"This vibrant book tells the history of the Modernist design movement and how it completely revolutionized graphic design. A completely new aesthetic approach to graphic design and typography was created in Europe between 1919 and 1933. An avant-garde group of Dadaists, Futurists, and Constructivists created a brilliantly innovative language of design. This comprehensive volume shows how the work of pioneering artists such as El Lissitzky, Jan Tschichold, and László Moholy-Nagy broke conventions in color, typography, and composition, setting new standards in graphic design that are still in use today." --
This book examines the many functions of paper in the fine art and aesthetics of the early twentieth-century modernist or historic avant-garde (Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism and many more). With its many collages and photomontages, the historic avant-garde is generally considered to have transformed paper from a mere support into an artistic medium and to have assisted in art on paper gaining a firm autonomy. Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book shows that the story of paper in the avant-garde has thereby hardly been told. The first section looks at a selection of canonized individual avant-gardists’ work on paper to demonstrate that the material and formal analysis of paper in the avant-garde’s artistic production still holds much in store. In the second section, chapters zoom in on forms and formats of collective artistic production that deployed paper to move around reproductions of fine art works, to facilitate the dialogue between avant-gardists, to better promote their work among patrons, and to make their work available to a wider audience. Chapters in the third section lay bare how certain groups within the avant-garde began to massively create monochrome works, because these could be easily reproduced when transferred to, or reproduced as, linocuts. In the last section of the book, chapters explore how the avant-garde’s attentiveness to paper almost always also implied a critique of the ways in which paper, and all that it stood for, was treated and labored in European culture and society more broadly. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, modernism, and design.
Offering a fresh look at one of the major artists of the 20th century, this book illustrates how Paul Klee’s critical and ironic take on life was evident in every stage of his oeuvre. Known for its whimsy and levity, Paul Klee’s art is often considered gleefully childlike. This groundbreaking volume argues that Klee’s style emerged from a philosophical school that originated with early German Romanticism and consisted of perpetual shifts between satire and affirmation of the absolute, finite and infinite, and real and ideal. Featuring approximately 250 works, this careful appreciation of Klee connects each stage of his career to the larger philosophical context. Exploring the satires and caricatures of Klee’s youth, his experimentations in Cubism and "mechanical theater," and the constructivist approach of the Bauhaus school, this book follows the trajectory of Klee’s oeuvre as a reflection of prevailing styles. It closes with the artist’s final years, in which he was labeled a "degenerate artist" by the Nazi regime and struggled with illness. Viewed through the many facets of irony as a complex theme, and against the backdrop of Europe’s seismic political and artistic movements, Klee’s body of work takes on a renewed significance as one of the most critical of its generation.
This title presents criticism, commentaries, and creative responses to Carl Djerassi's literary texts, taking the author's achievements far beyond 'the Pill'
Primitivism versus modernity: the expressionist dilemma - Politics of primitivism - Brucke bathers: back to nature - Max Pechstein's visionary ideas - Emil Nolded.
Produced in close cooperation with the Klee Foundation in Bern, this catalogue gathers together the artist's outstanding masterpieces of the years 1917 to 1933. This extraordinary survey, which includes works which Klee originally intended to keep for himself, has been made possible by loans from the collection of Angela Rosengart in Lucerne, the Klee Foundation in Bern and many private collectors. Many of these works are being presented to a wide audience for the first time. Klee is widely seen as one of the most original artists of the twentieth century. Together with Feininger, Kandinsky and Jawlensky, he founded the Blue Four group, and had a decisive influence on artists such as Miro and Delaunany. The years 1917 to 1933 were the most productive in Klee's work.
Item documents the 117 works by Klee in the Djerassi which have been presented in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Djerassi Gallery/Paul Klee Study Centre and are a promised gift to the Museum.
"Paul Klee (1879-1940) is one of the most influential painters of European modernism. With an oeuvre comprising nearly ten thousand works, numerous solo and group exhibitions of his work have been mounted well beyond his lifetime. To this very day, the intense interest in his work has not waned. And yet there has never been an exhibition that has extensively examined Klee's relationship to abstraction. The show at the Fondation Beyeler--along with the accompanying catalogue, which is "underscored" by insightful texts from well-known authors--is closing this gap. Four groups of themes--nature, architecture, painting, and graphic characters--make up the golden thread through Klee's body of work whose formal repertoire repeatedly oscillates between the semi-representational and the absolute abstract, and which are examined here in separate chapters. Thus one not only gains in-depth insight into Klee's involvement with abstraction--new references to his contemporaries, as well as to artists of later generations, are unveiled."--From the publisher.
