Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden (Netherlands). He received his first drawing lessons during secondary school from F.W. van der Haagen, who also taught him the block printing, thus fostering Escher's innate graphic talents. From 1912 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita, who greatly influenced Escher's further artistic development. Between 1922 and 1934 the artist lived and worked in Italy. Afterwards Escher spent two years in Switzerland and five in Brussels before finally moving back to Barn in Holland, where he died in 1972. M.C. Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confrontation with the limitations of our sensory perception. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

    His empathetic studies of the great and the grotesque remain seminal works, all surveyed in this study that also shows his enormous influence on later artists including Picasso and Francis Bacon.

    Mixing realism and abstraction, Bacon delves deep beneath the surfaces of things, opening up the human body to reveal the chaos that lies within and struggling with all that is inexplicable. Erotic and grotesquely beautiful is the work of this legendary painter whose haunting, distorted figures have inspired entire generations of painters who seek to emulate his highly original style.

    Un retrato de una artista, sobre todo una artista.(Portrait of an artist, always an artist, above all an artist.)

    This book explores his work.

    His works stand out for the variety in their forms of artistic expression. His Tunisian water-colours depicting landscape, architecture and, above all, the North African light of this Mediterranean land constitute the true beginning of Klee's painting career. Although these paintings still fall under the heading of "objective", they already exhibit indications of his tendency toward abstraction and a language of forms. Geometrical figures and hieroglyphic elements characterize the majority of these works, which for this reason seem reminiscent of "naive" and playful children's painting. In reality, however, his paintings have their roots in theoretical considerations, their recurrent symbols conveying personal and at times political content.

    His early work clearly shows the influence of Fauvism and Cubism. The Catalan landscape also shapes the themes and treatment of these initial works. In his travels, Miro encountered the intellectual avant-garde of his time. His friends included Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Andre Masson, Jean Arp and Pablo Picasso. From the mid-twenties onward, Miro strove to leave direct objective references behind and developed the pictograms that typify his style. The pictures of this period, which include perhaps the most beautiful and significant ones of his whole oeuvre, dispense with spatiality and an unambiguous reference to objects. From now on, the surfaces are defined by numerals, writing, abstract emblems, and playful figures and creatures. Nineteen forty four saw the beginning of his extensive graphic oeuvre, ceramics, monumental mural works, and sculptures. In these works, too, the Catalan artist sought the solid foundation of a figurative, symbolic art with orientation as regards content: faces, stars, moons, rudimentary animal forms, letters. Joan Miro developed in several stages his characteristic flowing calligraphic style and his world of forms resembling shorthand symbols. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

    His work shows art at its most light-hearted, sensual and luminous. Renoir never wanted anything ugly in his paintings, nor any dramatic action. "I like pictures which make me want to wander through them when it's a landscape," he said, "or pass my hand over breast or back if it's a woman." Renoir's entire oeuvre is dominated by the depiction of women. Again and again he painted "these faunesses with their pouting lips" (Mallarme) and invented a new image of feminity.

    His main pictorial elements are horizontals and verticals, his preferred colours yellow, red and blue. Throughout his life, Mondrian (1872-1944) applied these elements in his quest for 'universal harmony'. This album presents his work.

    This XXL-format comprehensive survey is the most complete book ever made on the subject of this Italian painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist and all-around genius. With huge, full-bleed details of Leonardo's masterworks, this highly original publication allows the reader to inspect the subtlest facets of his brushstrokes. * Part I explores Leonardo's life and work in ten chapters. All of his paintings are interpreted in depth, with The Annunciation and The Last Supper featured on large double-spreads. * Part II comprises a catalogue raisonn? of Leonardo's paintings, which covers all of his surviving and lost painted works and includes texts describing their states of preservation. * Part III contains an extensive catalogue of his drawings (numbering in the thousands, they cannot all be reproduced in one book); 663 are presented, arranged by category (architecture, technical, anatomical, figures, proportion, cartography, etc). This sumptuous TASCHEN offering is the most thorough and beautifully produced Leonardo book ever published, and this special edition offers it for a third of the usual price.

    His own legacy is scarcely paralleled in its scope and diversity. Our study of Picasso, the most exhaustive record of his work to date, contains almost 1500 illustrations - from his earliest drawings to the master's very last painting.

    In six chapters -- The Brucke Group of Artists, Northern German Expressionism, The Blaue Reiter, Rhenish Expressionism, The City and Expressionism in Vienna -- this publication deals with a specifically German artistic revolution, a phenomenon that has quite accurately been described as "the most significant German contribution to 20th century European art." Beside a number of famous names, including Beckmann, Heckel, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Macke, Marc, Mueller, Nolde, Schiele, and Schmidt-Rottluff, the author also introduces several lesser-known artists, such as Campendonk, FelixMuller, Meidner, Morgner, Munter, and von Werefkin.

    After a short flirtation with Klimt's style, Schiele soon questioned the aesthetic orientation to the beautiful surface of the Viennese Art Nouveau with his rough and not easily accessible paintings. Many contemporaries found his expressive nudes and self-portraits, with their strange movements and morbid colours, to be ugly and even morally objectionable - criticism which culminated in criminalizing the painter as "obscene" and resulted in 1912 in an indictment and short jail sentence. However, not even his harshest critics could dispute however the artist's extraordinary drawing talent.

    With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns. With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life. In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya s work. Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another and the result is truly spectacular.

    Not only did he smuggle his pieces into four of New York City's major art museums, he's also "hung" his work at London's Tate Gallery and adorned Israel's West Bank barrier with satirical images. Banksy's identity remains unknown, but his work is unmistakable with prints selling for as much as $45,000.