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With roots in early Cubism and Futurism and reaching maturity in Op art and Minimalism, "Abstract Art" encompasses all forms of non-figurative expression. This book explores the diverse ways artists from the early 20th century, beginning with Kandinsky, through the 1960s used abstraction to express artistic ideas, such as the paint splatters of Jackson Pollock, the geometric shapes of Piet Mondrian, the non-objective squares of Malevich, and the complex compositions of Wassily Kandinsky.Each book in Tachen's "Basic Genre series" features: a detailed introduction with approximately 35 photographs, plus a timeline of the most important events (political, cultural, scientific, etc.) that took place during the time period; and, a selection of the most important works of the epoch; each is presented on a 2-page spread with a full-page image and, on the facing page, a description/interpretation of the work and brief biography of the artist as well as additional information such as a reference work, portrait of the artist, and/or citations....
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Gerhard Richter is one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era. For decades he has sought innovative ways to make painting more relevant, often through a multifaceted dialogue with photography. Today Richter is most widely recognized for the photo-paintings he made during the 1960s that rely on images culled from mass media and pop culture. Always fascinated with the limits and uncertainties of representation, he has since then produced landscapes, abstractions, glass and mirror constructions, prints, sculptures, and installations. Though Richter has been known in the United States for quite some time, the highly successful retrospective of his work at the MoMA in 2002 catapulted him to unprecedented fame. Enter noted curator Dietmar Elger, who here presents the first biography of this contemporary artist. Written with full access to Richter and his archives, this fascinating book offers unprecedented insight into his life and work. Elger explores Richter’s childhood in Nazi Germany; his years as a student and mural painter in communist East Germany; his time in the West during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, when student protests, political strife, and violence tore the Federal Republic of Germany apart; and his rise to international acclaim during the 1980s and beyond. Richter has always been a difficult personality to parse and the seemingly contradictory strands of his artistic practice have frustrated and sometimes confounded critics. But the extensive interviews on which this book is based disclose a Richter who is far more candid, personal, and vivid than ever before. The result is a book that will be the foundational portrait of this artist for years to come. ...
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The Elbe monotypes were made by Gerhard Richter in 1957, just one year after he had graduated from art college in Dresden. Abstract, somewhat melancholic and comparatively small in scale, these 31 works were placed in the safekeeping of a friend when Richter fled the GDR in 1961, and have never previously been published. They are here reproduced in their original full-size format, on chamois-colored A4 paper, in a beautiful large-format edition. It was not until 2008 that Richter signed, numbered and titled the sequence, recuperating it back into his oeuvre a half-century later. The Elbe monotypes foreshadow Richter's later abstractionism, and are fascinating in their subtle oscillation between figure, landscape and abstraction. In an afterword, Dieter Schwarz explicates some of the particularities of Richter's process, which utilized a rubber roller invented by Richter himself....
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