Fernand Léger (1881-1955) is one of the few Modernist artists that can be said to have anticipated both American Abstraction and American Pop, and to have made a deliberate relationship with American culture: He visited the U.S. several times, and during the Second World War, from 1940 to 1945, he lived in exile in New York. In America, Léger found much to admire--above all, a dynamic embrace of industry sympathetic to his own quasi-Futurist love of technological energies. An early critic of Léger described him as more of a "Tubist" than a Cubist, noting the cool metal cylinders that fill his early work. It was through such motifs that the artist approached modern life, viewing industry as a force for the good and its translation into art as a Modern vernacular. "Our pictures are our slang," he optimistically declared towards the end of his stay in New York. During that time, Léger had produced some of his most important works, which found a ready audience in the younger American artists surrounding him. Paris-New York covers the artist's entire oeuvre, from the Cubist-influenced early work to the later, cheerful large-format paintings. Special attention is paid to the American dimension of Léger's oeuvre, and the volume traces his impact on American artists--primarily on Roy Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, but also on other late twentieth-century artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Al Held, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

Fernand Léger: Paris-New York

Arts & Photography

Bois, Yve-Alain

Bouvier, Raphaël

Derouet, Christian

History & Criticism

Hatje Cantz

In recent years, critics and curators have pursued fascinating lines of analogy and sympathy between the sculptural oeuvres of Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) and Richard Serra (born 1939). Foremost among these shared qualities is the awareness of surrounding space both sculptors foster in the viewer, compelling a spatial encounter in which the sculpture resonates well beyond its own formal achievements. Serra and Brancusi also enjoy a mutual fascination with stacking elements, with spreading and concentrating forms and with stressing weight and material. But the distinctions between their oeuvres are also very telling: where Brancusi plays with the function of the base in his sculptures, making them an integral component of the work, Serra rejects the base altogether and uses the floor, walls and surrounding architecture as part of his enterprise. Constantin Brancusi and Richard Serra: Resting in Time and Space explores this retroactive art-historical conversation by juxtaposing 35 key Brancusis with a selection of Serras from across the artist's career. Key works in marble, bronze, wood and plaster are oriented within the themes outlined above, which position the oeuvres of Brancusi and Serra as the purest and most innovative articulations of abstract sculpture of the past century.

Constantin Brancusi & Richard Serra: Resting In Time and Space

Bach, Friedrich Teja

Reference

Painter, sculptor, graphic artist and poet Max Ernst was one of the most versatile artists of the modern era. Starting out as a Dadaist in Cologne, Ernst soon became, in Paris, a pioneer not only of Surrealism but also of such techniques as collage (he invented the collage novel), frottage and grattage. Even later, as a perpetual innovator of figures, forms and techniques, Ernst was continually reorienting and revitalizing his art. In the process he created a huge body of work, whose abiding motif was the bird: an alter-ego he named Loplop. Ernst’s ingenuity and inventiveness in handling dream imagery, the sudden breaks that mark the numerous phases of his work and his constant exploration of techniques all conspire to confound summation of his oeuvre. This career overview--published to coincide with a major retrospective at the Albertina in Vienna, traveling to the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel--presents the full wealth of Ernst’s multifaceted oeuvre in a selection of more than 150 paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures, alongside illustrated books and other documents. With more than 250 color reproductions, the catalogue also makes visible and explicates Ernst’s working processes, as he seems effortlessly to combine references to the past with the political events of his time and a prophetic, visionary view of the future. Max Ernst (1891–1976) was born near Cologne. While studying at the University of Bonn he became fascinated with the art of mental patients, and through an early friendship with Hans Arp, joined the Dada movement. In 1921 he befriended André Breton, moving to Paris and cofounding Surrealism. With the Nazi invasion of France in 1939, Ernst fled to America with the assistance of Peggy Guggenheim, only returning to France in 1953 with his third wife, Dorothea Tanning. He died in Paris in 1976.

Max Ernst: Retrospective

Michaud, Philippe-Alain

Drost, Julia

Fischer, Gisela

Individual Artists

Jean Dubuffet is one of the most influential and versatile artists of the postwar period. With his novel aesthetic inspired by Art Brut (a term he coined), Dubuffet succeeded in breaking away from modernist conventions and redefining the concept of art, and in doing so leaving his mark on the second half of the 20th century and exercising a considerable influence on numerous young artists. Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape―the first substantial English-language Dubuffet monograph in decades―is published for a large-scale retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, with around 100 major works from all of the artist’s important creative phases. It opens with an exploration of Dubuffet’s multilayered notion of landscape, which the artist transforms into bodies, faces or objects. Dubuffet experimented with new techniques and materials, and in the process created a completely independent, fascinating pictorial cosmos. Besides important paintings and sculptures from international museums and private collections, the book also presents the ensemble of figures from Dubuffet’s stage play Coucou Bazar, his unparalleled Gesamtkunstwerk synthesis of the arts. The French painter, sculptor and writer Jean Dubuffet (1901–85) evolved his style of art from pictures created spontaneously by children, self-taught artists and the mentally ill. In 1948 he founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut which advocated working artistically outside the bounds of art-canon norms and academic training. During this decade he developed a powerful reputation in the US, where his work was championed by Clement Greenberg and the Abstract Expressionists; he also forged close relationships with writers and artists such as Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge and Antonin Artaud. In 1962 he developed a semi-figurative, semi-abstract artistic idiom in a large series of works he called Hourloupe. In his later work Dubuffet returned to the gestural techniques of Art Informel.

Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape

FRANZKE, Andreas

Iselin, Catherine

Queneau, Florence

Webel, Sophie

"Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible." –Balthus
One of the last great 20th-century masters, Balthus pursued a path that ran exactly contrary to that of the modernist avant-gardes with which he was contemporary. At once quiet and intriguing, his paintings unite colliding contrasts, combining reality and dream, eroticism and innocence, practicality and mystery, the familiar and the uncanny in unique ways.
This volume, published for a retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, gathers around 50 key paintings from all phases of this legendary artist's career. It commences with the monumental masterpiece Passage du Commerce-Saint-André (1952–54), in which Balthus' intensive study of the dimensions of space and time and their relationship to figure and object is especially apparent.
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus (1908–2001), was born in Paris to Polish expatriate parents. He was raised in an exceptionally artistic milieu, with visitors to his household including Rilke (who became his mother's lover), André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard. Balthus was one of the few living artists to be represented in the Louvre, when his painting The Children (1937) was acquired from the private collection of Pablo Picasso.

Balthus

Wenders, Wim

Kono, Michiko

Berggruen, Olivier

Burger, Christine

Guignard, Yves

López-Manzanares, Juan

Söntgen, Beate

Le Jeune Picasso PEriodes bleue et rose /franCais

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