“Ich bin ein Berliner.” With these words, John F. Kennedy made history. Addressing a crowd of several hundred thousand in West Berlin, two years after the erection of the Berlin Wall, the young and charismatic president conveyed solidarity and support for West Germany on behalf of the United States, marking the height of good relations between the two countries and a decisive moment in Cold War history as well. The local media were poised to record this momentous event. Among the photographers and reporters covering the Kennedy visit was twenty-eight-year-old Ulrich Mack, whose never-before-published photographs feature the president in a variety of settings: a triumphal ticker-tape procession down the main street of West Berlin with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, mayor of Berlin; a visit to the notorious Checkpoint Charlie where Kennedy stands atop the observation deck; a crowd of cheering West Berliners encircling the president following his impassioned speech. Mack’s photographs are technically superb but, more important, they are guided by an instinctive feel for capturing great moments—including those on the sidelines that, in their candor, often surpass the staged appearances. For the modern-day viewer, many of the photos are also remarkable for having been taken at very close range. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of this historic occasion, Kennedy in Berlin reproduces more than one hundred of Mack’s photos taken throughout the state visit in June 1963—selected by the photographer himself and editor Hans-Michael Koetzle, offering a look at this important event.

Kennedy in Berlin: Photographs by Ulrich Mack

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Hirmer Publishers

Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890–1918) is one of the most famous and recognizable twentieth-century artists, his work seen everywhere from museum walls to dorm room posters. This book is the first to focus on his early life and work, starting with his childhood in Tulln and following his career through his resignation from the Vienna Art Academy in 1909. Through that period, we see Schiele begin to develop the distinctive brushstrokes, expressive lines, and underlying intensity that make his work so unforgettable. Essays by art historians shed light on the circumstances of Schiele’s childhood and the cultural, social, and family setting in which he began thinking about and making art. Beautiful, large-scale reproductions illustrate the evolution of his basic formal principles, and they help us understand his first creative phase, which reflected his dissatisfaction with the traditional styles that were then dominant. Other essays address his crucial friendship with Gustav Klimt and the various collections and collectors of Schiele’s early work. An enlightening new take on one of the most influential figurative painters, Egon Schiele: The Beginning will appeal not only to specialists and scholars, but to Schiele’s many fans as well.

Egon Schiele: The Beginning

History & Criticism

Expressionist sculptor Bernhard Hoetger (1874–1949) was a key figure in the Art Nouveau movement in Germany. This volume focuses on the series of extremely influential sculptural works that Hoetger created for the plane tree grove of the Art Nouveau exhibition center Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt. A member of the Darmstadt artists’ colony, Hoetger created more than forty sculptural works for the colony’s final exhibition in 1914, including reliefs, animal sculptures, jug carriers, vases, and more. Exhibited across the entire garden area, the artworks drew on motifs not only from Christian art and the Western tradition, but also on Buddhism, ancient Egyptian poetry, and more—and the result was an outdoor realm that visitors experienced as almost sacredThis beautifully illustrated volume, the first in-depth look at these works in a century, includes new photographs of all the artworks in situ and also details the extensive restoration work they’ve undergone in recent years.

Bernhard Hoetger - The Plane Tree Grove: A Total Artwork on the Mathildenhöhe

Nukuoro Atoll is a ring of tiny islands in the south Pacific that has a total area of only 1.7 square kilometers and is home to only three hundred residents. Yet the tiny aitu sculptures produced there are known worldwide, appreciated for their unusual forms and coveted for their rarity. This book features images of almost half the aitu sculptures known to exist, starting with the earliest ones that were purchased by trader Johann Stanislaus Kubary in 1873. These pieces are distributed throughout museums across the globe, and they are rarely seen as a group—let alone photographed in such stunning detail. The resulting book offers an unprecedented chance to assess the form and the achievement of the sculptors of Nukuoro Atoll.

Nukuoro: Sculptures from Micronesia

Minimalist artist Dan Flavin (1933–96) is best known for his brightly colored fluorescent light installations, which have captivated art lovers for decades. But he was also an accomplished draftsman, and this is the first book to fully explore the central role that drawing played in Flavin’s art. Not only did Flavin produce numerous sketches for each of his light installations, he also regularly drew outdoors, primarily riverscapes and beach scenes. A number of those drawings are included in this volume, as are a group of remarkable pastels of sails, a subject he turned to when he was in his fifties. This book also draws on Flavin’s journals, in which he wrote about his passion for drawing, which he called “an intensely concentrated personal form of artistic relief.” Yet despite the importance of drawing in Flavin’s life, his drawings are little known, in part because he almost never sold—or even gave away—his drawings. Most of the works reproduced here were never shown publicly and are being published here for the first time. Offering a surprising new angle on a major artist, Dan Flavin: Drawing will surprise—and delight—his many fans.

Dan Flavin: Drawing

Individual Artists

Hundertwasser was a key figure in the international avant-garde art scene in the years just after World War II. This volume takes a close look at an under-studied aspect of his work: the deep influence of Japanese art and philosophy that can be traced in his painting. Like many European artists in the 1950s, Hundertwasser viewed the Far East as a source of a new, more open concept of art, free of the dispiriting weight of the Western tradition. He was fascinated by the striking woodcuts of Japanese masters Hiroshige and Hokusai, and his study of their work, along with his long-lasting engagement with Taoism and Zen Buddhism, greatly influenced his experimental compositions and action paintings of the period. An early friendship with Akria Kito and his 1961 marriage to his Japanese life partner provided further fuel to Hundertwasser’s artistic explorations. A beautifully produced volume that offers a wholly new way of thinking about a potent figure in twentieth-century art, Hundertwasser will appeal to fans of the European and Japanese traditions alike.

Hundertwasser: Japan and the Avant-garde

The fantastical art of short-lived German painter and photographer Wolfgang Schulze (1913–51), known as Wols, draws viewers into a strange, miniature world, one that bridges Surrealism and abstract expressionism. This richly illustrated book offers the first comprehensive retrospective of Wols’s career in more than twenty years. It presents two hundred color images of the artist’s work—the majority drawn from private collections, and thus rarely seen in public. The paintings presented here make up more than one-third of his entire oeuvre, and they’re accompanied by drawings and aquarelles, which taken together show the artist’s evolution. We see him drawing on Surrealism and naive art, but then going beyond those schools to develop new forms of expression within abstract art. Essays by German and American scholars round out the volume, putting Wols’s achievement in its historical and artistic context. The result is the most complete picture ever offered of Wols’s work, and it makes a strong case for his important place in twentieth-century art.

Wols: Retrospective

Painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz is one of the most important German artists working today, and his art is held by major museums around the world. And for more than thirty years, photographer Benjamin Katz has been documenting Baselitz at work. Katz is famous for his photographic portraits of artists, including Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Rosemarie Trockel, and Martin Kippenberger. His long experience working with artists—and the friendships he’s established with them—enables him to capture them when they are completely at ease. The resulting portraits offer an unprecedented view of artists actually working rather than posing. In this book, we see Baselitz with paintbrush in hand, contemplating a painting, lifting a hammer as he eyes an in-progress sculpture, or relaxing with a cigar and a dog at his side. The photographs in this volume are intimate, personal, and disarming. A testament to decades of friendship, they reveal a new side of an artist we’ve previously seen only through his work.

Benjamin Katz: Georg Baselitz at Work

Gockel, Cornelia

Alexander Calder is one of the most important—and most popular—American artists of the twentieth century. This lavishly illustrated volume accompanies an exhibit at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf that focuses on Calder’s works of the 1930s and ’40s, a period in which the sculptor experimented with a number of wildly different artistic directions. In addition to showcasing a large number of Calder’s early abstract sculptures, this book also presents key works by his contemporaries, artists such as Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, and Jean Arp. By setting Calder’s work alongside that of other artists, the volume establishes not only lines of influence and differentiation, but also the larger context in which he created his sculptures. Beautiful full-page images of Calder’s iconic mobiles and stabiles give a rare sense of Calder’s often playful use of space, and enable readers to study his work in detail. An accompanying DVD includes historical and experimental films, avant-garde music, interviews, and a walk through the exhibition, bringing the whole of Calder’s achievement to life in unprecedented fashion.

Alexander Calder: Avant-garde in Motion

This lavishly illustrated book presents a comprehensive overview of the career thus far of German artist Verena Landau, documenting her projects from 1999 through 2013. Landau is particularly interested in the tense relationship between art and commerce, a theme that runs through several of her works. The sale of her painted film stills Pasolini-Stills and Passing Pasolini, for example, led her to create portraits of collectors engaged in mundane activities in the spaces in front of the paintings, while Zone of Discretion traces the story of a painting that was sold to a bank. Another project involved staging a fictional theft of her own painting through a series of photomontages. In more recent years, Landau has been interested in entrances to banks and shareholder meetings, public passages, and, most recently, spaces of public transit and the waiting and movement that occur there.A retrospective that reveals an artist changing and evolving, Verena Landau: Passages, Passengers, Places is a fascinating, revealing document of a cutting-edge artist.

Verena Landau: Passages, Passengers, Places

Landau, Verena

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