Basic Art - Böcker

Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) made a unique modernist mark. Influenced by both the landscape and the political independence of his native Finland, he designed warm, curving, compassionate buildings, wholly set apart from the slick, mechanistic, geometri...

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In a fleeting fourteen year period, sandwiched between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanshi...

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Swiss artist HR Giger (1940-2014) is most famous for his creation of the space monster in Ridley Scott's 1979 horror sci-fi film Alien, which earned him an Oscar. In retrospect, this was just one of the most popular expressions of Giger's biomecha...

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In the architecture of Richard Neutra (1892-1970), inside and outside find their perfect modernist harmony. As the Californian sun glints off sleek building surfaces, vast glass panel walls allow panoramic views over mountains, gardens, palm trees...

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For Marc Chagall (1887-1985), painting was an intricate tapestry of dreams, tales, and traditions. His instantly recognizable visual language carved out a unique early 20th-century niche, often identified as one of the earliest expressions of psyc...

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The Case Study House program (1945-1966) was a unique event in the history of American architecture. Sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, the program sought to respond to the postwar building boom with prototype modern homes that could be bo...

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Through the turbulent events of the last century-and-a-half, graphic design-with its vivid, neat synthesis of image and idea-has distilled the spirit of each age. It surrounds us every minute of the day, from minimalist packaging to colorful adver...

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An icon of 1980s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) first made his name under the graffiti tag "SAMO", before establishing his studio practice and catapulting to fast fame at the age of 20. Although his career lasted barely a decade, he re...

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The creative duo Charles Eames (1907-1978) and Ray Kaiser Eames (1912-1988) transformed the visual character of America. Though best known for their furniture, the husband and wife team were also forerunners in architecture, textile design, photog...

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An extraordinarily prolific artist, Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) produced some 4,000 paintings in his lifetime, not including a prodigious quantity of commissioned editorial, commercial, and advertising work. His death in 1978 was regarded the loss...

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American painter Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) pioneered a new epoch in American art, bursting onto a scene dominated by Abstract Expressionism in late 1950s New York and defining a new art vocabulary for a new era. With his groundbreaking use of i...

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Founded in 1848 as a secret society, the Pre-Raphaelites rejected classical ideals and the dominant artistic genre painting of their era for what they saw as a more spiritual, sincere, and naturalistic approach. Founded by William Holman Hunt, Joh...

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Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and of what constituted an artwork. Focusing o...

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With Salvador Dalí as its figurehead, the great ship of Surrealism traversed the turbulent seas of the early 20th century with sails billowing with dreams and desires. Inspired by the psychoanalytical practice of Sigmund Freud, the Surrealists cha...

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The beauty of nature and man's loneliness are dominant themes in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). The artist often places a small human figure in a broad landscape, as in his famous paintings Monk by the Sea and The Wanderer above t...

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Sharp angles, strange forms, lurid colors, and distorted perspectives are classic hallmarks of Expressionism, the twentieth century movement that prioritized emotion over objective reality. Though particularly present in Germany and Austria, the m...

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Spanish visionary Santiago Calatrava is renowned around the world as an architect, structural engineer, sculptor, and artist. Famed for bridges as much as buildings, he has made his name with neofuturistic structures that combine deft engineering ...

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William Morris (1834-1896) was one of the greatest creative figures of the 19th century. As a visionary designer, as well as a manufacturer, writer, artist, and socialist activist, he pioneered the Arts and Crafts movement of the Victorian era, an...

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With a career spanning seven decades, Catalan-born Joan Miró (1893-1983) was a polymath giant of modern art, producing masterworks across painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry, and ceramics, and embracing ideologies as varied as Fauvism, Surrea...

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In 1956, TIME magazine called him one of the defining "form-givers of the 20th century." Today, Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) remains a locus classicus of modernism for architects and designers alike. As a Bauhaus pioneer, even his earliest work was m...

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Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was only 31 when he died, but during his short life he created hundreds of drawings, oil sketches, and paintings on canvas that introduced a fresh perspective in European painting.As a student at the École des Beaux-Arts...

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The creator of the ubiquitous Knoll "Tulip" chairs and tables, Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) was one of the 20th century's most prominent space shapers, merging dynamic forms with a modernist sensibility across architecture and design. Among Saarinen'...

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Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is hailed as the most important proponent of the Pop art movement. A critical and creative observer of American society, he explored key themes of consumerism, materialism, media, and celebrity. Drawing on contemporary adve...

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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, f...

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Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) was one of the last great artists in the ukiyo-e tradition. Literally meaning "pictures of the floating world," ukiyo-e was a particular woodblock print genre of art that flourished between the 17th and 19th centuries...

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A hairless, ghostly figure on a bridge. The sky orange-red above him. His hands raised to his ears, his mouth wide in a haunting wail. In painting The Scream, Edvard Munch (1863-1944) created Mona Lisa for our times. The shriek of his iconic figur...

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Paris is the City of Light in all its facets. In the 1920s La Ville des lumières gleams especially bright and becomes a magnet for creative people from around the world. This is the decade of Coco Chanel and Josephine Baker, Art Deco and Surrealis...

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In this essential TASCHEN introduction to Tadao Ando we explore the hybrid of tradition, modernism, and function that allows his buildings to enchant architects, designers, fashion designers, and beyond. Through key projects including private home...

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A key contributor to Nouveau Réalisme in early 1960s Paris, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) worked alongside artists such as Arman, Yves Klein, and Jean Tinguely, scavenging real objects in place of traditional art materials. She connected art to...

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The work of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) reflects an ongoing belief in the power of brilliant colors and simple forms. Though famed in particular for his paintings, Matisse also worked with drawing, sculpture, lithography, stained glass, and collage,...

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