Victoria Charles

Patrick Bade

Born in 1860 in a small Czech town, Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was an artist on the forefront of Art Nouveau, the modernist movement that swept Paris in the 1910s, marking a return to the simplicity of natural forms, and changing the world of art and design forever. In fact, Art Nouveau was known to insiders as the “Mucha style” for the legions of imitators who adapted the master’s celebrated tableaux. Today, his distinctive depictions of lithe young women in classical dress have become a pop cultural touchstone, inspiring album covers, comic books, and everything in between. Patrick Bade and Victoria Charles offer readers an inspiring survey of Mucha’s career, illustrated with over one hundred lustrous images, from early Parisian advertisements and posters for Sandra Bernhardt, to the famous historical murals painted just before his death, at the age of 78, in 1939.

Alphonse Mucha

Gustav Klimt at Home explores the influences of Vienna and other places Klimt travelled to and called home on his life and work. Klimt was one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. He was both influenced by and shaped the city of Vienna at the turn of the century, undertaking several public commissions. Klimt travelled little, but trips to Venice and Ravenna, as well as annual summer holidays with the Flöge family on the shores of Attersee, were a source of inspiration and influence on his creative output. Fully illustrated, the book features paintings, archive imagery and photographs of the surrounding city and landscape to provide an insight into how the people and places of his life relate to his work.

Gustav Klimt at Home

Joseph Manca

Sarah Costello

30 Millennia of Sculpture

Von ihren prähistorischen Anfängen bis zur konzeptionellen Moderne des 20. Jahrhunderts hat die Skulptur die Welt der Kunst buchstäblich und im übertragenen Sinn geformt. Einen einheitlichen Blick auf die Entwicklung der Formen in allen Epochen und Zivilisationen eröffnend, präsentiert dieses Werk die Meisterwerke der Bildhauerei, die mit ihrer Zeitlosigkeit die heutige Auffassung von Schönheit prägten. Als Spiegelbild von Ära, Künstler oder der Öffentlichkeit ist diese hochwertige Zusammenstellung mit ihren zahlreichen Referenzen, Bildkommentaren und Biografien der Künstler nicht nur eine offene Tür zu Kunst und Geschichte, sondern auch ein idealer Kunstführer für Studenten und für interessierte Laien.

1000 Meisterwerke der Bildhauerei

Propaganda, Götterfunken, Swing: Musik im Zweiten Weltkrieg

Music Wars 1937-1945

Felicien Rops is a very surprising artist. Engraver and drawer of exception, Felicien Rops captures and anticipates, with an astonishing talent, the female bodies with great modernity. Abandoning the conventional forms of the time, the artist creates a world full of humour, tenderness and, at times, insolence for the jubilation of the spectator's eye.

Félicien Rops

Images of Evil and Fascinating Women

Femme Fatale

"In the striking works of pre-Raphaelite, Symbolist and Art Nouveau artists and in their literary parallels, Patrick Bade uncovers an extraordinary, disturbing world of sexual fantasy and a remarkably pervasive image of woman as destroyer, enchantress, priestess, siren, sphinx and angel of death, the femme fatale becambe the sinister new heroine of an entire generation of one of the most powerful symbols of change in late nineteenth-century society."--Back cover.

Jane Rogoyska

“I am not interested in myself as a subject for painting, but in others, particularly women...”Beautiful, sensuous and above all erotic, Gustav Klimt’s paintings speak of a world of opulence and leisure, which seems aeons away from the harsh, post-modern environment we live in now. The subjects he treats – allegories, portraits, landscapes and erotic figures – contain virtually no reference to external events, but strive rather to create a world where beauty, above everything else, is dominant. His use of colour and pattern was profoundly influenced by the art of Japan, ancient Egypt, and Byzantium. Ravenne, the flat, two-dimensional perspective of his paintings, and the frequently stylised quality of his images form an oeuvre imbued with a profound sensuality and one where the figure of woman, above all, reigns supreme. Klimt’s very first works brought him success at an unusually young age. Gustav, born in 1862, obtained a state grant to study at Kunstgewerbeschule (the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts) at the age of fourteen. His talents as a draughtsman and painter were quickly noticed, and in 1879 he formed the Künstlercompagnie (Artists’ Company) with his brother Ernst and another student, Franz Matsch. The latter part of the nineteenth century was a period of great architectural activity in Vienna. In 1857, the Emperor Franz Joseph had ordered the destruction of the fortifications that had surrounded the medieval city centre. The Ringstrasse was the result, a budding new district with magnificent buildings and beautiful parks, all paid for by public expenses. Therefore the young Klimt and his partners had ample opportunities to show off their talents, and they received early commissions to contribute to the decorations for the pageant organised to celebrate the silver wedding anniversary of the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Empress Elisabeth. In 1894, Matsch moved out of their communal studio, and in 1897 Klimt, together with his closest friends, resigned from the Künstlerhausgenossenschaft (the Cooperative Society of Austrian Artists) to form a new movement known as the Secession, of which he was immediately elected president. The Secession was a great success, holding both a first and second exhibition in 1898. The movement made enough money to commission its very own building, designed for it by the architect Joseph Maria Olbrich. Above the entrance was its motto: “To each age its art, to art its freedom.” From around 1897 onward, Klimt spent almost every summer on the Attersee with the Flöge family. These were periods of peace and tranquillity in which he produced the landscape paintings constituting almost a quarter of his entire oeuvre. Klimt made sketches for virtually everything he did. Sometimes there were over a hundred drawings for one painting, each showing a different detail – a piece of clothing or jewellery, or a simple gesture. Just how exceptional Gustav Klimt was is perhaps reflected in the fact that he had no predecessors and no real followers. He admired Rodin and Whistler without slavishly copying them, and was admired in turn by the younger Viennese painters Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, both of whom were greatly influenced by Klimt.

Gustav Klimt

Klimt

Music played an unprecedented role in World War II. Whether live or through the media of radio, film and gramophone records, it was used by all sides for propaganda and morale-boosting. The mightiest musical weapon of the war was Swing, an irresistible force that even the Nazis attempted to harness. Ultimately the music that most potently evokes the emotions and experiences of the war is that of the sentimental songs of loss and separation-Vera Lynn singing `We'll meet again' and Zarah Leander singing `Ich weiss es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehen'.

In this richly illustrated introduction to impressionism, art historian Patrick Bade explains how Impressionism began, what it stood for and why it was so important. He describes the philosophy and techniques, such as why ancient Japanese prints, and the gritty streets of Paris neighbourhoods all held such strong appeal.

Monet and the Impressionists

Patrick Bade's intimate yet comprehensive study of all the stages of Michael Leonard's career reveals his artistic development in all its variety. Lavishly illustrated with paintings, drawings and photographs, this is a seminal book for admirers of one of Britain's most versatile and popular artists.

Painter and Illustrator

Michael Leonard

From the Antiquity to the 20th century, this sculpture collection offers a truly original vision of Western art. Here are the most sensual and harmonious masterworks to the most provocative and minimalist sculptures. Sculpture shapes the world and our concept of beauty, leaving everlasting silhouettes and always creating new intriguing ones. These masterworks are the mirror of an era, of an artist and his public and through this sculpture gallery, one visits not only the history of art, but history as a whole. Between the acclaimed ideals of beauty and the most controversial works, 1000 Sculptures of Genius will give you a true panoramic view of Western sculpture. Along with numerous references, comments on masterworks, and biographies, this work enables the reader to rediscover the Western world heritage and is the perfect guide for art students and statuary lovers.

1000 Scupltures of Genius

The smoothly metallic portraits, nudes and still-lifes of Tamara de Lempicka which are reproduced in this volume encapsulate the spirit of Art Deco and The Jazz Age and reflect the elegant and hedonistic life-style of the privileged elite in Paris between the wars.

Tamara de Lempicka

Ornans, Courbet’s birthplace, is near the beautiful valley of the Doubs River, and it was here as a boy, and later as a man, that he absorbed the love of landscape. He was by nature a revolutionary, a man born to oppose existing order and to assert his independence; he had that quality of bluster and brutality which makes the revolutionary count in art as well as in politics. In both directions his spirit of revolt manifested itself. He went to Paris to study art, yet he did not attach himself to the studio of any of the prominent masters. Already in his country home he had had a little instruction in painting, and preferred to study the masterpieces of the Louvre. At first his pictures were not sufficiently distinctive to arouse any opposition, and were admitted to the Salon. Then followed the Funeral at Ornans, which the critics violently assailed: “A masquerade funeral, six metres long, in which there is more to laugh at than to weep over.” Indeed, the real offence of Courbet’s pictures was that they represented live flesh and blood. They depicted men and women as they really are and realistically doing the business in which they are engaged. His figures were not men and women deprived of personality and idealised into a type, posed in positions that will decorate the canvas. He advocated painting things as they are, and proclaimed that la vérité vraie must be the aim of the artist. So at the Universal Exposition of 1855 he withdrew his pictures from the exhibition grounds and set them in a wooden booth, just outside the entrance. Over the booth he posted a sign with large lettering. It read, simply: “Courbet – Realist.” Like every revolutionary, he was an extremist. He ignored the fact that to every artist the truth of nature appears under a different guise according to his way of seeing and experiencing. Instead, he adhered to the notion that art is only a copying of nature and not a matter also of selection and arrangement. In his contempt for prettiness Courbet often chose subjects which may fairly be called ugly. But that he also had a sense of beauty may be seen in his landscapes. That sense, mingled with his capacity for deep emotion, appears in his marines – these last being his most impressive work. Moreover, in all his works, whether attractive or not to the observer, he proved himself a powerful painter, painting in a broad, free manner, with a fine feeling for colour, and with a firmness of pigment that made all his representations very real and stirring.

Courbet

Gustav Klimt werd geboren op 14 juli 1862 en stief in Wenen op 6 februari 1918. Hij was een Oostenrijkse symbolistische schilder en een van de meest prominente leden van de Wiener Sezession, de Weense jugendstilbeweging. Klimt werd geboren in de buurt van Wenen in een armoedig gezin. Zijn vader was goudgraveerder. Misschien heeft dit Klimt beïnvloed bij zijn gebruik van goud in zijn schilderijen. In zijn begintijd werd het werk van Klimt niet gewaardeerd door de gevestigde orde, die zijn schilderijen pornografisch vond. Om zich af te zetten tegen de traditionele opvattingen richtte Klimt de Wiener Secession op, de Oostenrijkse variant van de jugendstil of de modern style. Gustav Klimts werk bestaat vooral uit schilderijen, maar hij heeft ook muurschilderingen, tekeningen en collages vervaardigd.

Patrick Bade

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