Painting

Helmut Sturm’s paintings radiate powerful colours and forms, yet are simultaneously both lyrically tender and poetical. He developed his individual pictorial language in a study of Cubism and Art "Informel" as well as artists like Max Beckmann, Asger Jorn and Willem de Kooning. The publication pays tribute to one of the most important witnesses of abstract-expressive painting in Germany.

How can you paint colour? That is the question which the Munich artist Isabelle Dyckerhoff asks herself anew before every picture. The material presence of colour, its expressive power and spatial effect are characteristic for her works on canvas and paper, which are presented together in this volume for book lovers.

The private art collection of the Hilti Art Foundation includes over 200 top-quality paintings, sculptures and photographs from Classical Modernism to the present day. Volume 2 of the two-part catalogue of the collection presents 120 selected works from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day, from Josef Albers to Thomas Struth.

The Bauhaus master Johannes Itten is one of the prominent protagonists of early Modernism in twentieth-century art. Few people are aware of the close links between his beginnings as an artist and his experience of landscape and nature in the town of Thun and Lake Thun.

The publication examines in depth the influence of folkloric traditions on the pioneers of Modernism in the develop- ment of their new artistic language. Craft objects and folk art are contrasted with masterpieces by artists of the avant-garde like Josef Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Johannes Itten, Vasily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Pablo Picasso, Charles Sheeler and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

Heinz R. Böhme has been collecting artworks of the Lost Generation for more than twenty years. The main focus of his private collection in Salzburg is the recognition of more than eighty artists whose creative work was massively restricted under the National Socialist regime.

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.