Lange als Stiefkind der Malerei vernachlässigt, erfreut sich die Kunst des Zeichnens seit einiger Zeit wachsender Beliebtheit. In zahlreichen Museen weltweit, wie dem Metropolitan Museum of Art oder den Uffizien, verschaffen thematisch ausgerichtete Ausstellungen der Zeichenkunst steigende Aufmerksamkeit durch Kritiker und Akademiker. Dieses fesselnde Buch bietet dem Leser eine umfassende Untersuchung der Geschichte der Zeichenkunst, von Renaissance-Künstlern wie Leonardo da Vinci und Michelangelo zu modernen Meistern wie M. C. Escher, Pablo Picasso und allen, die dazwischen liegen.

1000 Meisterwerke der Zeichenkunst

A symbol of massive crowds and solitary desires, the city holds promise for all those that pass through it. Its meandering streets, unexplored neighbourhoods and incessant noise create a landscape that captivates the observer. The lights of the city can conceal or reveal it, transforming its appearance hour by hour, offering countless facets to the passerby. While the light of morning pulls the city from its torpor and renews it for the dawning day, the nocturnal illumination plunges the pedestrian into the strangeness of its mysteries, creating a striking and ephemeral beauty. Between the shadow and the light, these original photographs reveal the fragile glow of the city, and help us rediscover the eternal pulse of these great capitals, simultaneously surprising and sublime.

City Lights

John Constable was the first English landscape painter to take no lessons from the Dutch. He is rather indebted to the landscapes of Rubens, but his real model was Gainsborough, whose landscapes, with great trees planted in well-balanced masses on land sloping upwards towards the frame, have a rhythm often found in Rubens. Constable's originality does not lie in his choice of subjects, which frequently repeated themes beloved by Gainsborough. Nevertheless, Constable seems to belong to a new century; he ushered in a new era. The difference in his approach results both from technique and feeling. Excepting the French, Constable was the first landscape painter to consider as a primary and essential task the sketch made direct from nature at a single sitting; an idea which contains in essence the destinies of modern landscape, and perhaps of most modern painting. It is this momentary impression of all things which will be the soul of the future work. Working at leisure upon the large canvas, an artist's aim is to enrich and complete the sketch while retaining its pristine freshness. These are the two processes to which Constable devoted himself, while discovering the exuberant abundance of life in the simplest of country places. He had the palette of a creative colourist and a technique of vivid hatchings heralding that of the French impressionists. He audaciously and frankly introduced green into painting, the green of lush meadows, the green of summer foliage, all the greens which, until then, painters had refused to see except through bluish, yellow, or more often brown spectacles. Of the great landscape painters who occupied so important a place in nineteenth-century art, Corot was probably the only one to escape the influence of Constable. All the others are more or less direct descendants of the master of East Bergholt.

Constable

Marc Chagall (Vitebsk, 1887 - Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1985)

Chagall est né dans une famille juive de stricte obédience pour laquelle l'interdit de représentation de la figure humaine avait valeur

de dogme. Après un échec à l'examen d'entrée à l'école des Arts et Métiers du baron Stieglitz, Chagall intègre plus tard celle fondée par

la Société impériale d'encouragement des Beaux-Arts dirigée par Nicolas Roerich.

En 1910, il s'installe à Paris qui sera son « second Vitebsk ». Chagall retrouve à la Ruche de nombreux compatriotes attirés, eux aussi, par le prestige de Paris. Lipchitz, Zadkine, Archipenko, Soutine qui maintiendront, autour du jeune peintre, le parfum de sa terre natale. Les auteurs des premières études sur Chagall relevaient déjà que Paris avait influencé sa manière picturale, avait apporté une nervosité

frêle et une netteté aux lignes qui répondent avec assurance et justesse à la couleur et pour beaucoup, la commandent. L'observateur le plus attentif, le plus passionné, se révèle parfois incapable de distinguer le Chagall « de Paris » du Chagall « de Vitebsk ».

L'artiste n'est pas contradictoire ni « dédoublé », mais il demeurait constamment ouverts, regardant en lui et autour de lui, considérant le

monde environnant, les idées de son époque, les souvenirs du passé. Chagall est doué d'une sorte « d'immunité stylistique », il

s'enrichit sans rien détruire de sa propre structure. Il s'enthousiasme, apprend en toute ingénuité, se défait de la maladresse juvénile, mais sans perdre son « authenticité ». Parfois, c'est comme s'il regardait le monde à travers le prisme magique de l'école de Paris.

Alors il engage un jeu tout en finesse et en sérieux avec les découvertes du tournant du siècle, alors l'adolescent se considère, ironique et songeur, dans un miroir où s'unissent tout naturellement les acquis picturaux de Cézanne, la spiritualisation fragile de Modigliani, les rythmes complexes des plans qui rappellent les expériences des premiers cubistes (Autoportrait devant le chevalet, 1914).

Cependant, au-delà des analyses qui, aujourd'hui, éclairent les sources judéo-russes du peintre, les filiations formelles héritées ou

empruntées, mais toujours sublimées, une part de mystère demeure dans l'art de Chagall. Ce mystère tient peut-être à la nature même de

cet art qui puise dans le souvenir.

Chagall

Au cours de l'histoire, nombreuses sont les guerres qui changerent le paysage politique et culturel du monde. Source de bouleversements, de destructions et de violences, elles contribuerent neanmoins a l'evolution de la creation artistique. En effet, malgre les evenements traumatisants qu'elles engendrent, les guerres inspirent les artistes depuis toujours. Ces derniers immortalisent ces moments dramatiques en des oeuvres qui sont autant de precieux temoignages pour toutes les generations. Ce livre offre au lecteur les illustrations des batailles les plus connues et autres scenes de guerre. Compose de textes d'ecrivains celebres, cet ouvrage s'accompagne, en outre, du texte de reference de Sun Tzu, stratege militaire legendaire de Chine. De l'antique Gaulois agonisant au Guernica de Picasso, ce livre propose un panorama captivant des oeuvres inspirees par les guerres qui faconnerent l'humanite.

L'Art de la guerre

A symbol of modernity, the Viennese Secession was defined by the rebellion of twenty artists who were against the conservative Vienna Künstlerhaus' oppressive influence over the city, the epoch, and the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Influenced by Art Nouveau, this movement (created in 1897 by Gustav Klimt, Carl Moll, and Josef Hoffmann) was not an anonymous artistic revolution. Defining itself as a "total art", without any political or commercial constraint, the Viennese Secession represented the ideological turmoil that affected craftsmen, architects, graphic artists, and designers from this period. Turning away from an established art and immersing themselves in organic, voluptuous, and decorative shapes, these artists opened themselves to an evocative, erotic aesthetic that blatantly offended the bourgeoisie of the time.

Painting, sculpture, and architecture are addressed by the authors and highlight the diversity and richness of a movement whose motto proclaimed "for each time its art, for each art its liberty" - a declaration to the innovation and originality of this revolutionary art movement.

The Viennese Secession

Die charakteristischen Merkmale der gotischen Kunst werden am ehesten in der kraftvollen Architektur nordfranzösischer Kathedralen sichtbar. In dieser mittelalterlichen Kunstbewegung, die sich über 200 Jahre lang in ganz Europa hielt, wurden die runden Formen romanischer Kunst zugunsten von Strebewerken und Spitzbögen aufgegeben, um Sakralbauten dem Tageslicht zugänglich zu machen. In einem Zeitalter großen wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Umbruchs entwickelte sich in der Gotik eine neue Ikonografie, welche die Heilige Mutter Gottes in den Mittelpunkt stellte und den trostlosen Bildthemen der Romanik entgegensetzte. Voller vielfältiger Entwicklungen in allen Kunstformen (Architektur, Bildhauerei, Malerei etc.) wurde die Gotik im 14. Jahrhundert von der italienischen Renaissance und der Spätgotik abgelöst.

Gotik

Dürer is the greatest of German artists and most representative of the German mind. He, like Leonardo, was a man of striking physical attractiveness, great charm of manner and conversation, and mental accomplishment, being well grounded in the sciences and mathematics of the day. His skill in draughtsmanship was extraordinary; Dürer is even more celebrated for his engravings on wood and copper than for his paintings. With both, the skill of his hand was at the service of the most minute observation and analytical research into the character and structure of form. Dürer, however, had not the feeling for abstract beauty and ideal grace that Leonardo possessed; but instead, a profound earnestness, a closer interest in humanity, and a more dramatic invention. Dürer was a great admirer of Luther; and in his own work is the equivalent of what was mighty in the Reformer. It is very serious and sincere; very human, and addressed the hearts and understanding of the masses. Nuremberg, his hometown, had become a great centre of printing and the chief distributor of books throughout Europe. Consequently, the art of engraving upon wood and copper, which may be called the pictorial branch of printing, was much encouraged. Of this opportunity Dürer took full advantage. The Renaissance in Germany was more a moral and intellectual than an artistic movement, partly due to northern conditions. The feeling for ideal grace and beauty is fostered by the study of the human form, and this had been flourishing predominantly in southern Europe. But Albrecht Dürer had a genius too powerful to be conquered. He remained profoundly Germanic in his stormy penchant for drama, as was his contemporary Mathias Grünewald, a fantastic visionary and rebel against all Italian seductions. Dürer, in spite of all his tense energy, dominated conflicting passions by a sovereign and speculative intelligence comparable with that of Leonardo. He, too, was on the border of two worlds, that of the Gothic age and that of the modern age, and on the border of two arts, being an engraver and draughtsman rather than a painter.

Albrecht Dürer and artworks

Russian countryside is some of the world's most lovely, from the celebrated explosions of wild flowers that fill its forests in the spring, to the icy winter tundra that defeated the advances of Napoleon and Hitler, and provided the backdrop for the drama of many of Russian literature's celebrated scenes. And no one immortalized it better than Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898), a Russian landscape painter. In this comprehensive work of scholarship, Irina Shuvalova and Victoria Charles make a thorough examination of Shishkin's work.

1000 Meisterwerke der Zeichenkunst

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