Christoph Becker Livres

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was one of the first artists to move his studio out into the open air, creating works which continue to fascinate and inspire us today as much as they did his contemporaries. One of the founding fathers of Impressionist art, Monet's works consistently reflect the artist's profound love of nature. Many of his paintings were directly inspired by the gardens that played such an important role in his life--the garden at his house in S vres in the 1860s, those at his two homes in Argenteuil in the 1870s, followed by a garden at his estate in Vatheuil. Yet the most famous of Monet's gardens was the expansive park in Giverny, which inspired his masterful handling of light and color for more than thirty years and provided motifs for hundreds of individual paintings and series that remain immensely popular today--among them the masterpieces of his Water-Lilies series. This magnificent volume of full-page color plates is devoted to this central theme in the work of the French artist. It presents landscapes, still lifes, and portraits of people in natural settings from nearly all of Monet's creative periods--from his early Impressionist paintings of the 1870s to the Grandes Dacorations of the early 1900s. Also included are photographs of Monet's gardens, diagrammatic recreations of these spaces (based on the artist's paintings), several bills of delivery and planting instructions from horticulturalists.

In 1983, more than one million Germans joined together to protest NATO’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe. International media overflowed with images of marches, rallies, and human chains as protesters blockaded depots and agitated for disarmament. Though they failed to halt the deployment, the episode was a decisive one for German society, revealing deep divisions in the nation’s political culture while continuing to mobilize activists. This volume provides a comprehensive reference work on the “Euromissiles” crisis as experienced by its various protagonists, analyzing NATO’s diplomatic and military maneuvering and tracing the political, cultural, and moral discourses that surrounded the missiles’ deployment in East and West Germany.

The Swiss painter Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) and his artworks were uniquely poised to embrace both the dawn of modernism and the fading light of the post-impressionist and symbolist movements. Lavishly illustrated, Félix Vallotton traces the artist’s life from his early days as a portraitist and printmaker to his later work as painter who prefigured European modernism.Linda Schädler and Christoph Becker reveal Valloton to be not only the most important Swiss symbolist, but an intelligent observer of his tumultuous times, highly critical of bourgeois convention. His sometimes eerie naturalism, the authors argue, links him to literary fashions of the day as well as reflecting the inception of psychoanalysis. This stunning volume forges a new understanding of landmark paintings from an especially fertile period in art history and the fascinating artist behind them.

A journey through circa 500 years of fashion history as reflected in art: How have artists reacted to extreme phenomena such as slashed clothing, codpieces, the crinoline, or the dinner jacket? Fashion is an economic factor as well as a seismograph of social sensitivities, an expression of longing, and an instrument for mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. In the modern age of global homogenization through fast fashion, this exhibition aims to provide a critical and at the same time sensory overview of clothing in art and the problematic and subversive moments in the history of fashion through the techniques of painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and film.

Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) war der typischste und individuellste Maler des Impressionismus. Er widmete sein ganzes Leben und sein außergewöhnliches Werk der bildlichen Darstellung der Sensationen, die Städte und vor allem Landschaften zu bieten haben. Monets Pappeln und Getreideschober, die Kathedrale von Rouen und die Seerosen, die zu den beliebtesten Bildern des Impressionismus gehören, entstanden lange Zeit bevor die damalige Avantgarde einen unschätzbaren Einfluss auf die Entwicklung moderner Kunst hatte. Dieses Buch zeichnet Leben und Werk eines der beliebtesten Künstler der Geschichte nach.