Gerhard Richter is one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era. For decades he has sought innovative ways to make painting more relevant, often through a multifaceted dialogue with photography. Today Richter is most widely recognized for the photo-paintings he made during the 1960s that rely on images culled from mass media and pop culture. Always fascinated with the limits and uncertainties of representation, he has since then produced landscapes, abstractions, glass and mirror constructions, prints, sculptures, and installations. 
Though Richter has been known in the United States for quite some time, the highly successful retrospective of his work at the MoMA in 2002 catapulted him to unprecedented fame. Enter noted curator Dietmar Elger, who here presents the first biography of this contemporary artist. Written with full access to Richter and his archives, this fascinating book offers unprecedented insight into his life and work. Elger explores Richter’s childhood in Nazi Germany; his years as a student and mural painter in communist East Germany; his time in the West during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, when student protests, political strife, and violence tore the Federal Republic of Germany apart; and his rise to international acclaim during the 1980s and beyond.
Richter has always been a difficult personality to parse and the seemingly contradictory strands of his artistic practice have frustrated and sometimes confounded critics. But the extensive interviews on which this book is based disclose a Richter who is far more candid, personal, and vivid than ever before. The result is a book that will be the foundational portrait of this artist for years to come.

Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting

Arts & Photography

ELGER, DIETMAR

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Text by Dietmar Elger, Anette Kruszynski, Isabel Ewig, Justin Hoffman, Gerhard Schaub, Julia Schmidt.

In the Beginning is MERZ: From Kurt Schwitters to the Present Day

Schmidt, Julia

Kruszynski, Anette

Hoffman, Justin

Schaub, Gerhard

Ewig, Isabel

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Perhaps no other artist from the second half of the 20th century is as familiar to the public as Andy Warhol--and his self-portraits can hardly be said to have played a lackluster role with regards to the artist's celebrity. U.S. postage stamp anyone? Occupying a position of central importance in his oeuvre, Warhol's self-portraits also occupy a consistent, long-running one. From the first self-images in gouache painted by 16-year-old Andrew Warhol in the mid-40s to the fright-wig series completed shortly before his death in February 1987, Andy Warhol continually used self-portraiture to reflect on his position and social status as an artist, performing a variety of roles in the process. Yet he never made use of the traditional topos of the artist's self-portrait; his fascination with transience and death is constantly present, as in his other works. Although a seemingly endless number of books have been published on Warhol's various work groups, this is the first monograph devoted exclusively to his self-portraits. The accompanying essays discuss different aspects of the theme and examine Warhol's self-portraits in the light of an expanded concept of the artist's self-portrait in the 20th century.

Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits

Rosenblum, Robert

Individual Artists

Over the 60 years of his artistic career, Gerhard Richter (born 1932) has produced a standard-setting oeuvre whose thematic and stylistic diversity has no equal among the art of our time. This extensive monograph is the first to present the complete range of the numerous works Richter realized as series, cycles and spaces. It includes figurative paintings, such as landscapes, still lifes and portraits, many of which are based on photographs, such as the series S. and Child, a personal and intimate variation on the traditional subject of the Madonna and Child. It also features abstract works, for which Richter draws from a changing repertoire of forms and colors to produce both small and monumental paintings.

Gerhard Richter: Pictures / Series

Didi-Huberman, Georges

Kono, Michiko

Schwarz, Dieter

Hatje Cantz

Expressionismus: Eine deutsche Kunstrevolution (German Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

B. Taschen

Expresionismo

Taschen

Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art

Anxious angles: The pioneers and masterworks of “degenerate” Expressionism German Expressionists were uneasy and angry. Emerging at the dawn of the 20th century, they railed against Christian and bourgeois values as much as rampant urban industrialization. Anti-imperialist, they were dispersed, shattered, and depleted by the horrors of the First World War, and rallied their efforts only to be officially erased by the Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937. In this comprehensive TASCHEN collection, director of the Gerhard Richter Archive Dietmar Elger gathers the many artists and elements of this urgent, scattered, complex movement into one authoritative overview of its protagonists, principles, and essential role in 20th-century modernism. Finding a critical calm amid the frenzy of color and distortion, the book distills Expressionism’s leading collectives, Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, as well as its regional characteristics across its Berlin and Munich hubs, and its North German, Rheinland, and Viennese variants. Along the way, we compare and contrast themes and stylistic choices as this dispersed group of artists wrestled with their modern industrial reality. We find luminous streaks from Wassily Kandinsky, and the sickly hues of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the futurist facets of Franz Marc, and a partial Impressionist throwback in the gaudy dabs of Emil Nolde. We meet fat faces, tired faces, and faces like African masks. We walk into seedy bars with bloated old men, and then enter a claustrophobic yellow room occupied by an awkwardly posed nude. We are crushed in a cacophony of city sound and smoke, and then left alone with woods, a lake, and silence. Spanning this richness and range in Expressionist output, Elger features such well-known figures as Beckmann, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Nolde, Schiele, while taking care to present inadequately studied artists such as Conrad Felixmüller, Ludwig Meidner, and Marianne von Werefkin. The result is an expansive, inclusive, dependable digest of a vivid, often violent mode of expression, and the yearning and unease behind its frenzied paintwork.

Taschen America, LLC

A specifically German artistic revolution 
In six chapters - The Brücke Group of Artists, Northern German Expressionism, The Blaue Reiter, Rhenish Expressionism, The City and Expressionism in Vienna - this publication deals with a specifically German artistic revolution, a phenomenon that has quite accurately been described as "the most significant German contribution to 20th century European art". 
Beside a number of famous names - Beckmann, Heckel, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Macke, Marc, Mueller, Nolde, Schiele and Schmidt-Rottluff - the author also introduces several lesser-known artists, such as Campendonk, Felixmüller, Meidner, Morgner, Münter and von Werefkin, with some representative works.

Expressionism

Each book in Taschen's Basic Art movement and genre series includes a detailed Introduction with approximately 30 photographs, plus a timeline of the most important events (political, cultural, scientific, sporting, etc.) that took place during the time period. The body of the book contains 35 of the most important works of the epoch; each is presented on a 2-page spread with a full page Image and, on the facing page, a description/interpretation of the work, portrait of the artist, and biographical information. A precursor to surrealism, the Dada movement stressed the absurd and unpredictable, lashing out against traditional standards of aesthetics. Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray were among the most famous proponents of Dada, creating works that dared viewers to expand their notions of what can be considered art.

Dadaismo (Serie menor) (Spanish Edition)

Detailed introduction to Dadaism with 30 photographs plus timeline of most important political, cultural, scientific and sporting events. Body of book contains 35 of most important works of epoch with interpretationand artist biography.

Dadaism

Eiger, Dietmar

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