Gilles Néret – författare

Surrealism freed art from the grip of logic. Turning instead to dreams, desire, memory, and the volatile realm of the subconscious, these five modern masters pursued the impulse of Surrealism along radically individual paths, each one arriving at a distinct creative destination.Max Ernst was the movement’s great experimentalist. Embracing chance, collage, and invention, he pioneered new methods of image-making in which accident and intuition were his trusted collaborators. Joan Miró developed a language of dancing symbols and radiant color, filling his canvases with poetic constellations that are both playful and cosmically charged. René Magritte’s cool, cerebral wit shifted the focus to perception itself. He reveled in visual paradoxes and deadpan humor, questioning the dynamics between image, language, and reality. Salvador Dalí was infamous for his theatrical flair and virtuosic precision. His images, rendered with almost scientific clarity, turned the irrational into something uncannily tangible. Frida Kahlo was often placed at Surrealism’s margins and resisted the label herself. Her fiercely personal works fused physical pain, Mexican identity, folklore, and autobiography, juxtaposing reality and fantasy in images of raw emotional force.Surrealism was never a single doctrine but a shared impulse: to ignite the imagination and dismantle the familiar. Bringing landmark works from five canonical artists together with incisive commentaries, this is both the perfect primer and a rewarding deep dive into art’s dream state, where fantasy, intellect, and emotion collide.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s (1841–1919) timelessly charming paintings still reflect our ideals of happiness, love, and beauty. Derived from our large-format volume, the most comprehensive retrospective of his work published to date, this compact edition examines the personal history and motivation behind the legend. Though he began by painting landscapes in the Impressionist style, Renoir found his true affinity in portraits, after which he abandoned the Impressionists altogether. Though often misunderstood, Renoir remains one of history’s most well-loved painters—undoubtedly because his works exude such warmth, tenderness, and good spirit. In an incisive text tracing the artist’s career and stylistic evolution, Gilles Néret shows how Renoir reinvented the painted female form, with his everyday goddesses and their plump contours, rounded hips and breasts. Renoir’s later phase, marked by his return to the simple pleasure of the female nude in his Bathers series, was his most innovative and stylistically influential, and would inspire such masters as Matisse and Picasso. With a complete chronology, bibliography, photos, sketches, and brilliant reproductions, this is the essential work of reference on this enduring master artist.

Italian-born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475–1564) was a tormented, prodigiously talented, and God-fearing Renaissance man. His manifold achievements in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and engineering combined body, spirit, and God into visionary masterpieces that changed art history forever. Famed biographer Giorgio Vasari considered him the pinnacle of Renaissance achievement. His peers called him simply “Il Divino” (“the divine one”).This book provides the essential introduction to Michelangelo with all the awe-inspiring masterpieces and none of the queues and crowds. With vivid illustration and accessible texts, we explore the artist’s extraordinary figuration and celebrated style of terribilità (momentous grandeur), which allowed human and biblical drama to exist in compelling scale and fervor. Through the power hubs of Renaissance Italy, we take in his major commissions and phenomenal capacity for compositional schemes, whether the famous Medici library in Florence, or the extraordinary 500-square-meter ceiling (1508–1512) in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel.From the towering David to the aching grief and faith of The Pietà and the vivid drama of the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment, this is a succinct, dependable reference to a true giant of art history and to some of the most famous artworks in the world.

Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980) lived art in the fast lane. With an appetite for glamour and fame as much as Left Bank bohemianism, she fled St. Petersburg after the Bolshevik revolution and set about taking Paris by storm. Her prolific, monumental oeuvre remains one of the most vivid visual documents of 1920s Art Deco.De Lempicka’s style deployed cool colors and tight post-cubist forms into an at once neoclassical and voluptuous figuration. Her subjects are often nude and always sensual, aloof, and powerful. Bedecked in seductive light and textures, they command our attention but typically avert their gaze with an aspect of haughty grandeur. They include both high-society patrons and progressive portraits of emancipated and lesbian women, such as Women Bathing and Portrait of Suzy Solidor. De Lempicka’s notorious Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, meanwhile, was commissioned for the cover of German magazine Die Dame and became an icon of speed, sophistication, and female independence.Through some of de Lempicka’s finest, most compelling portraits, this introduction explores the artist’s unique visual language and its privileged place not only in the annals of interwar art but also in the history of female artists and our collective consciousness of the Roaring Twenties.

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was a fighting spirit. Despite a cancer diagnosis in 1941, increasing frailty, and the confines of a wheelchair, the indomitable Frenchman never stopped in his quest to make art. With what he called une seconde vie, a second life, he embarked on a remarkable collage period, cutting and pasting pieces of colored paper into gouaches découpées of birds, plants, flowers, and the female form.Emphasizing color and contrast, the cut-out technique generated both striking lines and vivid juxtapositions. In works such as Icarus (1943), The Blue Nude (1952), The Snail (1953), and The Sheaf (1953), clean forms and elemental structures power a compositional force that belies the work’s decorative appeal, at once tightly organized and infectious with joie de vivre. As his work progressed, Matisse’s excitement with his results fueled ever-larger pieces, advancing from small works to vast wall-sized murals.As his final years approached, Matisse reveled in the simplicity and brilliance of these pieces, avowing, “Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated…” In this essential introductory book, we revisit this joyful final chapter of Matisse’s long and prodigious career, examining how the cut-outs encapsulated the artist’s many years exploring the possibilities of composition, form, and color.

Lampooned during his lifetime for his style as much as his subject matter, French painter Édouard Manet (1832–1883) is now considered a crucial figure in the history of art, bridging the transition from Realism to Impressionism.Manet’s work combined a painterly technique with strikingly modern images of contemporary life, centered on the urban Paris experience. He recorded the city’s parks, bars, and cabarets, often delighting in the frisson of underground or provocative content. The Paris salon rejected his Déjeuner sur l’herbe with its juxtaposition of fully dressed men and a nude woman, while the steady gaze and unabashed pose of the prostitute Olympia, a very modern reworking of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, caused a society scandal.This richly illustrated book introduces Manet’s work and his uniquely influential combination of Realism, Impressionism, and reworked Old Masters that would become paradigms of a brave new world for generations of modernists to come.

Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was one of the century’s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics—and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination.This publication presents the artist’s painted oeuvre. After many years of research, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Néret finally located the paintings of this highly prolific artist. Many of the works had been inaccessible for years—in fact so many that almost half the illustrations in this book had rarely been seen in public.

There are over 1,000 catalogued works by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), the 16th-century flag bearer for Baroque drama, movement, and sensuality. This essential introduction takes in the most important works from this astonishingly prolific oeuvre to explore Rubens’s influences and innovations, and his remarkable visual, and art historical, impact.The richly illustrated survey takes in Rubens’s portraits, landscapes, and historical paintings, as well as his famed and bountiful nudes. Along the way, we examine the artist’s astonishing technique and his deft ability to depict narrative in a compelling and legible visual form, whether an erotic mythological scene or a tender biblical story. This remarkable artistic bravura is placed in context both within Rubens’s long art historical legacy through Van Dyck, Velázquez, and beyond, and his other talents as a classical scholar, diplomat, and knight.

There are over 1,000 catalogued works by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), the 16th-century flag bearer for Baroque drama, movement, and sensuality. This essential introduction takes in the most important works from this astonishingly prolific oeuvre to explore Rubens’s influences and innovations, and his remarkable visual, and art historical, impact.The richly illustrated survey takes in Rubens’s portraits, landscapes, and historical paintings, as well as his famed and bountiful nudes. Along the way, we examine the artist’s astonishing technique and his deft ability to depict narrative in a compelling and legible visual form, whether an erotic mythological scene or a tender biblical story. This remarkable artistic bravura is placed in context both within Rubens’s long art historical legacy through Van Dyck, Velázquez, and beyond, and his other talents as a classical scholar, diplomat, and knight.

From the dawn of time, ever since Adam and Eve, all artists of every age—whether the Egyptian, Greek, or Roman artists of Antiquity, or more recent famous names such as Rembrandt, Courbet, Degas, or Picasso—have succumbed to their fantasies, obsessions, and libido and produced erotic works that the censors have taken good care to keep from the public.For Erotica Universalis, we surface from the subterranean realms of the museums to enter those of our national and private libraries. Here we discover that not only most of our famous writers, such as Ovid, Aretino, Voltaire, Verlaine, or Maupassant, wrote erotic texts that bordered on indecency, but also that great artists like Boucher, Fragonard, Dalí, or Matisse were inspired to provide suitable illustrations for these naughty books. For this new hardcover edition of the classic 1995 best seller, we have culled highlights from our Erotica Universalis collection.

The unfading popularity of Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) attests not only to the particular appeal of his luxuriant painting but also to the universal themes with which he worked: love, feminine beauty, aging, and death.The son of a goldsmith, Klimt created surfaces of ornate and jewel-like luminosity which show the influence of both Egyptian and Japanese art. Through paintings, murals, and friezes, his work is defined by radiant color, fluid lines, floral elements, and mosaic-like patterning.With subjects ranging from sensuality and desire to anxiety and despair, all this iridescence is also suffused with feeling. Klimt’s numerous images of women, characterized by curvaceous forms, tender flesh, red lips, and flushed cheeks, were particularly charged with passion, at a time when such frank eroticism was still taboo in Viennese upper-middle-class society.This book presents a selection of Klimt’s work, introducing his pictorial world of decoration and desire, as well as his influence on artists to come.

The unfading popularity of Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) attests not only to the particular appeal of his luxuriant painting but also to the universal themes with which he worked: love, feminine beauty, aging, and death.The son of a goldsmith, Klimt created surfaces of ornate and jewel-like luminosity which show the influence of both Egyptian and Japanese art. Through paintings, murals, and friezes, his work is defined by radiant color, fluid lines, floral elements, and mosaic-like patterning.With subjects ranging from sensuality and desire to anxiety and despair, all this iridescence is also suffused with feeling. Klimt’s numerous images of women, characterized by curvaceous forms, tender flesh, red lips, and flushed cheeks, were particularly charged with passion, at a time when such frank eroticism was still taboo in Viennese upper-middle-class society.This book presents a selection of Klimt’s work, introducing his pictorial world of decoration and desire, as well as his influence on artists to come.

The unfading popularity of Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) attests not only to the particular appeal of his luxuriant painting but also to the universal themes with which he worked: love, feminine beauty, aging, and death.The son of a goldsmith, Klimt created surfaces of ornate and jewel-like luminosity which show the influence of both Egyptian and Japanese art. Through paintings, murals, and friezes, his work is defined by radiant color, fluid lines, floral elements, and mosaic-like patterning.With subjects ranging from sensuality and desire to anxiety and despair, all this iridescence is also suffused with feeling. Klimt’s numerous images of women, characterized by curvaceous forms, tender flesh, red lips, and flushed cheeks, were particularly charged with passion, at a time when such frank eroticism was still taboo in Viennese upper-middle-class society.This book presents a selection of Klimt’s work, introducing his pictorial world of decoration and desire, as well as his influence on artists to come.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of the Italian Baroque, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial, violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Though famed for his dramatic use of color, light, and shadow, it was above all Caravaggio’s boundary-breaking naturalism which scorched his name into the annals of art history. From the dirtied soles of feet to the sexualized languor of bare flesh, the artist allowed even sacred and biblical scenes to unfold with a startling, often visceral humanity. This vivid pictorial world was accompanied by an equally intense personal biography, scored by gambling, debts, drunken brawls, and even a murder charge. This book brings together more than 50 of Caravaggio’s most famous and revolutionary works to explore how and why this artist is now considered the most important painter of the early Baroque period and one of the defining influences of art history, without whom Ribera, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet could never have painted the way they did.

Painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and all-round showman Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was one of the 20th century’s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics. One of the first artists to apply the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to art, he is celebrated in particular for his surrealist practice, with such conceits as the soft watches or the lobster telephone, now hallmarks of the surrealist enterprise, and of modernism in general.Dalí frequently described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs.” Their tantalizing tension and interest resides in the precise rendering of bizarre elements and incongruous arrangements. As Dalí himself explained, he painted with “the most imperialist fury of precision,” but only “to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.”Revolutionizing the role of the artist, the mustache-twirling Dalí also had the intuition to parade a controversial persona in the public arena and, through printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and film, to create work that could be consumed and not just contemplated on a gallery wall.This book explores both the painting and the personality of Dalí, introducing his technical skill as well as his provocative compositions and challenging themes of death, decay, and eroticism.

Painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and all-round showman Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was one of the 20th century’s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics. One of the first artists to apply the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to art, he is celebrated in particular for his surrealist practice, with such conceits as the soft watches or the lobster telephone, now hallmarks of the surrealist enterprise, and of modernism in general.Dalí frequently described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs.” Their tantalizing tension and interest resides in the precise rendering of bizarre elements and incongruous arrangements. As Dalí himself explained, he painted with “the most imperialist fury of precision,” but only “to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.”Revolutionizing the role of the artist, the mustache-twirling Dalí also had the intuition to parade a controversial persona in the public arena and, through printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and film, to create work that could be consumed and not just contemplated on a gallery wall.This book explores both the painting and the personality of Dalí, introducing his technical skill as well as his provocative compositions and challenging themes of death, decay, and eroticism.

At the age of six, Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) wanted to be a cook. At the age of seven, he wanted to be Napoleon. “Since then,” he later said, “my ambition has steadily grown, and my megalomania with it. Now I want only to be Salvador Dalí, I have no greater wish.” Throughout his life, Dalí was out to become Dalí: that is, one of the most significant artists and eccentrics of the 20th century.This weighty volume is the most complete study of Dalí’s painted works ever published. After years of research, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Néret located painted works by the master that had been inaccessible for years—so many, in fact, that almost half the featured illustrations appear in public for the first time in this book.More than a catalogue raisonné, this book contextualizes Dalí’s oeuvre and its meanings by examining contemporary documents, from writings and drawings to material from other facets of his work, including ballet, cinema, fashion, advertising, and objets d’art. The study is divided into two parts: the first examines Dalí’s beginnings as an unknown artist. We witness how the young Dalí deployed all the isms—Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, Fauvism, Purism and Futurism—with playful mastery, and how he would borrow from prevailing trends before ridiculing and abandoning them. The second part unveils the conclusions of Dalí’s lifelong inquiries, as well as the great legacy he left in works such as Tuna Fishing (1966/67) or Hallucinogenic Toreador (1970). It includes previously unpublished homages to Velázquez or Michelangelo, painted to the same end as the variations on past masters done by his contemporary, Picasso.We discover how, motivated by the desire to tease out the secrets of great works and become a Velázquez of the mid-20th century, Dalí became Dalí.

Toward the end of his monumental career as a painter, sculptor, and lithographer, an elderly, sickly Matisse was unable to stand and use a paintbrush for long. In this late phase of his life—he was almost 80 years of age—he developed the technique of “carving into color,” creating bright, bold paper cut-outs. Though dismissed by some contemporary critics as the folly of a senile old man, these gouaches decoupées (gouache cut-outs) in fact represented a revolution in modern art, a whole new medium that reimagined the age-old conflict between color and line. This edition of the first volume of our original award-winning XXL book provides a thorough historical context to Matisse’s cut-outs, tracing their roots to his 1930 trip to Tahiti and continuing through to his final years in Nice. It includes many photos of Matisse, as well as some rare images by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the filmmaker F. W. Murnau, with texts by Matisse, publisher E. Tériade, the poets Louis Aragon, Henri Michaux, and Pierre Reverdy, and Matisse’s son-in-law Georges Duthuit. In their deceptive simplicity, the cut-outs achieved both a sculptural quality and an early minimalist abstraction, which would profoundly influence generations of artists to come. Exuberant, multi-hued, and often grand in scale, these works are true pillars of 20th-century art, and as bold and innovative to behold today as they were in Matisse’s lifetime.

Toward the end of his monumental career as a painter, sculptor, and lithographer, an elderly, sickly Matisse was unable to stand and use a paintbrush for long. In this late phase of his life—he was almost 80 years of age—he developed the technique of “carving into color,” creating bright, bold paper cut-outs. Though dismissed by some contemporary critics as the folly of a senile old man, these gouaches decoupées (gouache cut-outs) in fact represented a revolution in modern art, a whole new medium that reimagined the age-old conflict between color and line. This edition of the first volume of our original award-winning XXL book provides a thorough historical context to Matisse’s cut-outs, tracing their roots to his 1930 trip to Tahiti and continuing through to his final years in Nice. It includes many photos of Matisse, as well as some rare images by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the filmmaker F. W. Murnau, with texts by Matisse, publisher E. Tériade, the poets Louis Aragon, Henri Michaux, and Pierre Reverdy, and Matisse’s son-in-law Georges Duthuit. In their deceptive simplicity, the cut-outs achieved both a sculptural quality and an early minimalist abstraction, which would profoundly influence generations of artists to come. Exuberant, multi-hued, and often grand in scale, these works are true pillars of 20th-century art, and as bold and innovative to behold today as they were in Matisse’s lifetime.