Dieter Buchhart – författare

The ultimate and authoritative introduction to Songye culture, sculpture, masks, and iron forgingThis lavishly illustrated book brings a new approach to the masterpieces of Songye, a Bantu ethnic group from the central Democratic Republic of the Congo, exploring the styles of the different regions, the identification of Songye master artists, and the specificity of Kifwebe masks.  The World of Songye displays a large number of unpublished and specially commissioned photographs of Songye works of art from private and public collections, and of historic field photographs. Edited by the unchallenged specialists of the subject with contributions from ten distinguished writers, World of Songye analyses Songye aesthetics and symbols, the Songye representation of animals and weapons and the history of collecting Songye artefacts in the field. It also explores the religious and magical functions and powers of Songye objects and their influence on modern art, focusing in particular on Jean-Michel Basquiat. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

The artist’s most inspired works in one volume.Jean-Michel Basquiat—artist and art world provocateur—took New York City by storm with his powerful and complex works that relentlessly engaged with charged sociopolitical issues, including race, police brutality, and structural inequity. In this important volume, devoted to an exhibition at the Brant Foundation in their newly opened Manhattan outpost featuring the artist’s key works, Basquiat’s art returns to its East Village roots, contextualized for the first time in decades in the very neighborhood that served as one of his greatest inspirations.Dieter Buchhart, noted Basquiat scholar and curator, brings together one hundred of the artist’s most important works, focusing on the best examples of the many subjects that informed Basquiat’s work, from jazz, anatomy, sports figures, comics, classical literature, the African diaspora, and art history. The exhibition partially restages three of the artist’s critical early shows, including an exhibition of the artist’s paintings and drawings of heads at Robert Miller Gallery; his most important canvases from Gagosian Gallery’s 1982 show in Los Angeles; and Basquiat’s solo show at Fun Gallery in the East Village. Buchhart also considers in-depth the artist’s so-called stretcher bar paintings, in which the normally hidden wooden supports for stretched canvases are exposed, works that have yet to be explored at length by scholars. In so doing, Buchhart offers a critical assessment of the enduring importance and legacy of the artist’s work.© Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.

A richly illustrated exploration of Calder’s deep ties to France and the evolution of his workThis book brings together more than three hundred works, testament to Alexander Calder’s profound connection to France and the way he developed a radically modern body of work. It focuses on the evolution of Calder’s work over his career, at times in harmony with the masterpieces of his contemporaries, such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as his close circle, including Hans Arp, Joan Miró, and Fernand Léger. This dialogue between Calder and the international scene contextualizes his work’s significance. This richly illustrated book is edited by the exhibition’s curators, Anna Karina Hofbauer and Dieter Buchhart. It features contributions from Elisabeth Hutton Turner, Chuz Martinez, Olivier Michelon, and Arnauld Pierre, as well as an interview between Sandy Rower and Jordana Mendelson.Published in conjunction with the Alexander Calder retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France

A revelatory collection of the artist’s sketches and preparatory drawings, featuring many that have never been published beforeThe great Russian modernist painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky was one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art. Few documents provide more insight into his evolution from figural to abstract art—or into the development of abstraction in the early twentieth century—than the pages of his sketchbooks. Featuring previously unpublished drawings, Wassily Kandinsky: The Sketchbooks is a comprehensive selection of hundreds of sketches from twelve notebooks Kandinsky kept between 1889 and 1935. Beginning with early figure studies, architectural sketches, and landscapes, the notebooks reveal a process of exploration that would lead Kandinsky from his first experiments in geometric abstraction to paintings that reshaped modernism.Demonstrating Kandinsky’s mastery of color, line, shape, composition, and movement, the book includes notes and preparatory studies for major paintings, such as the “analytical drawing” for Composition VII (1913), the first study for Several Circles (1926), and Study for Composition IX, a preliminary working of his 1936 masterpiece. Visually stunning, the book offers a remarkable, intimate look at how Kandinsky sought to discover nothing less than a spiritually transcendent form of art.

With no formal training, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 1988) succeeded in developing a new and expressive style to become one of the most influential artists in the postmodern revival of figurative during the 1980s. In a series of notebooks from the early to mid-1980s, never before exhibited, Basquiat combined text and images reflecting his engagement with the countercultures of graffiti and hip-hop in New York City, as well as pop culture and world events. Filled with handwritten texts, poems, pictograms, and drawings, many of them iconic images that recur throughout his artwork teepees, crowns, skeleton-like silhouettes, and grimacing masks and these notebooks reveal much about the artist s creative process and the importance of the written word in his aesthetic. With over 150 notebook pages and numerous drawings and paintings, this important book sheds new light on Basquiat s career and his critical place in contemporary art history.

An exploration of the personal and artistic connections between two icons of twentieth-century art Keith Haring (1958–1990) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) changed the art world of the 1980s through their idiosyncratic imagery, radical ideas, and complex sociopolitical commentary. Each artist invented a distinct visual language, employing signs, symbols, and words to convey strong messages in unconventional ways, and each left an indelible legacy that remains a force in contemporary visual and popular culture. Offering fascinating new insights into the artists’ work, Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat reveals the many intersections among Haring and Basquiat’s lives, ideas, and practices.This lavishly illustrated volume brings together more than two hundred images—works created in public spaces, paintings, sculptures, objects, works on paper, photographs, and more. These rich visuals are accompanied by essays and interviews from renowned scholars, artists, and art critics, exploring the reach and range of Haring and Basquiat’s influence.Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat provides a valuable look at two artistic peers and boundary breakers whose tragically short but prolific careers left their marks on the art world and beyond.Distributed for the National Gallery of Victoria in association with No More Rulers

In 2018 the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, is hosting exhibitions on two of the greatest artists of the 20th century - Egon Schiele, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Both exhibitions have the same curator, and are taking place at the same time. The shows illustrate exactly what it is that linked the two artists: line, and the use of expressive force.This, the catalogue of the Basquiat exhibition, labelled "the definitive exhibition" by its curator, brings together 120 of the artist's most important masterpieces, sourced from international museums and private collections. With the astonishing radicalness of his artistic practice, Basquiat renewed the concept of art with enduring impact. This Basquiat retrospective centres on the idea of Basquiat's unique energetic line, his use of words, symbols, and how he integrates collage in his paintings, sculptures, objects, and large-scale drawings.The catalogue includes texts by great authors, including Paul Schimmel who tells of his meeting with Basquiat in California; Francesco Pellizzi who knew Basquiat well and has not written about him for a long time; and Okwui Enwezor who talks about the Afro American identity.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, New York City was financially and socially bankrupt, but the art and music scene was flourishing. During these years, the downtown New York music scene – no wave, hip-hop, disco funk and club culture – shaped Jean-Michel Basquiat as both a musician and an artist. This catalogue for a travelling exhibition explores how Basquiat’s painting has parallels in his music (sampling, cut-up, rapping), and takes a new look at his production as a writer and a poet in light of his connections with the then-emerging hip-hop culture. This beautifully illustrated exhibition catalogue of rarely seen photographs and images sheds new light on Basquiat as a musician, exploring how his art and music are related, and how they reflect on his identity as a Black artist in the United States, the downtown New York music scene, and contemporary culture.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and Objecthood, at Nahmad Contemporary, this book will illuminate the role of found objects and unconventional materials in the Jean- Michel Basquiat’s oeuvre. Basquiat, whose artistic practice has profoundly impacted audiences on an international scale, used objects and media from his environs to proliferate messages of social justice and change.Featuring a breadth of works that the artist made using unconventional painted supports and found-object sculptures, this publication will provide an innovative, in-depth look into the artist’s sculptural practice. In addition to painting and drawing on items within his domestic spaces—refrigerators, chairs, and cabinets—Basquiat also left his mark on items he encountered on the street—discarded windows and doors, mirrors, wood boards, and subway tiles.The publication will present new scholarship by leading Basquiat academics and art historians that will explore Basquiat’s use of found objects and materials and their role in addressing issues of social inequality and the politics of race in the United States.

While Munch's pessimistic, melancholy world view crucially defines our understanding of his work, many important postwar and contemporary artists have drawn inspiration from several aspects of his oeuvre. This richly illustrated book explores how seven such artists- Georg Baselitz, Miriam Cahn, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol-engaged with Munch's work at different points in, or throughout, their careers. It features elaborate reproductions of sixty works by Munch juxtaposed with those inspired by him. Readers discover how Baselitz cunningly pays tribute to his artistic hero how Tracey Emin's practice, like Munch's, is autobiographical, both drawing from their personal torment to create their unnerving works ; how Marlene Dumas was drawn to the expressiveness of Munch's portraits; and how Peter Doig draws on Munch's radical treatment of pigments and materiality. Essays by leading scholars detail each artist's unique preoccupation with Munch and offer a focused exploration of the ways women artists in particular were inspired by his examinations of loneliness, fear, and trauma.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s symbolic, complex, and often emotionally charged work made a huge impact on the 1980s downtown New York City art scene. And though his all-too-brief career ended when he died at age 27, Basquiat left behind an enormous legacy—not only in the number of works he produced, but also in the messages he encoded around political, social, racial, and cultural issues. This exciting book shows how Basquiat used an intricate network of signs and symbols to challenge the very system that made him a darling of the art world. It traces his inspiration from cartoons, children’s drawings, and advertising as well as his own Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage; discusses the influence of African-American, African, and Aztec cultural histories; and shows how Basquiat incorporated into his work classical themes and contemporary icons—from athletes to musicians. What becomes clear is how, even as a young man, Basquiat had a profound understanding of the artist’s role in art history, and of his position as a young Black artist in a world of racism, suppression and social injustice. This book helps readers decode Basquiat’s unique lingua franca, an intoxicating body of work brimming with social commentary that was in turns incisive, angry, comic, hip, and heartbreaking, and that remains powerful and meaningful today.

An exploration of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s connection with Switzerland and the Engadin region, and its influence on his trailblazing work.Though most often associated with New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat had a strong connection to Switzerland, which began in 1982 with his first exhibition at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich. Throughout the 1980s, he returned several times, travelling to St. Moritz and the Engadin region. This new book examines the artist’s relationship with the country and is published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Basquiat Engadin' at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz. It was in Switzerland that Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Francesco Clemente began to work on their collaborations, marking a significant turning point in Basquiat’s artistic practice. Featuring an essay by curator Dr. Dieter Buchhart, this publication documents a unique body of work that captures the artist’s impressions of the Swiss Alpine landscape and culture through the lens of his iconic visual language.