Painting

The history and culture of Europe has been decisively shaped by the exploration and use of the seas surrounding Europe. This catalogue book reflects the significance of the sea as a space of rule and trade for Europeans, as bridge and border, as resource and a place of longing. The book also reviews the changing perception of the sea in the arts.  

In 1926 22 year-old Dutch artist Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) travelled to the USA on a British freighter – without papers and hidden in the machine room. The young art student eked out a living by painting houses, signs and façades, before he was able after eight years to dedicate himself entirely to painting.  

Fully integrated into the nature of the Corinthian countryside, the Museum Liaunig is at once restrained and spectacular. An outstanding example of contemporary museum architecture, it creates spaces for the Liaunig collections whose focus is on Austrian art from the post-war era to the present.

"Innovative Impressions" explores an under-examined aspect of three Impressionists’ careers: their groundbreaking prints and the new techniques they developed through collaboration and experimentation. In 1879, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro formed the most active core of a group of artists planning a periodical to feature their prints.

Admired by contemporaries as an artistic “jack-of-all-trades”, Koloman Moser (1868–1918) is regarded today as one of the most important representatives of the Viennese Secession of around 1900. As a graphic artist and designer Moser was unparalleled in his artistic diversity, creating furniture, textiles, and objects – for the Wiener Werkstätte among others – that are icons of Modernism, as well as leaving behind an impressive oeuvre of paintings.  

1918 marked the end of a golden era: it was the year that Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Koloman Moser, and Otto Wagner died. Artistic activity, however, had already freed itself of their influence. Hardly affected by the political disruptions taking place, artists in the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy were busily productive, driven by a desire for a new start.  

In decades of artistic production Gerhard Berger (born in 1933) has arrived at a unique, characteristic visual language. His representation of humans, oscillating between figurative and abstract painting, is rooted in the great myths of humankind and in the religious visual conceptions of the world’s cultures.  

In the historical period of new beginnings starting in the 1950s, the collector Rudolf Leopold (1925‒2010), with pioneer-like foresight and a keen sense of art, was able to do someting few others of his ilk succeeded in doing:  build up a large, both aesthetically sophisticated and art historically relevant collection of international renown.

This opulent volume on Paul Klee celebrates one of the most important and productive artists of the twentieth century, whose work is as topical today as it ever was: growing out of the inner conflict of modern man, Klee’s imaginative works provide a link between the world of reason and the irrational “secrets” of human existence.

John Ruskin was an influential English art critic and social thinker of the Victorian era, who famously argued that the principal concern of the artist is “truth to nature.” For Ruskin, this truth entailed more than merely adept technical representation: artists should, in fact, depict the natural world as mankind experiences it, with all the sensations of both beauty and terror it elicits.