Painting

The new guide to the collection of the Museum Schnütgen offers a compact, chronological overview of the internationally famous, high-quality and multi-faceted collection of the museum. The volume presents some 250 works from the various sections of the collection in an attractive manner and with the latest research findings.

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist will be the first survey of this under recognized American painter in over 22 years. Her distinctive paintings could be described as metaphysical landscapes rooted in the California desert near Cathedral City. Pelton chiefly drew on her own inspirations, superstitions, and beliefs to exemplify emotional states.

The Swiss artist Johannes Itten (1888–1967) was not only a pioneering art theorist and a prominent teacher at the Bauhaus, but he also left an extensive and wide-ranging oeuvre which is only known in part today. The lavishly illustrated catalogue raisonné covers comprehensively and presents an appropriate appreciation of the entire range of his artistic oeuvre.

What a shock it must have been for the Utrecht painters Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerard van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen when they first encountered the breathtaking and unconventional paintings of Caravaggio in Rome. This volume shows impressively how the young artists individually explored this role model and thereby developed their own individual style.

Over a career that now spans nearly seven decades, the American painter Alex Katz (b. 1927, New York) has devoted himself to the representation of the here and now and to the immediacy of human perception – a commitment to what the artist has often described as “painting in the present tense.”

Abstract paintings were being produced even before Kandinsky. Completely independently from each other, Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) in England, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) in Sweden and Emma Kunz (1892–1963) in Switzerland developed an individual, abstract pictorial language. What they had in common was a desire to make visible the laws of nature, the intellect and the supernatural. Their works are being presented side by side for the first time in an exhibition.

Wilhelm Kuhnert was a pioneer. He was one of the first European artists to travel to the largely unexplored savannahs and jungles of the German colonies in North and East Africa. Under hazardous conditions he documented at close quarters the fascinating animal and plant world and then created in his Berlin studio monumental paintings which were much sought-after on the art market.

Painting re-invented itself during the 15th century in Florence. Artists experimented in an innovative manner with pictorial subjects, forms and techniques and thus arrived at an unprecedented diversity of means of artistic expression. This volume tells in an interesting and nuanced manner of a unique creative development which permanently changed art in Europe.

2018 marks the centenary of Egon Schiele’s death. To coincide with this occasion the publication will present the painting collection of the Belvedere Vienna including highlights such as Eduard Kosmack, House Wall, Death and Girl, The Embrace and Four Trees. The book provides an opportunity to study the artist’s work processes in greater detail and to follow the fascinating routes taken by his works before reaching ...

Frans Hals (1582/83–1666) is one of the foremost portrait painters of the Dutch Golden Age. This exhibition is the first devoted to his family group portraiture. The show and the catalogue unite all of his four family portraits along with related works by the artist and examine the topic of Hals’s family portraiture as a whole, placing it in the context of his complete oeuvre.