Pegasus library

The theme of children and childhood, a highly popular subject with the great painters and sculptors of the past, has received comparatively little attention in twentieth-century art. Here, as in so many other respects, the work of Pablo Picasso stands out as a major exception. Picasso's many portraits and other depictions of children constitute one of the most immediately accessible and appealing facets of his extraordinarily varied oeuvre. This fascinating new study by Werner Spies, one of the foremost connoisseurs of Picasso's work, examines the artist's approach to the subject of the child against the background of his turbulent personal life, the development of this restlessly innovative aesthetic thinking, an the general ideas about the significance of childhood and youth that have played such a key role in shaping modern culture. Sumptuously illustrated, and packed with original and stimulating insights, the book offers an enticing introduction to Picasso's magical world of children, and to his visual universe as a whole.

Sister Wendy Beckett's highly acclaimed insights into the work and psyche of Max Beckmann, one of the major Expressionist painters and graphic artists of the 20th century. The author sheds new light on the way the traumatic events in the artist's life were reflected in his painting and observes that "he painted himself as if thereby to find himself. If he could make visible...these lineaments, that expression, that visual record of his experience, then he might come to a deeper experience of what he was." By tracing the changing moods of Beckmann's painting throughout his life, Sister Wendy, with her uncanny and intimate skills of analysis, plots a fascinating series of peaks and troughs in his feeling of self-worth. She correlates these directly with events in his life, and reveals a number of hidden self-portraits. Much of Beckmann's work was dramatically influenced by the two world wars, and Sister Wendy shows how it was only the artist's last works, in America, that demonstrated he had finally reached fulfillment.

Egon Schiele: 27 Masterworks brings together a group of the artist's most significant works, including a cross-section of his major paintings and many of his most beautiful watercolors and drawings. A thorough overview of the oils enables the reader to understand the artist's overriding creative ambitions, but it is in his works on paper that Schiele truly stands out. As evidenced by the numerous oversize and superbly printed reproductions in this book, Schiele deserves to be counted among the foremost draftsmen of all time, ranking alongside Albrecht Durer and Hans Holbein. Egon Schiele: 27 Masterworks follows the entire trajectory of the artist's career, beginning with his early Gustav Klimt-influenced paintings and his startling Expressionist breakthrough in 1910 at the tender age of 20, to his more serene late works, completed shortly before his untimely death at the age of 28.

Briefly examines the life and work of the American realist painter, describing and giving examples of his art.

An introduction to the life and work of the nineteenth-century French artist Henri Rousseau

The ill-starred love affair between Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter is one of the most intriguing episodes in the history of twentieth-century art - a story of happiness and pain, trust and betrayal, idyllic harmony and bitter conflict, set against the backdrop of the revolutionary upheavals that attended the birth of Modernism. Living and working together in Munich and in the Bavarian countryside, Kandinsky and Munter jointly became the moving spirits of the Blue Rider school, which pioneered the epochal turn from figurative painting to abstraction. This book traces the development of the couple's personal and artistic relationship from its beginnings in 1902 to the key moment in 1914 when Kandinsky fled Germany and returned to his native Russia, before finally abandoning Munter in 1917. The fascinating and often moving story of their life together - and of the underlying tensions that eventually drove them apart - is told in letters (some of which are published here for the first time), in diary extracts and memoirs, and in superb reproductions of their finest paintings and sketches.