Ortrud Westheider Livres

This publication is the first to focus solely on the abstract strategies and processes contained in Gerhard Richter's body of work. In the early 1960s, the artist began to call painting into question, an exploration that continues to occupy him to this day. In the 1970s, he responded to the rejection of painting by creating a series of monochrome works in gray. Moreover, he viewed the color gray as a means of addressing political themes without depicting them in an idealized manner. In his Inpainting series of the 1970s, Richter made brushstrokes and the application of paint his subject. In other works, he photographed small details from his palette and transferred them onto large canvases in a photorealistic manner. In his color charts, he subjected painting to an objective process by leaving the arrangement of the colors to chance. Since 1976, Richter has created a series of abstract works by applying paint with a brush, scraper, and palette knife, alternating between conscious decision-making and random processes. Exhibition curated by DIETMAR ELGER and ORTRUD WESTHEIDER.

This lavishly illustrated exhibition catalog features seventy career-spanning works by the French avant-garde painter, one of the twentieth century's great colorists and a major proponent of Fauvism. After his participation at the Paris Salon d'Automne of 1905, Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958) quickly established himself as a leading figure of the French avant-garde. More than any other member of the Fauves, he keenly identified with the attribute of wildness and early on propagated the image of a modern artist rebel who resolutely turned his back on the rules of academic painting. His central source of inspiration was the oeuvre of Vincent van Gogh, whose works Vlaminck studied at the large solo exhibition which took place at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in 1901. Van Gogh's training as an autodidact as well as his burgeoning myth as an artist genius and social outsider strengthened this identification, which would remain key throughout Vlaminck's later career. This catalog provides a wide-ranging overview of the painter's entire oeuvre: from the first compositions he executed at the beginning of the 20th century, through the experiments with Cubism that were inspired by Cézanne and Picasso, to some of his very last landscapes. Throughout, the book recalls Vlaminck's vital contribution to the development of 20th-century painting, notably his role as one of the most important precursors of Expressionism.

This beautiful volume offers a comprehensive overview of Impressionist landscape painting from an incomparable collection.

This book offers an innovative view of the art of East Germany that will fascinate art lovers and history enthusiasts alike. Behind the Mask: Artists in the GDR focuses on the wide variety of artistic self-staging in the GDR, between public and private, prescribed collectivism and creative individuality. The intention of the GDR's official state art was to exert political influence and this resulted in ideological entanglements that have been examined in numerous publications and exhibitions in recent years. Yet how did artists in the GDR critically scrutinize themselves and their own art when their prescribed role was to represent the interests of the state? The pertinent essays and outstanding reproductions in this volume draw a comprehensive picture of art in the GDR from a new and knowledge-enhancing perspective.

This book explores the development of modern American art through the works of its signature artists. This collection of rarely seen masterpieces from The Phillips Collection traces the development of American art from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism. During the Gilded Age, American artists like Julian Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman, Ernest Lawson, and others developed landscape paintings which set the course for modern art in America. Revelations such as these are common within the pages of this book, which examines Duncan Phillips's interest in collecting and his promotion of living artists. Including essays by European and American experts, this publication of 68 works by 50 artists presents paintings by Maurice Prendergast, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, and Richard Diebenkorn. Together these magnificent works tell the tale of a nation and artistic expression growing in confidence and diversity.

This magnificently illustrated book explores Max Beckmann's idea of the world as a stage while also providing a striking introduction to one of the 20th century's most spectacularly creative periods of art and design. Many of the paintings by Max Beckmann show the world of the theater, the circus, and vaudeville. He assumed the position of the spectator and his paintings were the stage. He was driven by pageantry and this is the first publication to show how Beckmann's artistic theater was palpably visual while also showing his work in the context of the history of ideas. It brings home how the painter and author of dramas that has hitherto received little attention saw himself as an impresario, director, and scene shifter. This book grants readers highly innovative and captivating access to one of the exceptional artists of the last century and his extraordinary visual and formal language.

This lavishly illustrated volume looks at the myriad ways in which the burgeoning art of photography dialogued with Impressionist painting. In the 19th century, numerous photographers chose the same motifs as Impressionist painters: the forest of Fontainebleau, the cliffs of Étretat or the modern metropolis of Paris. They, too, studied the changing light, seasons and weather conditions. From its inception, photographers pursued artistic ambitions, as evidenced by their experimentation with composition and perspective, by means of various technical procedures. Until the First World War, the relationship between photography and painting was characterized both by competition and mutual influence. The exhibition and catalogue examine these interactions and illuminate the development of the new medium from the 1850s to its establishment as an autonomous art form around 1900. With contributions by: Dominique De Font-Réaulx, Monika Faber, Matthias Krüger, Ulrich Pohlmann, Esther Ruelfs, Helene Von Saldern, Bernd Stiegler, and Daniel Zamani.

This book gives new insights into the flowering of radical abstraction after 1945, focussing on the creative interplay between painters in the wider orbit of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel.Following World War II, Western painting went in completely new directions.A young generation of artists turned their backs on the dominant styles of the interwar Instead of figurative representation or geometric abstraction, painters in the orbit of Abstract Expressionism in the US and Art Informel in Western Europe pursued a radically impulsive approach to form, color, and material.As an expression of individual freedom, the spontaneous artistic gesture gained symbolic significance. Large-scale color-field compositions created a meditative space for ruminating the fundamental questions of human existence. The exhibition and catalogue examine the two sister movements against the background of a vibrant transatlantic exchange, from the 1940s through to the end of the Cold War.This lavishly illustrated volume brings together works by more than 50 artists, amongst them Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, K. O. Götz, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Georges Mathieu, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Judit Reigl, Mark Rothko, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, and Jack Tworkov.

This book sheds light on the fascinating ways Rembrandt and other Golden Age painters were influenced by Eastern culture.In the 17th century, Amsterdam was a vibrant hub of the burgeoning European trade with Asia, Africa, and the Levant, importing copious amounts of foreign items that powerfully stimulated the imagination of numerous Dutch artists. This was notably the case with Rembrandt, whose curiosity and voraciousness as a collector were legendary in his time. Throughout his prolific career, he drew on Eastern influences in genres as diverse as history painting and portraiture, including depictions in which he himself adopted Oriental styled attire. This lavishly illustrated book explores the inventive ways in which Rembrandt and his contemporaries accommodated Eastern imagery into their own repertoire, set within the wider context of Holland's rapidly expanding commercial and cultural exchange with its non-European trading partners. The problematic term "Orient" was widely used in Rembrandt's time and will be discussed at great length in this catalogue.

Discover how painters such as Van Gogh, Mondrian, and Jacoba van Heemskerck drew on the legacy of Dutch landscapes and realism to put their own spin on the Impressionist movement. Impressionism may have originated in France, but artists in late 19th- and early 20th-century Netherlands quickly made it their own. The genre’s vibrant colors and focus on light and atmosphere were a perfect complement to the country’s groundbreaking traditions of landscape painting and realism. This exhibition catalog brings together hundreds of works by nearly forty artists including Johan Barthold Jongkind, Vincent van Gogh, Jacoba van Heemskerck, and Piet Mondrian. It traces the birth of the Hague School, whose practitioners captured the changing moods of light in the coastline’s vast, grey skies. And it explores the Amsterdam Impressionists, whose cityscapes offered realistic images of modern life. Alongside vibrant reproductions of masterworks, a series of lively essays explore a diverse array of topics, including Dutch landscape painting within an international context; Dutch artist settlements and communities; and iconography in Dutch impressionism.