Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 1919) is so heavily associated with Impressionist painting that his last creative period has frequently been ignored. This publication devotes itself to precisely these last three creative and innovative decades, in which Renoir abandoned Impressionism. He dedicated himself during this period to cheerful subjects such as bathers, domestic idylls, and landscapes that were influenced by both classical mythology and his move to the south ofFrance. His fluid brushstrokes and masterful use of color were much admired by the up-and-coming modernist avant-garde. More than three hundred color illustrations graphically demonstrate the influence Renoir had on younger artists such as Bonnard, Matisse, and Picasso, as well as the ways they examined his work.

«In 1889, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) organized the independent «L’Exposition de Peintures du Groupe Impressionniste et Synthésiste» at Café Volpini with his followers on the occasion of the Paris World’s Fair. The French artist presented an extraordinary portfolio of prints in this framework for the first time: the so-called «Suite Volpini», an ensemble of eleven lithographs printed on radiant yellow paper. The publication examines the year 1889 as a defining moment in Gauguin’s development in which his autonomous, revolutionary new painting style and the central motifs of his work were unmistakably formed. It reconstructs the Volpini exhibition in the process, demonstrating the radicality of the works produced by Gauguin’s artistic circle. The «Suite Volpini» – for Gauguin a visual résumé that was intended to advertize his role as the founder of a new style – will be comprehensively described and seen in the context of the artist’s related paintings, woodcuts, ceramics, prints, and drawings.»

Paul Klee (1879 1940) produced a unique, extraordinarily popular group of works; higher beings not only stand for spirituality, but also for skepticism and doubt toward religion and questions of faith. This is the reason for their popularity: Klee s angels are trapped in human form; they have weaknesses and blemishes, are forgetful and ugly, worried or playful occasionally even satanic. To the artist, good and evil do not negate but creatively complement one another. About eighty depictions of angels, most of them created during the final years of Klee s life, reflect both the fear of death and the physical fragility of the incurably ill as well as the artist s sage wit, sense of humor, cheerfulness, and quiet manner. Besides the biographical references and iconographic phrases, the publication sheds light on individual works, such as Angelus Novus, which inspired Walter Benjamin to develop his legendary concept of the Angel of History.

«Almost singlehandedly, Leipzig school painter Neo Rauch has renewed the possibilities of allegory, politics and surrealism in contemporary painting. His epic canvases, with their disjunct components, resemble collages as much as painting, populated with characters seemingly plucked from momentous historical occasions — protestors, eminent-looking statesmen, soldiers, workers — as well as ordinary people engaged in bizarre, enigmatic actions of no apparent political/historical consequence whatsoever. The protagonists of these works, surrounded by floating symbols, abstract blobs and fragments of buildings and interiors, collide as if in some grand trans-historical continuum in which all eras come together. Realized in loud, garish hues partly informed by the artist's early exposure to Socialist Realism, Rauch's enigmatic pictorial narratives never vanish into explanation: «My paintings have something vital about them, like an animal, a living thing,» he says. «You don't have to understand them, just to feel that this creation, to the greatest possible extent, is at peace with itself.» Following major solo exhibitions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2007), the Pinakothek in Munich (2010) and the Leipzig Museum of Art (2010), this new major Rauch monograph accompanies an exhibition at Bozar Expo in Brussels, and provides the most up-to-date overview of his accomplishment. The best-known exponent of the Leipzig school of painting, Neo Rauch (born 1960) was born, reared and trained as an artist in Leipzig, where he continues to live. In August 2005, Rauch was awarded the chair of painting at Leipzig University. In 2010, he received a major museum retrospective, held jointly at the Leipzig Museum of Art and the Pinakothek. In 2011, a selection of the works from this retrospective then traveled to the Zach?eta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland.»

The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, or Dresden State Art Collections, comprise the oldest, second-largest group of museums inGermany. The eleven museums united under this umbrella organization are among the most famous in the world, and they contain a wealth of unique art treasures that span a variety of themes and epochs, attracting visitors from around the globe. Augustus the Strong and his son, Augustus III—both electors of Saxony and kings of Poland during the eighteenth century—were extraordinary connoisseurs of the arts, and their enthusiastic patronage had a lasting impact on the development of the collections which today are exhibited in world-famous buildings, such as the Zwinger, the Rezidenz, and the Albertinum. The year 2010 marks the 450th anniversary of the Dresden State Art Collections, and visitors are invited to travel through time—from the days of antiquity to the present. This opulent volume features numerous illustrations of very special highlights from the individual collections and the historical buildings that house them.

This volume juxtaposes the dynamic, sweeping planes and angles of the buildings of Zaha Hadid (born 1950) with the equally dynamic art of the Russian Suprematist and Constructivist avant garde-as exemplified in works by Ilya Chashnik, El Lissitzky, Kasimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and Nikolai Suetin. The book documents an extraordinary, imaginative exhibition curated and designed by Hadid, which examines this conjunction across four themes or aesthetic qualities: Abstraction, Distortion, Fragmentation and Flotation. The exhibition, held in the Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich in the summer of 2010, was effectively a continuous art installation or environment, with the rooms dramatically striated and sculpted in angular black and white patterns. Hadid first explored the Russian avant garde in her graduation project in 1976-77, and this project consequently represents both a culmination and a labor of love for the architect.

The notoriously complex life and radical, visionary work of Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) are inextricably interwoven, at times seeming to constitute a whole theatrical performance. As the daughter of a German-born photographer, Kahlo was used to posing, and from early youth she was adept at guiding the public perception of her person. In her often anguished self-portraits, she dissected her conflicts and her physical traumas, soon becoming an iconic figure and a symbol for Mexican culture. Yet ironically she transgressed many boundaries and shattered taboos in a way that was perhaps shocking to most Mexicans. In portraits by friends and photographers such as Tina Modotti and Edward Weston she wears traditional clothing and features many Mexican folk traditions, transforming her “Mexicanidad” into an indelible personal trademark. Through numerous paintings and photographs, and with articles by acclaimed theorists such as Griselda Pollock and Mieke Bal, this book traces the major events of this unique artist’s life, while relating Kahlo’s art to that of her contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera, María Izquierdo, David Alfaro Siquieros and José Clemente Orozco.

«This exhibition celebrates that groundbreaking moment in the history of modern art when Kazimir Malevich debuted his new nonobjective paintings — including the «Black Square» — under the banner of Suprematism and Vladimir Tatlin introduced his revolutionary counter-relief sculptures. Malevich and Tatlin were bitter rivals and diametrically opposed in their creative thinking, so when the exhibition 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting, organized by fellow artist Ivan Puni, was launched in Petrograd in 1915, the other 12 artists in the show (Ivan Puni, Liubov Popova, Ivan Kliun, Ksenia Boguslavskaya, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Nathan Altman, Vasily Kamensky, Vera Pestel, Maria Ivanovna Vasilieva, Anna Michailovna Kirillova and Mikhail Menkov) chose sides. It was a stylistically diverse exhibition, with Cubist-inspired works and the first nonobjective paintings and reliefs. «In Search of 0,10» accompanies a show at the Fondation Beyeler, which includes a large number of the works from the original exhibition. The catalogue features essays by exhibition curator Matthew Drutt and other leading scholars, as well as documents gathered together and translated for the first time.»