Kirjahaku

With his signature graphic style, embrace of figural distortion, and bold defiance of conventional norms of beauty, Egon Schiele was one of the leading figures of Austrian Expressionism. He was an Austrian painter, a prot g of Gustav Klimt and important figurative painter of the early 20th century. The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize his paintings and drawings mark the artist as one an earliest exponent of Expressionism. In Schiele's early years, he was strongly influenced by Klimt and Kokoschka but soon evolved into his own characteristic style. He focused on portraits of others as well as himself. In his later years, while he still worked often with nudes, they were done in a more realist fashion. Schiele made many drawings, some of which were extremely erotic. During his short but highly prolific career which ended with his premature death, Schiele created more than three thousand works on paper and approximately 300 paintings.

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form. Amedeo Modigliani was born July 12, 1884 in Livorno, Italy. After studying in Italy, Modigliani settled in Paris and exhibited at the Salon des Ind pendants. Following the advice of Brancusi, he studied and was influenced by African sculpture. In 1917 he began painting a series of female nudes that are among his best works. Modigliani died in 1920 in Paris of tubercular meningitis, exacerbated by poverty, overwork and addiction to alcohol and narcotics.

One of the most brilliant and original artists of the eighteenth century, Antoine Watteau had an impact on the development of Rococo art in France and throughout Europe lasting well beyond his lifetime. Living only thirty-six years, and plagued by frequent illness, Watteau nonetheless rose from an obscure provincial background to achieve fame in the French capital during the Regency of the duc d'Orl ans. His paintings feature figures in aristocratic and theatrical dress in lush imaginary landscapes. During Watteau's lifetime, a new term, f te galante, was coined to describe them. Watteau was also a gifted draftsman whose sparkling chalk sheets capture subtle nuances of deportment and expression. His method of juxtaposing flecks of color on the canvas was carried further by Delacroix and later reduced to a science by Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists.

This Art Book contains selected and annotated detailed color reproductions of paintings from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 -1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy. Ingres is a puzzling artist and his career is full of contradictions. Yet more than most artists he was obsessed by a restricted number of themes and returned to the same subject again and again over a long period of years. He was a bourgeois with the limitations of a bourgeois mentality but as Baudelaire remarked, his finest works 'are the product of a deeply sensuous nature'. The central contradiction of his career is that although he was held up as the guardian of classical rules and precepts, it is his personal obsessions and mannerisms that make him such a great artist. His technique as a painter was academically unimpeachable. A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eug ne Delacroix. His exemplars, he once explained, were "the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal and incontestable bounds of the sublime in art ... I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator." Nevertheless, modern opinion has tended to regard Ingres and the other Neoclassicists of his era as embodying the Romantic spirit of his time, while his expressive distortions of form and space make him an important precursor of modern art.

This Art Book contains selected and annotated detailed color reproductions of paintings from Amedeo Clemente Modigliani. Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form. Amedeo Modigliani was on born July 12, 1884 in Livorno, Italy. After studying in Italy, Modigliani settled in Paris and exhibited at the Salon des Ind pendants. Following the advice of Brancusi, he studied and was influenced by African sculpture. In 1917 he began painting a series of female nudes that are among his best works. Modigliani died in 1920 in Paris of tubercular meningitis, exacerbated by poverty, overwork and addiction to alcohol and narcotics.