Artist Monographs

Wilhelm Leibl (1844–1900) is regarded as one of the most significant portraitists and an important representative of Realism in Europe. With large-format illustrations of 40 paintings and 60 drawings, this volume accompanies the first comprehensive museum exhibition with a focus on portraits and representations of figures to be shown in Switzerland and Austria.

Making van Gogh focuses on the œuvre of Vincent van Gogh in the context of its reception. The publication examines the particular role which German gallerists, collectors, critics and museums played in the story of his success. At the same time it sheds light on the importance of van Gogh as a role model for the avant-garde generation of artists.

Heinz Mack is an artist who has left his mark on our times. He has made a pioneering contribution to the question of a new concept of art, which has been of fundamental importance since the post-war period. This volume offers for the first time a monograph with an overview of Mack’s philosophy of art as well as his multi-faceted oeuvre: from ZERO and the legendary Sahara Project to light art and his most recent paintings.

Georg Baselitz's various creative phases are exemplified by 31 of his masterpieces that are held within the Bavarian State Painting Collections. The volume analyses for the first time these important paintings and sculptures within the context of the history of the collection, which has been shaped not only by the artist’s outstanding supporters and collectors, including Duke Franz von Bayern, but also by the passionate commitment of the directors and curators of the museum.

The painting Paris Street, Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) is an icon of Impressionism.This volume presents the work in the context of Caillebotte’s innovative artistic work, introducing him as a driving force in the establishment of Impressionism and describing his intensive exchanges with his fellow-artists.

A master of colour and an ambitious cosmopolite: Hans Purrmann (1880–1966) was an authoritative figure who forged links in European Modernism both as an artist and a personality, as a stylist and a figure of social integration. The balance between a record of what he saw and the visual reflexion of painting as a form of expression hovers lightly in his pictures.

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.

She was not only a talented artist but also a shrewd free thinker and hostess: at the beginning of the twentieth century famous artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Alfred Kubin, Adolf Erbslöh, Erma Bossi, Franz Marc and August Macke assembled in Marianne von Werefkin’s salon in the Schwabing district of Munich.

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.”