Painting

This book marks the triumphant return of Frida Kahlo to San Francisco, the city where her artistic life began to unfold. Kahlo’s sojourns to the United States were brief, but formative. It was in the California city – the first she visited in the US – that she ventured into a new world beyond the scope of Coyoacán, Mexico City, and Cuernavaca.

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), painter, photographer, Bauhaus teacher and founder of the “New Bauhaus” and the “School of Design” in Chicago, is one of the most important artist personalities of the modern age. As one of the first artists to work in multiple media, who practised painting, sculpture, photography, film and design as equally valid art genres, he set standards which are still relevant today.

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is one of the most influential protagonists of the avant-garde, both as an artist and an author. With his utopia of the total Merz vision of the world he aimed at the unification of art and non-art. The art of assemblage and material art reached its first high point in his work; his Merzbau is regarded as a forerunner of present-day installations.

When Paula Modersohn-Becker’s artist friends examined her extensive estate a few weeks after her death, they were overwhelmed. They only gradually realised that in the painter, who had died so young, they had had an outstanding artist in their midst. Modersohn-Becker was largely unrecognised during her lifetime but is regarded today as one of the pioneers of Expressionism.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Alfons Mucha went to the United States for four years as a lecturer, the world-famous poster designer, Art-Nouveau book illustrator, designer, photographer and painter was greeted with enthusiasm. Mucha is regarded as one of the most important representatives of Jugendstil; he knew how to move between the various genres more skilfully than virtually any other artist of his day.

The Hahnloser Collection was ...

Frida Kahlo was just one of them: between 1930 and the 1960s many more women artists contributed to the Surrealist movement than has hitherto been assumed. The male Surrealists surrounding André Breton mostly saw them only as partners or models, but this volume shows how much more these women artists had to offer.

Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) is regarded as the first woman artist of European standing. Well educated and very well connected, she enjoyed an international reputation. She pursued a brilliant career and was one of the outstanding artist personalities of the Classical Age in London and Rome. She was admired by Goethe and Herder and her clients included queens and emperors from across the continent.

The painter and performance artist Helmut Schober (* 1947) is famous internationally. For some 40 years he has devoted his attention to the vortex and its trans-cultural content. Over the decades the vortex has remained a constant in his œuvre, always borne by his principal interests in representing and making light, time, space and the cosmos tangible.

Taking Shape traces the emergence and development of abstraction in the Arab world through paintings and sculpture dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. Drawn from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah (UAE), this book features nearly ninety works by a diverse group of artists whose creative visions stretch beyond the boundaries of representation.