Painting

The impressions which Paul Klee collected on his journey to Tunisia in 1914, and especially to the city of Kairouan, were of fundamental significance: »Colour and I are one.  I am a painter.« A few years later, in 1921, Wilhelm Hausenstein placed his friend Paul Klee at the centre of his book Kairuan and was thus one of the first people to recognise the artist’s genius.

Sensuousness, magic, a profound momentousness and irrationality are the hallmarks of the new art movement of Belgian Symbolism, which emerged during the 1880s. From Georg Minne and Félicien Rops to Fernand Khnopff and James Ensor, the portraits, figure paintings and landscapes revealed a fascination with the eerie and the nefarious, with Thanatos und Eros.

The publication focuses on 150 portrait miniatures from the age of Napoleon I. They provide us with an astonishingly direct view of people who lived in this turbulent, war-torn period. The works are presented in detail in image and text. Essays by a number of experts on miniature painting round out the subject.

Elvira Lantenhammer’s paintings are colour events which rely to a considerable extent on intensity of colour. The choice of colour and its application take place intuitively in an examination of the effects of colours and their interaction with regard to a specific location. The term Site Plan, under which the abstract works are subsumed, serves here as an open action grid which conquers new spaces for the colours.

The elements of Astrid Lowack’s (*1969) photographic-artistic transcendence are light, movement and water. As the driving forces of life they relentlessly bring about change and reflect our innermost being – our feelings and experiences. Her snapshots remain thereby constant imaginative challenges to human perception.

The internationally famous Swiss artist Franz Gertsch will celebrate his 90th birthday in 2020. The Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, which has a long-standing relationship with the artist and which is one of the most important presentation locations for his printed works, is taking advantage of this occasion as a reason for an exhibition and a bibliophile jubilee publication.

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.