სასაჩუქრე გამოცემები

Delicate illustration that defined an era

With his instantly recognizable decorative style, Czech artist and Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) defined the look of the fin-de-siècle. In evocative shades of peach, gold, ochre, and olive, his seductive compositions of patterns, flowers, and beautiful women became paradigms of the Belle Époque years.

Mucha’s work permeated illustration, posters, postcards, and the advertising designs of his day. His striking posters of star actress Sarah Bernhardt were particularly famous. Alongside this delicate decorative work, Mucha also harbored strongly felt political ideas. With his monumental cycle The Slav Epic, he expressed his staunch support for Pan-Slavism, promoting the political independence of the Czech and Slavic nations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Compiled in association with the Mucha Foundation, this book presents key works and introduces the full reach of Mucha’s œuvre from patterned decoration to his book illustrations, posters, photographs and monumental paintings.

Hieronymus Bosch’s meticulous visions of the grotesque, debauched, and divine

As cryptic as they are compelling, the masterpieces of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) remain some of the most enduring enigmas of the art world. Their intricate, allegorical, and often startling content has captivated not only art historians, but also fashion designers, rock stars, writers, and punk rockers, as well as countless modern and contemporary artist successors.

Although rooted in the Old Netherlandish tradition, Bosch developed a highly subjective, richly suggestive style to render both the celestial bliss of heaven and the grotesque tortures of hell, most famously and meticulously excecuted in The Garden of Earthly Delights. Here, as in his other known works, his artistic language combined religious humility with a razor-sharp wit, often playing off pictorial versions of contemporary proverbs or figures of speech.

This book ties together the elusive threads of Bosch’s oeuvre to provide a concise introduction to an at once haunting and enthralling pictorial world.

Radical and all-revealing figures

With his graphic style, figural distortion, and defiance of conventional standards of beauty, Egon Schiele (1890–1918) was a pioneer of Austrian Expressionism and one of the most startling portrait painters of the 20th century.

Mentored by Gustav Klimt, Schiele dabbled in a glittering Art Nouveau style before developing his own much more gritty and confrontational aesthetic of sharp lines, lurid shades, and mannered, elongated figures. His prolific portraits and self-portraits stunned the Viennese establishment with an unprecedented psychological and sexual intensity, favoring erotic, exposing, or unsettling poses in which he or his sitters cower on the floor, languish with legs akimbo, glower at the viewer, and thrust their genitalia into the foreground. His models are at times skeletal and sickly, at other times strong and sensual.

Many contemporaries found Schiele’s work to be not only ugly but morally objectionable; in 1912, the artist was briefly imprisoned for obscenity. Today, his oeuvre is celebrated for its revolutionary approach to the human figure and for its direct and particularly fervent, almost furious brand of draftsmanship. This book presents key Schiele works to introduce his short but urgent career and his profound contribution to the development of modern art, which reaches right through to such contemporary talents as Tracey Emin and Jenny Saville.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser, hero of fluid forms and ecology

Vivid color, organic forms, and a loathing of straight lines were just a few stalwart characteristics in the unique practice of Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000). A non-conformist hero, the artist, architect, and activist left a blazing trail of imagination and ideas in buildings, paintings, manifestos, initiatives, and more.

Hundertwasser’s best-known work is considered by many to be the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna, a structural synthesis of the vitality and uniqueness that determined the artist’s entire oeuvre. For Hundertwasser, rational, sterile, monotonous buildings caused human misery. He called for a boycott of the modernist paradigm championed by the likes of Adolf Loos, and campaigned instead for an architecture of creative freedom and ecological commitment. A fierce opponent of straight lines, which he called “godless and immoral,” Hundertwasser was fascinated by the spiral, drawing also on the Secessionist forms of Klimt and Schiele.

This richly illustrated book traces Hundertwasser’s style and vision not only for each building, but for society at large. From naked addresses at the end of the 1960s to worldwide architecture projects and alternative blueprints for society, author Pierre Restany explores Hundertwasser’s most high-profile and innovative ideas in a thrilling introduction to a pioneering 20th-century mind.

Deconstructing perspective with Picasso and peers

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.

Picasso’s celebrated painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 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 Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, and Robert Delaunay.

The complete self-portraiture

Few devotees of the form can approach Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s radical contributions to self-portraiture. Challenging the conventions enshrined by his predecessors, Rembrandt transformed the art into a fully realized medium capable of communicating emotional depth rather than favorably immortalizing one’s likeness in the finest trappings of luxury. With more than 80 works spanning paintings, etchings, and drawings, the Dutchman’s lifelong practice of self-portraiture functions as a means of concretizing that which is fleeting. Across four decades, one constant is particularly striking across media and styles—Rembrandt’s dedication to presenting himself from multiple perspectives, celebrating the multiplicity of the individual and championing the unfiltered portrayal of emotional expression.

Apart from the thematic concerns present within Rembrandt’s suite of self-portraits, the works themselves are rich with technical innovation and experimentation. There is an unmistakable humanity present across the entirety of this oeuvre, each expressive brushstroke and obfuscated feature amounting to an unflinchingly honest characterization of himself, in all his foibles, contrasting states of feeling, and stages of life.

This monograph renders all of Rembrandt’s self-portraits – from his first experimentations at age twenty-two to his final self-portrait painted a year before his death – and stands testament to a life committed to revolutionizing painterly practice both in content and form.