Painting

Elegant sailing ships, expansive seascapes, crystal-clear expansive views of architecture – with his unique pictorial language and range of subjects Lyonel Feininger became one of the most important artists of Classic Modernism, whose works remain very popular to this day.  

When the State Bauhaus opened in Weimar in 1918, the Swiss artist and art theorist Johannes Itten (1888–1967) was one of the first teachers to be appointed by Walter Gropius. With his preliminary course Itten had a considerable effect on the creative training in the Bauhaus; to this day his insights into the theory of colours set standards in art education and in the field of design.

This richly illustrated book features an introduction by the National Portrait Gallery’s chief curator and nearly 150 insightful entries on key self-portraits in the museum’s collection. "Eye to I" provides readers with an overview of self-portraiture while revealing the intersections that exist between art, life, and self-representation.

The broad spectrum of abstract¬-expressive art during the post-war period in Europe, Japan, and the United States is reflected in the Wiesbaden collection of Reinhard Ernst. For the first time a selection of 160 outstanding works from the collection – principally from art informel and Abstract Expressionism –  are shown here in large-format illustrations.

The new guide to the collection of the Museum Schnütgen offers a compact, chronological overview of the internationally famous, high-quality and multi-faceted collection of the museum. The volume presents some 250 works from the various sections of the collection in an attractive manner and with the latest research findings.

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist will be the first survey of this under recognized American painter in over 22 years. Her distinctive paintings could be described as metaphysical landscapes rooted in the California desert near Cathedral City. Pelton chiefly drew on her own inspirations, superstitions, and beliefs to exemplify emotional states.

The Swiss artist Johannes Itten (1888–1967) was not only a pioneering art theorist and a prominent teacher at the Bauhaus, but he also left an extensive and wide-ranging oeuvre which is only known in part today. The lavishly illustrated catalogue raisonné covers comprehensively and presents an appropriate appreciation of the entire range of his artistic oeuvre.

What a shock it must have been for the Utrecht painters Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerard van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen when they first encountered the breathtaking and unconventional paintings of Caravaggio in Rome. This volume shows impressively how the young artists individually explored this role model and thereby developed their own individual style.

Over a career that now spans nearly seven decades, the American painter Alex Katz (b. 1927, New York) has devoted himself to the representation of the here and now and to the immediacy of human perception – a commitment to what the artist has often described as “painting in the present tense.”

Abstract paintings were being produced even before Kandinsky. Completely independently from each other, Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) in England, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) in Sweden and Emma Kunz (1892–1963) in Switzerland developed an individual, abstract pictorial language. What they had in common was a desire to make visible the laws of nature, the intellect and the supernatural. Their works are being presented side by side for the first time in an exhibition.