Garten und Wildnis. Landschaft im achtzehnten Jahrhundert.

Küster, Hansjörg

Küster, Ulf.

C.H.Beck

Wolfgang Laib's extraordinarily concentrated installations are touching in an immediate and fundamental way, perhaps because they also address various levels of early childhood consciousness. Beeswax tunnels are redolent with an overwhelming scent of sweet honey and pollen; powdery piles of pollen are such a luminous yellow that you want to put your hands in them and play. Visitors to the installations are opened up, become aware of the energetic presence of the natural materials shown, and are prepared for a spiritual and intellectual encounter with the work's symbolic content. This retrospective monograph establishes the unique position and great power of Laib's work.

Wolfgang Laib

Büttner, Philippe

Reference

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Though he is more often viewed as a semi-lunatic Symbolist or proto-Expressionist, the great Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was in fact a forerunner of much Modern art. His works concentrate on the human dramas of love and death, and on contemporary conditions of claustrophobia and alienation--or what he called "the modern life of the soul"--frequently deploying contemporary effects to depict this condition. He worked in paint, printmaking and photography (though he once wrote that "the camera cannot compete with a brush and canvas, as long as it can't be used in heaven and hell"). Edvard Munch: Signs of Modern Art assesses the significance of Munch's oeuvre as a highly independent contribution to Modern art, drawing on more than 100 paintings, as well as 60 drawings and prints. In flouting the boundaries between the genres of painting and printmaking, in his work with photography and film, and through his emphasis on process--for example exposing his paintings to outdoor weather--Munch opened up a turn-of-the-century view of the future.

Edvard Munch: Signs of Modern Art

Hatje Cantz

Late in their careers, Swiss art dealers Ernst and Hildy Beyeler asked the renowned architect Renzo Piano to design a home for their collection. In 1997, it opened to the public, a low, sunny temple within driving distance of Basel. In its first 10 years it has attracted almost 3,000,000 visitors over some 30 exhibits. The Beyelers had always seen the museum as a place of living involvement and innovation, and the resulting juxtapositions have provided surprising insights and experiences for a broad range of visitors, many of whom are international. The works on show have included Claude Monet to Digital Impressionism, the paintings of Titian and Velazquez and a continuous shifting Mark Rothko installation. In 2008, Samuel Keller, director of the influential European art fair, Art Basel, will assume the directorship of the foundation and continue the Beyelers' life work. This complete catalogue of the foundation's collection documents 230 paintings and sculptures by artists like Cézanne, Picasso, Rousseau, Mondrian, Klee, Ernst, Matisse, Newman, Bacon, Dubuffet and Baselitz.

Beyeler Collection

Arts & Photography

Hohl, Reinhold

Beyeler, Ernst

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

The isolate and emaciated figures of Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) speak of the extremes of solitude, but the artist's own social and familial world was populous, composed of a greatly and diversely talented family on a par with the Duchamps. Constellating Alberto's parents and siblings around his work and world view, and basing its thesis upon new research, this volume traces the influence of the family upon the art of its most famous member. It shows how Alberto's father, the painter Giovanni Giacometti, encouraged his son from an early age, and how his brothers assisted him in his art: Diego was his assistant and model, and after Alberto's death, he became famous for his bronze furniture, which is now widely collected and often exhibited; he was responsible for the casting (and sometimes the armature) of Alberto's plaster and clay sculptures, and was reputedly so attuned to his brother's work that he could recall the furrows and ridges of Alberto's figures when they were brought to him for restoration in later years. Bruno, the youngest brother, is among Switzerland's most renowned architects (he designed the Swiss pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale); and Alberto's mother and wife, and Silvio, the son of his sister Ottilia, were all indispensable models. Through the lens of this book, Giacometti is revealed as an artist deeply informed and very much supported by his family.

Giacometti

Wiesinger, Véronique

Martin-Vivier, Pierre-Emanuel

This volume from the Art to Read series makes an outstanding introduction to the life and work of this important artist. Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was born and raised in Val Bregaglia in Switzerland, but following his studies in Geneva and Rome he lived primarily in Paris. As an artist, Giacometti's earliest affiliations were among the Surrealists, but today his reduced and exposed bronze figures seem much more in sympathy with the Existentialist worldview (particularly as these pieces were developed during and after World War II, and also because of the artist's close friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre). Notoriously self-critical, and always paring back the form at hand, Giacometti labored tirelessly to reconcile humanity's outer appearance and inner condition, never arriving at a satisfactory realization: "If I could make a sculpture or a painting (but I'm not sure I want to) in just the way I'd like to, they would have been made long since (but I am incapable of saying what I want)," he once lamented. "I don't see my sculpture, I see blackness."

Alberto Giacometti: Space, Figure, Time

The earliest paintings of Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899) date back to the 1870s, when the artist was still in his native Italy enduring a life of extreme poverty. It was not until he moved to Switzerland, around 1883, that Segantini found his métier and subject matter: the Alps. Working largely outdoors, Segantini developed a style later tagged Divisionist, in which agglomerated optical effects are derived from the separation of colors into individual dots or patches. Published on the occasion of a comprehensive exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Segantini unites the artist's earliest works from Northern Italy with his depictions of Savoyan peasant life and the later paintings of the Engadin mountains that mark the apex of his career. Scholarly essays elucidate the important role that the "painter of light" played in paving the way for modernism.

Segantini

Bachmann, Dieter

Magnaguagno, Guido

Keller, Sam

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) concocted gentle deliriums of color in quiet domestic scenes: views of a table set for lunch, a garden view, a woman adjusting a bouquet or, most famously, the artist's wife bathing, all infused with an infectious chromatic delight. "It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms and character using nothing but color," he once wrote, "without recourse to values." Bonnard lavishes his domestic scenes with a palpable tenderness that later led to his style (and that of his colleague Eduoard Vuillard) being dubbed "Intimiste." In the 1880s Bonnard was a founding member of the Nabi group, along with his close friends Paul Sèrusier, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson and Edouard Vuillard. Their Post-Impressionist aesthetic favored emotional tangibility over observational truth, and their paintings reveled in heightened effects of pattern, prompted by a shared predilection for Japanese decorative arts and prints. In Bonnard's case, this predilection led to an experimentation with many forms, such as lithography, illustration, interior design and photography. For this catalogue and the exhibition it accompanies, the Fondation Beyeler has gathered an extraordinary selection of Bonnard's paintings from institutions and private collections around the world, compiling an ideal introduction to Bonnard's life-affirming vision.

Pierre Bonnard

Benesch, Evelyn

Pivotal in modern art's move towards abstraction, Piet Mondrian's oeuvre is extraordinarily versatile and complex. Not only did he paint and draw, he also wrote extensively about his thoughts and theories on art and life. Moving from traditional Dutch landscape painting to a pronounced rhythmic framework focusing on compositional structure rather than naturalistic representation, Mondrian was profoundly impressed by contemporary culture. Thus, he was not only inspired by the pattern of the extensive Dutch canal system, but also by the rhythm of jazz and the foxtrot. Demonstrating the impact of his oeuvre, Yves Saint-Laurent's famous "Mondrian Dress" even made him a fashion icon posthumously. Celebrating the 150th anniversary of his birth, Ulf Küster entertainingly leads through well- and lesser-known aspects of Mondrian's life and work offering inspiring impulses for reflection and further engagement with the fascinating artist.

Piet Mondrian: A–Z

Individual Artists

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