The Library of great painters

The book, its title a reference to a characterization that his artist friend Paul Klee bestowed on Nolde, is published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Emil Nolde' at Zentrum Paul Klee and includes, in addition to the illustrations of the works on show, the first ever publication of correspondence between the Nolde and Klee couples. Any encounter with the unknown seemed to always inspire Emil Nolde's artistic work. In his oeuvre there are great number references to the grotesque, the fantastic and the exotic - a fascination he shared with Paul Klee. Grotesques enabled both to critically comment on contemporary events. Fantastic depictions in Nolde's work stem from the serious examination of the unknown and uncanny and, accordingly, take a central position in his work, while in Paul Klee's work, the realm of ghosts, demons and other hybrid beings as an exciting parallel world seems to rather serve a kind of edification. For Nolde as well as for Klee and many of their contemporaries, exotic motifs formed a new inspiring vocabulary of forms, which helped them transcend the restrictions of the European tradition. Exhibition: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (17.11.2018 - 03.03.2019).

Hieronymus Bosch was one of those rare artists who introduced a new vision to the history of his medium. His phantasmagoric images of Heaven and Hell were conjured out of the visions and myths that swirled and howled in the minds of many Christians poised between the Middle Ages and the Reformation in Northern Europe.

Contains forty color plates, supplemented by black-and-white reproductions with text and commentary on Manet's life and his works.

Max Beckmann is one of the titans of modernism, although he considered himself the last Old Master. This publication examines the artist's landscape paintings, which are less characterized by allegorical layers of meaning than his works in other genres. Their splendid painterly qualities are immediately perceptible. The starting point for these landscapes was a potent experience of nature. Frequently, personal objects appear in the foreground like remnants of still lifes, making the viewer aware of the artist's presence. But the paintings are also realistic representations of places the artist visited, and Beckmann referred to photographs or postcards of these sites as part of his creative process. Further inspirations came from art itself: flashes of Beckmann's immense knowledge of art history can be seen in his citations of other works. Thus, his landscapes can be regarded as a kind of summary of his understanding of the world.

"When René Magritte reached his 40s, something unexpected happened. The painter, who had honed an iconic Surrealist style between 1926 and 1938, suddenly started making paintings that looked almost nothing like his earlier work. First he adopted an Impressionist aesthetic, borrowing the sweet, hazy palette of Pierre-Auguste Renoir-which he described as "sunlit Surrealism." Then his style shifted again, incorporating popular imagery, the brash colors of Fauvism and the gestural brushwork of Expressionism. And then Magritte returned to his classic style as if nothing had happened. René Magritte: The Fifth Season looks at the art Magritte made during and after the stylistic crises of the 1940s, revealing his shifting attitudes toward painting. Subjects explored in this volume include the artist's Renoir period; the période vache, with its Fauvist- and Expressionist-style paintings that are little known to American audiences; the "hypertrophy of objects" paintings, a series that plays with the scale of familiar objects; and the enigmatic Dominion of Light suite, paintings that suggest the simultaneous experience of day and night. Featuring full-color plates of approximately 50 oil paintings, and a dozen of the artist's gouaches, René Magritte: The Fifth Season offers a new understanding of Magritte's special position in the history of 20th-century art. In a career of almost half a century, Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967) probed the distance between object, language and image. Even as he playfully explored new styles, his painting practice remained consistent in its cautionary message not to equate the observable world with reality in all its fullness." -- Publisher's description.