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How does design function? What is the difference between design and styling? Is the principle “form follows function” still valid? And what constitutes the design process in practice? There are so many questions on the highly topical subject of design. The authors provide answers to many of them by covering a wide range of topics, from the historical roots to the outlook on the near future, from a comprehensive look at product functions to the analysis of the complex design process, from theoretical foundations to descriptive case studies. The central theme is product design, taking the conflicting interests of consumers, manufacturers and designers into consideration. All factors of planning and designing of industrial products are considered and clearly presented. The book is aimed at enquiring users as well as committed entrepreneurs, interested technicians and aspiring designers from a great variety of fields.
Richard Gerstl (1883–1908) painted for just four years, but the work he produced in that short period is widely seen as well ahead of his time, including Self Portrait Against a Blue Background and The Fey Sisters. Although Gerstl never exhibited during his lifetime and his innovative work was largely ignored by both the academy and the art world, his portraits and landscapes are today regarded as some of the most important representatives of Austrian Expressionism. With Richard Gerstl, Diethard Leopold takes readers skillfully through the artist’s life and work. Gerstl trained at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, but his rejection of the Vienna Secession made it difficult for him to find acceptance there, and he ultimately continued painting without formal guidance. While he felt marginalized by the art world, Gerstl forged a meaningful friendship with the musician Arnold Schönberg. Later, his affair with Schönberg’s wife would lead to the loss of both his lover and his friend, causing him to tragically take his life at the age of twenty-five. Working with in cooperation with the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Leopold has written a detailed, accessible portrait of Gerstl, illustrated with selected works, that will enhance our understanding of this important artist.
German-Danish painter and printmaker Emil Nolde (1865–1956) was one of the first and most important representatives of expressionism, as well as an essential precursor of modernism. First trained as a woodcarver, he later studied painting and developed the vigorous brushwork and vivid choice of colors for which he is best known—and which would make him one of the great oil and watercolor painters of the twentieth century. His works, including The Prophet and Portrait of a Young Woman and a Child, are exhibited in major museums around the world. Produced in close collaboration with the Nolde Foundation in Germany, Emil Nolde illuminates the artist’s life and provides extended discussions of his key works. As they trace Nolde’s path from a small village in Denmark to his evolution into a prestigious artist, noted Nolde experts Christian Ring and Hans-Joachim Throl explore Nolde’s world of color—as seen in his paintings of gardens, landscapes, and seas—and consider his use of the fantastic and grotesque in his work. They also examine his life during the Nazi regime, when his work was condemned and removed from museums and he was forbidden to paint, and his subsequent creation of the Unpainted Pictures, a gorgeous and diverse series of watercolors he created in seclusion between 1938 and 1945. Supplemented by rarely seen documents from Nolde’s archive and complemented by fifty-five color images, Emil Nolde sheds new light on the artist, his life in the German-Danish borderlands, and his prolific production of outstanding works.
Henri Matisse (1869–1954) is one of the most original and beloved French artists, his colorfully luminescent paintings a stirring affirmation of life, levity, and sensitivity. This book reproduces a large number of Matisse’s works alongside the story of his life, from his early paintings to his late masterpieces, the cutouts, which he created when he was confined to his bed and unable to paint. Drawing on previously unavailable archival materials, Markus Müller traces the trajectory of Matisse’s career, showing how his oeuvre turned towards the color-intensive, near-abstract cutouts. A celebration of a great artist who never stopped seeking new ways to create, this book is the perfect introduction to Matisse’s genius.
Paul Gauguin’s story is nearly as dramatic and seductive as his art. In 1883, he walked away from a successful career in banking in order to paint every day. In 1891, he went a step further, leaving his family behind and setting sail for the South Seas, financing his trip by selling thirty paintings; the works that he created once he arrived were like nothing the art world had ever seen before. This book brings together beautiful reproductions of Gauguin’s most famous works with the story of his life, excerpts from his letters and diaries, and an introduction setting his work in context.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) was one of the most important and colorful artistic personalities of the twentieth century, an icon of German Expressionism. To mark the hundredth anniversary of “Kirchner in Davos,” Thorsten Sadowsky presents here a compact artist monograph with rare archival material from throughout Kirchner’s career. Touching on Kirchner’s myriad struggles, works, and milestones—from the radicalism of the artists’ association “Die Brücke” (The Bridge), which Kirchner cofounded, and the restless expressiveness of his Berlin and Davos years, to his struggles with mental instability and anxiety, and the reviews of his own works he published under the pseudonym Louis de Marsalle—Sadowsky lucidly retraces the artist’s turbulent trajectory. This erudite monograph shows how Kirchner, though vacillating between self-doubt and egocentricity, created an incomparably multi-faceted oeuvre with a remarkable instinct for the trends and imbalances of his time.
Elegant sailing ships, expansive seascapes, crystal-clear panoramas of cityscapes—with his unique pictorial language and range of subjects, Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) became one of the most important artists of classic modernism, and his works remain popular to this day. This volume brilliantly showcases Feininger’s artistic development from his early works to his last paintings. We follow Feininger from Paris in the 1900s, when he abandoned his successful career as a caricaturist to pursue fine art, to his early paintings peopled with grotesque, wild, risqué figures inspired by the streets of Paris, to his discovery of the geometric pictorial style for which he would become famous. Featuring photographs and extracts from the unpublished diary of his wife Julia, this artist monograph provides in-depth insight into the life and work of an iconic modernist artist.
Admired by contemporaries as an artistic jack-of-all-trades, Koloman Moser (1868–1918) is regarded today as one of the most important representatives of the Viennese Secession art movement, alongside Gustav Klimt. As a graphic artist and designer, Moser was unparalleled in his artistic diversity, applying his virtuosity to everything from furniture, textiles, and objects to paintings, posters, and exhibitions. This beautifully illustrated volume presents an overview of the artist’s life and work, from the posters he designed for the Secession, to his collaborations with Josef Hoffmann and Fritz Waerndorfer in the Viennese Workshop of the early twentieth century, to his return to painting in the last decade of his life. Situating the artist’s work in its biographical and art historical context, Koloman Moser presents the expansive range and incredible fantasy of one of the icons of modernist art.
In 1926, a young Willem de Kooning (1904–97) travelled from the Netherlands to the United States on a British freighter, hiding in the machine room without papers. The young art student eked out a living painting houses, signs, and facades before he was able to eventually dedicate himself entirely to painting, going on to forge friendships with artists such as Franz Kline, Jackson Pollack, and Mark Rothko. Today, De Kooning belongs to the outstanding painters of the abstract expressionist tradition, and is regarded as a pioneer of action painting along with Jackson Pollack. This volume vividly revisits De Kooning’s life and artistic work in the United States, exploring its many vicissitudes of self-doubt, success, new beginnings, excess, and scandalous paintings.
Born in Russia in 1860, Marianne von Werefkin was a shrewd free thinker and hostess, as can be seen by the salon she began in the Schwabing district of Munich at the beginning of the twentieth century. Here, she assembled famous artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Alfred Kubin, Adolf Erbslöh, Erma Bossi, Franz Marc, and August Macke. But Werefkin was also a talented artist in her own right. In this beautifully illustrated book, Brigitte Salmen delves into Werefkin’s work, restoring her place as one of the pioneering artists of expressionism. Salmen explores Werefkin’s early works from Russia and follows her as she returned to her own art after a long break, during which she sought to further the work of her companion, Alexej Jawlensky. In 1906 after a decade away from her art, Werefkin began painting once more, creating fascinating works in a new, expressive style—the results of her sojourns in the region around the picturesque town of Murnau, Germany, where she often visited with Jawlensky, Münter, and Kandinsky. With these artists, she was an important forerunner and co-founder of the Munich New Artist’s Association, and Salmen traces Werefkin’s powerful influence on the development of the “Blauer Reiter,” or Blue Rider. Finally, Salmen examines Werefkin’s lesser-known later works, which she created in Ascona, Switzerland, where she lived in exile until she died in 1938. An important look at the full life of this undervalued artist, Marianne von Werefkin is an essential book about a woman whose career staked out new ground for female painters.
When Paula Modersohn-Becker’s artistfriends examined her extensive estate afew weeks after her death, they were overwhelmed. They only gradually realised thatin the painter, who had died so young, theyhad had an outstanding artist in their midst.Modersohn-Becker was largely unrecognisedduring her lifetime but is regarded today asone of the pioneers of Expressionism.The sculptor Bernhard Hoetger was one of the few who recognised hertalent from an early stage. Hoetger’s memories of Paula Modersohn werepublished in 1920 as an authentic contemporary document in the seriesJunge Kunst. They are reprinted as a facsimile in this revised and extendededition. The volume is a bibliophilic highlight with an essay explaining theartist’s life and work from a present-day perspective, together with herbiography and some 40 illustrations of her most important works.
When the Museum of Modern Art sent its first exhibition to Europe, Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) joined Georgia O’Keeffe as the only women included. Stettheimer’s sensuous paintings and eccentric poetry earned her a place at the heart of the modernist avant-garde. The guest lists for her extravagant New York garden parties read like a who’s who of the 1920s art scene. Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Francias Picabia, among others, all flocked to the events she assembled, and following her death Duchamp curated a retrospective exhibition of the ardent feminist’s work in the Museum of Modern Art—the venue’s first such show dedicated to a woman.