on the social content of her work, often at the expense of her remarkable artistic skills. The present study challenges that view by focusing on the artistic aspect of her achievement. The book consists of three essays on Kollwitz. Elizabeth Prelinger provides a reassessment of Kollwitz as an artist; Alessandra Comini presents a richly atmospheric discussion of the artist's life in Berlin during the tumultuous period that spanned two world wars; and Hildegard Bachert surveys the reception of Kollwitz in Germany and the United States as manifested in collections of her works. The volume, which includes a selection of the finest examples of Kollwitz' oeuvre, juxtaposes preparatory drawings with finished art, illustrating the arduous experimental processes by which she attained her brilliant results. Themes important to Kollwitz--such as self-portraits, social activism as illustrated in the cycles A Weavers' Rebellion and Peasants' War, love and death, nudes, workers, war and revolution--are explored in depth in all media. The book will serve as the catalogue for an exhibition of Kollwitz' prints, drawings, and works of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, from May 3 to August 26, 1992.

Käthe Kollwitz

Arts & Photography

Alessandra Comini

Elizabeth Prelinger

Hildegard Bachert

Graphic Design

National Gallery of Art / Yale University Press

In April of 1912, twenty-one-year old Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918), known for his frank depictions of erotica as well as his Expressionist portraits, was arrested and imprisoned in a basement cell in the rural town of Neulengbach, some twenty miles from Vienna. There he made agonized diary entries and created twelve drawings of his dank surroundings. Half a century later, in August of 1963, as an enterprising PhD student from Texas in search of all sites and persons having to do with Schiele, the author of this book did what no previous scholar had yet done. She located and photographed the forgotten cellar and cell in which Schiele had been unjustly incarcerated. This book presents an English translation of the artist's extraordinary prison diary, a biographical chronology, and two essays, one concerning Schiele's cultural context, and the other, an enlightening analysis of the pungent artworks created in prison.

Schiele in Prison

THAMES HUDSON LTD

Gustav Klimt

Wien. 28 cm. 80 p. Encuadernación en tapa dura de editorial con sobrecubierta ilustrada. Idioma alemán .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario.

George Braziller

Egon Schiele's Portraits

Univ of California Pr, Berkeley, CA

NEW YORK GRAPHIC SOCIETY

The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking

No composer in the history of music has undergone so many makeovers in the portrayal of his facial features or the interpretation of his cultural legacy as Ludwig van Beethoven. The myth began during his lifetime when few verbal or visual portrayals of the composer adhered strictly to his physical appearance; instead his mannerisms, manners, and moods prevailed. Promoted from peevish recluse to Promethean hero, he was pictured early on as a 'genius inspired by inner voices in the presence of nature, with leonine hair writhing wildly in symbolic parallel to the seething turbulence of creativity,' according to the author. In this unique study of the myth-making process across two centuries, Alessandra Comini examines the contradictory imagery of Beethoven in contemporary verbal accounts and in some 200 paintings, prints, sculptures, and monuments. With a witty yet penetrating narrative, she moves through these images to construct a collective image of the composer that reflects the many differing impressions left by devoted 'myth makers' ranging from Wagner, Nietzsche, Berlioz, and Brahms to Rolland, D'Annunzio, and Jenny Lind.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Sunstone Press

Killing for Klimt, A Megan Crespi Mystery Series Novel

In this first in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, retired art history professor Megan Crespi, an expert on the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt, becomes involved in a race to recover the Secretum, a ''shameful, secret panel'' stolen from the artist's studio the night after his death in February of 1918. Her travels, at the behest of New York's Moderne Galerie Museum, owner of the famed 1907 ''golden'' Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, take her from the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Switzerland's Ascona, as well as to New York, Vienna, Helsinki, Paris, Montreal, and Girdwood, Alaska. Megan is shadowed by two different assassins hired by fanatical Günther Winter. Owner of Alaska's Alpenglow Hotel, he keeps his secret art collection in an annex basement. Several killings occur involving the interested criminal parties and naive owners of Klimt artworks. Finally setting up a trade--Winter's Secretum for the golden Adele--Crespi and two colleagues fly to Alaska. They bring with them two crates: one purporting to contain the Adele portrait, and a larger one to receive the Secretum panel. But there, greed leads to unexpected and colossal consequences. Will Megan survive the final killing for Klimt? (Includes Readers Guide)

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Egon Schiele was a meteor that flashed across the galaxy of Viennese art at the beginning of the last century. Although he lived only twenty-eight years--dying quite suddenly of influenza in 1918 just as World War I came to an end--he left a stunning pictorial oeuvre. Schiele's obsession with sexuality, his own and that of others, made him at once a voyeur and a participant in that sexual imperative which Freud was simultaneously plumbing with such unsettling results. The disturbing revelations of Schiele's unmasking portraiture and of the new science of psychology disclosed a collective cultural anxiety during the last years of the crumbling Austrian empire. As a seer into the souls of his sitters, Schiele redefined portraiture in the age of Angst. This new edition features a new introduction by the author.

Egon Schiele's Portraits, New Edition

History & Criticism

Retired art history professor Megan Crespi, an expert on the Expressionist artist Egon Schiele, is called to Vienna to help solve the brutal murder of a museum night watchman whose naked cadaver was propped up in the same pose as the nude self-portrait by Schiele above him. A series of attacks relating to Schiele occur, ranging from ''censoring'' of his nude figures' private parts with spray paint to desecration of his burial site. Amid restitution lawsuits and murderous competing gallery owners, Megan's investigations are endangered by the fanatical Grand Master of a secret sect dedicated to the obliteration of obscenity. Her own life in danger, the twisting Schiele trail leaves multiple corpses in its wake and leads Megan from conniving Vienna to remote Kaliningrad in Russia, to ancient Krumau in Bohemia, and bustling Milan in Italy as she hunts for a possible hidden trove of major Schiele paintings. What she discovers is undreamt of and leaves the Schiele world stunned and covetous. Includes Readers Guide.

The Schiele Slaughters, A Megan Crespi Mystery Series Novel

In this third book in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, a major double portrait by the Viennese Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka showing himself with his lover Alma Mahler has been stolen from the Basel Museum in Switzerland. Left in its place is an exact duplicate, except that Alma has been replaced by an unknown woman. Retired professor of art history Megan Crespi, an expert on Viennese art, is called in to help with the investigation. Then, a second theft of fourteen crates of unknown Kokoschka artworks from a Viennese storage vault takes Megan to Vienna. There she meets by accident the mysterious multimillionaire Desdemona Dumba. A stunning anorexic, Desdemona feels it is her role in life to bring Kokoschka's lost works together and away from public scrutiny. Meanwhile, two individuals, Leo Lang and Bruno Fichte-Mahler, harbor fanatical interest in Kokoschka and go to extreme measures either to desecrate or to protect the artist's images of Alma. An endangered Megan pursues leads that take her from Basel and Vienna to Berlin and finally to Xenia, Desdemona's remote islet off the Greek island of Corfu. Includes Readers Guide.

The Kokoschka Capers, A Megan Crespi Mystery Novel

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alessandra Comini. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Alessandra Comini

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alessandra Comini. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Käthe Kollwitz

Schiele in Prison

Gustav Klimt

Egon Schiele's Portraits

Schiele in Prison

The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking

Killing for Klimt, A Megan Crespi Mystery Series Novel

Egon Schiele's Portraits, New Edition

The Schiele Slaughters, A Megan Crespi Mystery Series Novel

The Kokoschka Capers, A Megan Crespi Mystery Novel