Böcker av Ortrud Westheider

Discover how painters such as Van Gogh, Mondrian, and Jacoba van Heemskerck drew on the legacy of Dutch landscapes and realism to put their own spin on the Impressionist movement. Impressionism may have originated in France, but artists in late 19th- and early 20th-century Netherlands quickly made it their own. The genre's vibrant colors and focus on light and atmosphere were a perfect complement to the country's groundbreaking traditions of landscape painting and realism. This exhibition catalog brings together hundreds of works by nearly forty artists including Johan Barthold Jongkind, Vincent van Gogh, Jacoba van Heemskerck, and Piet Mondrian. It traces the birth of the Hague School, whose practitioners captured the changing moods of light in the coastline's vast, grey skies. And it explores the Amsterdam Impressionists, whose cityscapes offered realistic images of modern life. Alongside vibrant reproductions of masterworks, a series of lively essays explore a diverse array of topics, including Dutch landscape painting within an international context; Dutch artist settlements and communities; and iconography in Dutch impressionism.

Published in conjunction with the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Monet's 1872 painting, Impression, Sunrise, this unique and illuminating catalog reaches throughout history to explore how artists have incorporated the sun as a reference point and as inspiration in their art. For as long as humans have been making art, they have turned to the sun as the source of light, warmth and life itself. It appears as a symbol of limitless power, as the personification of gods and of Christ, and as a harbinger of change. Artists have also used the sun as a means of exploring light and color and as an entrée into discussions about climate. The first of its kind, this book investigates visual representations of the sun from antiquity to the present day. It is divided into seven roughly chronological sections that look at both epoch-spanning and period specific examples, including symbolic, allegorical representations, the iconography of mythological subjects, and mimetic qualities such as typology, phenomenology, and emotional effect. It includes more than two hundred stunning reproductions of well- and lesser-known works of art. Incisive and enlightening texts explore how solar symbolism figured in pre-Christian objects; through 17th-century depictions of the "Sun King" Louis XIV; how artists such as Rubens and Monet employed the sun in their narrative paintings; how the Impressionists first investigated the sun's effects on a landscape; how Neo-Impressionists such as Seurat experimented with color, based on the Newtonian analysis of the solar spectrum; and how 20th-century artists incorporated a broad array of abstract, surrealistic, and transformative modes of solar representation into a variety of media.

This book gives new insights into the flowering of radical abstraction after 1945, focussing on the creative interplay between painters in the wider orbit of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel.Following World War II, Western painting went in completely new directions. A young generation of artists turned their backs on the dominant styles of the interwar period: Instead of figurative representation or geometric abstraction, painters in the orbit of Abstract Expressionism in the US and Art Informel in Western Europe pursued a radically impulsive approach to form, color, and material. As an expression of individual freedom, the spontaneous artistic gesture gained symbolic significance. Large-scale color-field compositions created a meditative space for ruminating the fundamental questions of human existence. The exhibition and catalogue examine the two sister movements against the background of a vibrant transatlantic exchange, from the 1940s through to the end of the Cold War. The lavishly illustrated volume brings together works by more than 60 artists, amongst them Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, K. O. Götz, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Georges Mathieu, Joan Mitchell, Ernst-Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Judit Reigl, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.

This beautiful volume offers a comprehensive overview of Impressionist landscape painting from an incomparable collection.