In the architecture of Richard Neutra (1892-1970), inside and outside find their perfect modernist harmony. As the Californian sun glints off sleek building surfaces, vast glass panel walls allow panoramic views over mountains, gardens, palm trees, and pools.
Neutra moved to the United States from his native Vienna in 1923 and settled in Los Angeles. He displayed his affinity with architectural settings early on with the Lovell House, set on a landscaped hill with views of the Pacific Ocean and Santa Monica Mountains. Later projects such as the Kaufmann House and Nesbitt House would continue this blend of art, landscape, and living comfort, with Neutras clients often receiving detailed questionnaires to define their precise needs.
This richly illustrated architect introduction presents the defining projects of Neutras career. As crisp structures nestle amid natural wonders, we celebrate a particularly holistic brand of modernism which incorporated the ragged lines and changing colors of nature as much as the pared down geometries of the International Style.
Louis Isadore Kahn and a luminous modernist language
Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974) treated each building like a temple. Across the United States, in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Israel, his designs combined the sleek, utilitarian surfaces of modernism with a devotion to geometric forms and a reverence for natural light that suffused his stuctures with a monumental and breathtaking spirituality.
This essential introduction brings together 17 of Kahns most important buildings across his cultural, governmental, religious, and residential repertoire. Plans, views, descriptions, and quality photographs trace the context and development of each project, while an introductory essay explores Kahns unique architectural ideology and his legacy as one of the most important 20th-century American architects since Frank Lloyd Wright.
Through Kahn masterworks, such as the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, or Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, well explore Kahns his back to basics grammar inspired by ancient sites in Italy, Greece, and Egypt; and his unique vocabulary of mass, void, and light that suffused the International Style with a near-celestial luminescence.
The life and work of Glasgow School pioneer Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Scottish architect, designer, and painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) was one of the earliest pioneers of modern architecture and design. While he did not receive much recognition in his hometown of Glasgow during his lifetime, his bold new blend of simplicity and poetic detail inspired modernists across Europe.
Mackintoshs avant-garde approach embraced a variety of media as well as fresh stylistic devices. His multi-faceted oeuvre incorporated architecture, furniture, graphic design, landscapes, and flower studies. He embraced strong lines, elegant proportions, and natural motifs, combining an adventurous dose of japonisme with a modernist sensibility for function. He preferred bold black typography, restrained shapes, and tall, generous windows suffusing rooms with light.
Much of his work was collaborative practice with his wife, fellow artist Margaret Macdonald. The couple made up half of the loose Glasgow collective known as The Four; the other two were Margarets sister, Frances, and her husband, Herbert MacNair. On the continent, the Glasgow Style was met with delight. In Italy, Germany, and, in particular, Austria, artists of the Viennese Secession and Art Nouveau drew much from its rectilinear yet lyrical forms.
In this introductory book, we take in Mackintoshs practice across art, architecture, and design to explore his particular combination of the statuesque and sensual and its vital influence on modernist expression across Europe. Featured projects include his complete scheme for the Willow Tea Rooms and the Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art, widely considered Mackintoshs masterwork.
Yves Klein, the artist who owned ultramarine
In the mid-1950s, Yves Klein (1928-1962) declared that a new world calls for a new man. With his idiosyncratic style and huge charisma, this bold artist would go on to pursue a brief but bountiful career, producing more than 1,000 paintings over seven years in an oeuvre now considered a mainstay of postwar modernism.
Klein made his name above all with his large monochrome canvases in his own patented hue of blue. International Klein Blue (IKB), composed of pure pigment and binding medium, is at once rich and luminous, evocative and decorative, and was conceived by Klein as a means of evoking the immateriality and infinitude of the world. The works of this Blue Revolution seem to draw us into another dimension, as if hypnotized by a perfect summer sky. Klein was also renowned for his deployment of living brushes, in which naked women, daubed in International Klein Blue, would make imprints of their bodies on large sheets of paper.
This Basic Art introduction presents key Klein works to introduce an artist who was at once a showman, inventor, and pioneer of performance art. With page after page of the ever-alluring International Klein Blue, it is both an essential guide to a modern art master and a meditation on the unique effects of a single color.
The visionary designs of Charles and Ray Eames
The creative duo Charles Eames (1907-1978) and Ray Kaiser Eames (1912-1988) transformed the visual character of America. Though best known for their furniture, the husband and wife team were also forerunners in architecture, textile design, photography, and film. The Eameses work defined a new, multifunctional modernity, exemplary for its integration of craft and design, as well as for the use of modern materials, notably plywood and plastics.
The Eames Lounge Chair Wood, designed with molded plywood technology, became a defining furniture piece of the 20th century, while the couples contribution to the Case Study Houses project not only made inventive use of industrial materials but also developed an adaptable floor plan of multipurpose spaces which would become a hallmark of postwar modern architecture.
From the couples earliest furniture experiments to their seminal short film Powers of Ten, this book covers all the aspects of the illustrious Eames repertoire and its revolutionary impact on middle-class American living.
The splattered oeuvre of a cultural icon
The rebel hero of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) careened through his life like a firework across the American art landscape. Channeling ideas from sources as diverse as Picasso and Mexican surrealism, he rejected convention to develop his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing.
Pollocks most famous works are his drip paintings, where he dripped and poured household enamel paint over the canvas with a variety of instruments, from sticks to syringes, hardened brushes to broken bits of glass. The splattered results pulsate with energy, replacing the refinement of easel and brush with something altogether more immediate, vivid, and physical. To evade the viewers search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and identified each work with a neutral number only.
Notoriously reclusive and volatile, struggling with alcoholism, married to fellow Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner, and killed in a car crash aged just 44, Pollock is as much a compelling celebrity icon as an artistic pioneer. This essential artist introduction explores both his work and his fame to shed light on masterpieces of the modernist story, and the making of a cultural icon.
The charge of 20th-century expressionism
Although it only lasted three turbulent years, the afterburn of the Blaue Reiter (1911-1914) movement exerted a tremendous influence on the development of modern European art. Named after a Kandinsky painting, The Blue Rider, this loose band of artists, grouped around Russian emigre Wassily Kandinsky and German painter Franz Marc, sought to reject establishment standards and charge into a new artistic unknown.
Articulating spiritual values and concerns in an era of rapid industrialization, the artists of the Blaue Reiter were connected by a shared interest in painting, woodcuts, and prints, as well as the symbolic values of color and spontaneous approaches to artwork. Key pieces such as Franz Marcs Blue Horse I (1911), Kandinskys Picture with a Black Arch (1912), and August Mackes Woman in a Green Jacket (1913) reveal varying subjects, but all channel distorted perspectives, crude lines, and an emphatic, expressionist use of color.
The Blaue Reiter was abruptly truncated by the onset of the First World War, which killed two of its leading artists, along with growing dissent between the groups protagonists. This book reveals the movements remarkable influence despite its brevity, presenting key works, artists, and their reverberating effects.
The unique El Greco vision
To his contemporaries in late 16th-century Venice, El Greco (1541-1614) was a contrary fellow, an innate artist blessed with extraordinary talent, but stubborn in the pursuit of his own path. Throughout his career, as he progressed from Crete to Venice, to Rome and ultimately Toledo, Spain, The Greek stood apart from his peers, merging different Western art traditions to create a unique pictorial language.
El Grecos single-minded style rejected naturalism and rejected accessibility. Works such as The Disrobing of Christ (1577-79), The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586-88), and The Vision of St John (1608-14) reveal elongated, twisted figures; unreal colors; and an experimental rendering of space — all resistant to easy viewing and intent, instead, on an art of epic grandeur and intellectual beauty.
Frequently regarded with suspicion and criticism during his lifetime, El Greco was revived by a troop of ardent modern admirers, including Pablo Picasso, Roger Fry, and Der Blaue Reiter pioneer Franz Marc. Today, the artist belongs to the privileged group of great old master painters, as much an anomaly of his age, as a reference point across the centuries.
This essential introduction from TASCHEN Basic Art 2.0 explores the influences and the ingredients of El Grecos radical and singular vision, from the symbolic world of Byzantine icons and the humanistic values of the Renaissance to the nascent beginnings of conceptual practice.
Changing the course of 20th-century art
When is a urinal no longer a urinal? When Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) declared it to be art. The uproar that greeted the French artists Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal installed in a gallery, sent shock waves through the art world establishment that reverberate right through to today.
This essential introduction distills all the daring and the scandal of Duchamps practice into one essential overview not only of a pioneering creative but also of a critical moment in Western culture. From his groundbreaking blend of abstraction, Cubism, and Futurism in Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) to his forays into the now-iconic readymades such as Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Bottle Rack (1914) we explore how Duchamp consistently challenged the notion of what art is and, in so doing, opened up a world of conceptual possibilities beyond the retinal experience.
Fernando Boteros fulsome and frolicking forms
Fernando Botero is an artist with his own style. For more than six decades, the Colombians Boterismo technique has captured collectors, institutions, and public spaces worldwide with a unique, fleshy, overblown approach to the human body. Through these corpulent creations, Botero has become one of the most recognized artists from Latin America, his artworks displayed in prominent places around the globe, including Park Avenue in New York City and the Champs-Elysees in Paris.
This TASCHEN Basic Art edition offers an essential introduction to this leading figure of figures in contemporary art. Tracing Boteros oeuvre from his earliest caricatures of animals through to recent large-scale bronze sculptures, the book examines the artists diverse array of influences, from Paolo Uccello to Abstract Expressionism, and celebrates the wit, irony, insight, and critical acumen that round out his compositions, however absurd the proportions.
William Morris (1834-1896) was one of the greatest creative figures of the 19th century. As a visionary designer, as well as a manufacturer, writer, artist, and socialist activist, he pioneered the Arts and Crafts movement of the Victorian era, and left an extraordinary influence on architecture, textile, and interior design.
This richly illustrated book offers a suitably beautiful introduction to Morriss colorful life and all aspects of his design work, including interiors, tiles, embroidery, tapestries, carpets, and calligraphy. Though best known in his lifetime as a poet and author, it is these exquisite designs that secured Morriss posthumous reputation. As page after page dazzles with their beautiful patterns and forms, we explore the pioneering craftsmanship and natural motifs that inspired them, as well as Morriss remarkable cultural legacy, through British textiles, Bauhaus, and even modern environmentalism.
About the series
Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in Taschens Basic Architecture series features:
an introduction to the life and work of the architect
the major works in chronological order
information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions
a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings
approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts, and plans)
Pioneered by Picasso and Braque, Cubism has been described as the first avant-garde art movement of the 20th century. With inspiration from African and Native American art and sculpture, its practitioners deconstructed European conventions of viewpoint, form, perspective to create flattened, fragmented, and revolutionary images.
Picassos celebrated painting Les Demoiselles dAvignon is typically regarded as the original cubist work, with its radical fracturing of objects and figures into distinct areas, corresponding to multiple different viewpoints. Cubism thereafter developed two distinct trends: Analytical Cubism, which continued to interweave perspectival planes in muted blacks, greys and ochre, and later Synthetic Cubism, characterised by simpler shapes, brighter colors, and collage elements such as newspaper.
This book presents the prime protagonists of Cubism, with work from artists including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, and Robert Delaunay.
About the series
Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHENs Basic Art History series features:
approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
a detailed, illustrated introduction
a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is something of an American success story, if only his success had come swifter. At the age of 40, he was a failing artist who struggled to sell a single painting. As he approached 80, Time magazine featured him on its cover. Today, half a century after his death, Hopper is considered a giant of modern expression, with an uncanny, unforgettable, and utterly distinct sense for mood and place.
Much of Hoppers work excavates modern city experience. In canvas after canvas, he depicts diners, cafes, shopfronts, street lights, gas stations, rail stations, and hotel rooms. The scenes are marked by vivid color juxtapositions and stark, theatrical lighting, as well as by harshly contoured figures, who appear at once part of, and alien to, their surroundings. The ambiance throughout his repertoire is of an eerie disquiet, alienation, loneliness and psychological tension, although his rural or coastal scenes can offer a counterpoint of tranquility or optimism.
This book presents key works from Hoppers uvre to introduce a key player not only in American art history but also in the American psyche.