Painting

Founded in 1948, Hirmer Publishers soon established a name for art books produced to the highest standards. Over the past decade they have become equally well-known in English-speaking countries, with a reputation as one of the most prestigious publishers in this field. This survey of English titles from 2010 to 2020 encompasses a wealth of subjects across the centuries, from antiquity to the modern age.  

This first full biography confirms Florine Stettheimer as one of the 20th century’s most significant, progressive artists whose work remains highly relevant today. Stettheimer was a feminist and a multi-media artist who painted several sexually explicit, political works examining identity issues documenting New York City’s growth as the center of cultural life, finance, and entertainment between the World Wars..

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.

Well-known for his etchings on bark paper featuring dazzling skeleton-characters working, celebrating, walking the streets, or crossing borders, Nicolás De Jesús’s political commitment is also expressed through powerful large-scale paintings that tackle a wide range of urgent themes including immigration, human rights, and environmental instability.

Adeliza McHugh helped put the whimsical, funky, and irreverent aesthetic of California’s Central Valley on the art-historical map at her legendary Candy Store Gallery. Published on what would be the 60th anniversary of the gallery’s founding, this catalogue is the most significant to date on the Candy Store and celebrates, as McHugh liked to say, art with a "kick".

Lying between deserts, mountain chains and seas, Iran developed a fascinating cultural landscape. 360 objects from the time of the first advanced civilisations during the 3rd millennium BC until the end of the Safavid Empire in the early 18th century illustrate the outstanding significance of Iran as the initiator and centre of intercultural exchange.

Three essays by leading scholars in the field of Japanese art explore Sesson Shūkei’s unique life and unconventional painting style, as well as how scholarly perceptions of the artist have changed over time. Fifty-three entries highlight major works by Sesson as well as those by other artists before, during, and after his time.

Caspar David Friedrich and Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov are the most important artists of the Romantic era in their native countries of Germany and Russia. At the centre of this opulent book are night scenes and moonlit landscapes, views of Dresden and Italy that are full of yearning, and portraits and lovingly depicted interiors by both master painters and their contemporaries.

No other artist of Classical Modernism has achieved a similar mythical status to that of Paula Modersohn-Becker. At the same time, the view of her work is often distorted by clichés. This comprehensive publication pays particular attention to the progressive nature of Modersohn’s works, in which this early representative of the avant-garde defied all social and artistic conventions.

In 1921/22 Édouard Vuillard created a cycle of six paintings for the entrance hall of the Villa Bauer in Basel. Four large-format pictures show exhibition rooms in the Louvre from Antiquity to French Rococo painting. Two sopraporte provide an intimate insight into the artist’s art collection.