The German-born Expressionist artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) first came to Davos in 1917 on a rest cure. His body and mind devastated by the war, mountain life promised recovery and proved extremely fruitful artistically. If at first Kirchner met his new environment with the same nervous brushstrokes and perspectivist escalations found in his Berlin street scenes, his inner turmoil soon subsided, producing calmer and stronger bands of pigment and later an exalted experience of nature. New imagery resulted as well, going beyond Kirchner's primary focus on landscapes to include interiors and a series of self-portraits and figure paintings of rural neighbors. With its selection of paintings, works on paper, sculptures, photographs and tapestry from European and American private collections, this monograph shows how Kirchner, after Segantini and Hodler, became the third great painter of the Alps. Life in the Mountains finishes with works from the years 1925-26, when Kirchner returned to Germany, leaving his union with the natural life behind.

Ernst Luwig Kirchner: Mountain Life: The Early Years in Davos 1917-1926

Arts & Photography

Boehm, Gottfried

GRISEBACH, Lucius

Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig

History & Criticism

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Jackson Pollock's pioneering "drip" technique provided the model for what Harold Rosenberg would term "Action Painting"--using the canvas as an arena for the emphatically physical, even balletic application of paint, and as a record of that engagement. Pollock also provided the credo for this approach: "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess." Featuring works by 25 major representatives of this movement, Action Painting: Jackson Pollock and Gesture in Painting addresses the fundamental qualities of gestural abstraction from 1945 to 1965, assessing common traits as well as contrasts in practice between America and Europe (where it was known as Informel). Essays by acclaimed specialists, alongside introductions to each of the featured artists, make this volume a revealing presentation of one of the most important artistic movements in the twentieth century. Artists include Karel Appel, Lynda Benglis, Norman Bluhm, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hartung, Eva Hesse, Hans Hofmann, Gerhard Hoehme, Asger Jorn, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Morris Louis, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Jackson Pollock, Kazuo Shiraga, Pierre Soulages, Clyfford Still, Cy Twombly and Wols.

Action Painting

Fleck, Robert

Kaufman, Jason

Reference

Hatje Cantz

Venice was truly a laboratory of perception in the nineteenth century, with its beguiling interplay of light, water, land and architecture. Of course, its fame as a muse for great artists goes further back, but the optical preoccupations of Impressionist and Neoimpressionist painters like Claude Monet and Paul Signac were especially suited to its singular virtues. Monet was inspired to create his famous Venice cycle in the autumn of 1908, and his Venetian paintings mark a turning point in his work as he embraced an increasingly abstract pictorial vocabulary. It is therefore safe to say that Venice made a considerable, if rarely acknowledged, contribution to this chapter of art history, poised as it was on the threshold of Modernity. This volume, filled with large-format color illustrations, is the first to provide a comprehensive examination of Venice's image in European and American painting of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the center of this well-informed exploration is Monet's aforementioned Venice cycle, supplemented by masterpieces by his predecessors and contemporaries, ranging from Canaletto to Turner to Signac.

Venice: From Canaletto and Turner to Monet

Distel, Anne

Chong, Alan

Vincent van Gogh was an artist wholly saturated in the colors and contours of the landscapes in which he lived and painted. More than Manet or Gauguin, nature itself was his muse and teacher: "it is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures," he once avowed. Between Earth and Heaven is the first book to provide a comprehensive survey of van Gogh's work as a landscape painter, identifying the stylistic transitions that were specific to this aspect of his work. It shows how the earthy tones of his early Dutch phase were gradually replaced by a lighter style following his relocation to Paris, and how, in the south of France, the artist discovered the intense, brilliant colors and vital expression that have made his paintings so fascinating to this day. Essays by renowned art historians and specialists explore this facet of van Gogh's oeuvre, examining both the artist's blockbuster landscape works and lesser-known paintings. Although he witnessed little success during his lifetime, today Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is rated as one of the greatest Dutch painters in history. He produced the majority of his work--some 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings--during a brief span of ten years, before he succumbed to mental illness and committed suicide at the age of 37. A seminal figure in the Post-Impressionist movement and an early pioneer of Expressionism, van Gogh is today one of the world's most famous artists.

Vincent van Gogh: Between Earth and Heaven: The Landscapes

Feilchenfeldt, Walter

BLOTKAMP, Carel

Known as "the notary" by his contemporaries for his very proper disposition, Georges Seurat (1859-1891), was nonetheless a trailblazing artist, who devised mesmerizing effects in paint, creating what Museum of Modern Art, New York director Alfred Barr described as a "strange, almost breathless poise." Seurat's most famous painting, "La Grande Jatte" (1884), exemplifies the airy suspension of which "Pointillism" (as his style of painting-by-dabs was named) is uniquely capable, a sensation well suited to evoking in paint the sedate pace of Paris' new leisure class. For Seurat, Pointillism was also a way to attain for painting the mathematically explicable harmony of music: "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, considered according to their dominance and under the influence of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations," he declared in a letter to a friend. Seurat's style lent itself especially well to the portrayal of figures in space, and the endowing of those figures with volume and atmosphere. No other visual theme so well illustrates the tremendous innovations in Seurat's paintings and drawings as this handling of the figure, a theme which is at the heart of this new appraisal.

Georges Seurat: Figure in Space

Becker, Christoph

Genazino, Wilhelm

Individual Artists

On the occasion of the Beyeler Fondation’s 20th anniversary, this richly illustrated publication gathers quotes, letters, interviews and writings from Arp, Bourgeois, Cézanne, Degas, Dubuffet, Kandinsky, Klee, Malevich, Matisse, Mondrian, Monet, Picasso, Rousseau, Tillmans, Van Gogh, Wolfson and others.

Foundation Beyeler: The Collection: It Might Turn out Well if The Sunshine Lasts

Ubl, Ralph

Vischer, Theodora

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Bildnis und Individuum: Über den Ursprung der Porträtmalerei in der italienischen Renaissance (German Edition)

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Prestel-Verlag

This lavish volume describes each piece in the Beyeler Collection of 20th-century master-pieces and the museum's new building by Renzo Piano.

Fondation Beyeler

Brüderlin, Markus

Hohl, Reinhold

Beyeler, Ernst

FONDATION BEYELER

Müller, Hans-Joachim

Prestel Pub

24 years after his death, artist, teacher, and activist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) is celebrated with an all-inclusive exhibition organized in his hometown Dusseldorf. A highly controversial artist during his lifetime, for whom artistic practice, teaching and political activism were were wedded to each other, he is considered today one of the most important figures of 20th century avant-garde art, mentioned in the same breath as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. He revolutionized sculpture by using new materials such as felt, honey and grease, which enabled him to explore and represent psychological subjects of unparalleled breadth and intensity. Making our notion of sculpture flow and expand, he also dissolved it by translating his vision into actions that oscillated between happenings and mime and reminded many viewers of shaman rituals. In his early drawings based on abstract forms Beuys developed an idiosyncratic iconography palpitating between fairy tale and fantasy.

Joseph Beuys: Parallel Processes

Müller, Maria

Ackermann, Marion

Schirmer/Mosel

In Hole in the Wall, his first video installation, created in 1974, we watch on a monitor screen inserted at eye level into a wall as Gary Hill removes, layer for layer, a rectangular section of that same wall in order to create the very hole in which the monitor is about to be positioned. The placement of the monitor in the hole in turn triggers feedback between the camera and the video monitor, which then restarts the loop, thus showing how the medium of video moves into a surface previously reserved for exhibiting paintings and drawings. Gary Hill: Selected Works and Catalogue Raisonné places this initial piece in the context of work dating from 1972 to 2001, including 20 performances, 50 mono-channel videos, 60 video installations, and a number of destroyed works, and demonstrates that, though video is truly the most appropriate medium for Hill's artistic project, it is never confused with the content of the work, with his interest in perception, image creation, and the relationship between body and speech. 
Essays by Chrissie Iles, Gottfried Boehm and Heinz Liesbrock. Foreword by Gijs van Tuyl. 
Clothbound, 360 pages, 130 color and 190 b&amp;w

Gary Hill: Selected Works & Catalogue Raisonne

Iles, Chrissie

DuMont

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