Raw, unadorned and decried in conservative circles as ‟gutter art”: Käthe Kollwitz used her art uncompromisingly as a political voice for the social and human misery of her time. Her focus always lies on human dignity. This volume provides a wide-ranging insight into the artist’s commitment and creative work. Her oeuvre is more topical than ever today.

As the charismatic artist friend of Egon Schiele, Erwin Osen also left his mark on the key early years of Expressionism in Vienna. His multi-faceted relationship with Schiele reached an intensity that inspired Egon Schiele’s radical creative work, resulting in masterpieces of Austrian art. Erwin Osen was forgotten, but is now waiting to be rediscovered.

His paintbrush set everything in motion: the landscape of Provence, the colourful still lifes, his portraits and the picturesque coast of southern France. More than any other artist, Paul Cézanne, the “Father of Modernism”, captured the light and the play of colours of the South in his pictures and lent them through his new pictorial language a liveliness and dynamism which continue to fascinate viewers to this day.

Frida Kahlo has become an icon of art with her powerfully expressive work. Her pictures not only reflect a view of herself, her fears, the biography of her illness, her passions and her joie de vivre; they also take up subjects which were regarded by society as taboo. As a pioneer of the feminist movement, this Mexican artist serves women the world over as a figure of identification.

Master printer Michael Flomen expands his darkroom out into the wild to create large-scale, avant-garde, cameraless photograms in confluence with nature. From the streets of the world to the wilds of North America, this monograph traces in 182 images and 8 critical essays the evolution of Flomen’s originality of vision.

Considered a pioneer in both video art and computer-based video dance as well as an innovator in body art, the Brazilian artist, dancer, and choreographer Analivia Cordeiro (*1954) has been developing since the early 1970s a continuous and intense work exploring the relationships between body, movement, visual and audiovisual art as well as media art.

Imi Knoebel (b. 1940) is regarded as a master of non-representational art. The monograph accompanying the retrospective in the Sammlung Goetz shows the entire spectrum of his creative artistic work from the 1960s until the present day. There is a particular focus on the connections between form and content within his works.

Among the most compelling artists in the history of conceptual art, the Russian-Americans Komar and Melamid used humour and irony to lambaste Soviet officialdom. With new scholarship and full-color illustrations, the book explores their journey from working under an oppressive regime to finding new subjects in the US for their provocative critique.

The art of Arnulf Rainer (*1929) is baffling. The “black overpainting”, with which he covers previous work, is world famous. We overlook the fact that overpaintings in red, blue, green and white also exist and thus that colour always belonged to his means of expression, as this volume vividly demonstrates.

The English illustrator Anna Atkins (1799–1871) was in every respect a modern woman. For the publication of her plant collections she used the latest technology, the recently invented cyanotype. In 1843 she used the process to create the first photo book in history, with images of breathtaking beauty and originality which often look like modern art.