Janis Mink

Hilma af Klint painted as though she was channeling the universe. Fascinated from childhood by botany and mathematics, she began her career painting landscapes and portraits, but other preoccupations stirred within her: questions of spirit, unseen energies, patterns too vast for the eye alone. Her art was inseparable from her spiritual practice. With a circle of female artists called The Five, she held séances, heard voices from "High Masters," and was inspired by the Theosophical Society and Rudolf Steiner’s theories. Working tirelessly to map life’s hidden dimensions, she would paint to the point of physical collapse. By 1906, her canvases featured radiant geometries of spirals and orbs, impregnated with symbols, letters, and words, anticipating the later embrace of abstraction by Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, and others. Her vast painted cycles?like her works for the Temple and The Ten Largest?often depicted dualities: inside and out, the earthly and the esoteric, man and woman, good and evil. Living as a vegetarian, questioning the fixity of gender, af Klint was clearly before her time, yet very much of it too, and pretty much uncelebrated in her day. Her prodigious output lay unseen for decades, locked away by her own instruction. Only in the 1980s did the world begin to recognize her as a true pioneer of abstract art. This book invites you into her visionary world, via a luminous selection of her works and a detailed essay distilling their complexity. Her once-secret universe is revealed to us anew.

Tirs and Tarot New possibilities for painting and sculpture A key contributor to Nouveau Réalisme in early 1960s Paris, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) worked alongside artists such as Arman, Yves Klein, and Jean Tinguely, scavenging real objects in place of traditional art materials. She connected art to life by instrumentalizing household items, machine parts, and even toys for her early assemblages. Saint Phalle created her first shooting painting, or Tir, in 1961, and went on to conduct these performances in such varied locations as the Impasse Ronsin in Paris, a garden in Amsterdam, a sandpit outside Stockholm, and the Malibu Hills. Reliefs made of plaster, small objects, paint, wood, and wire were punctured by the bullets of a gun. This book provides an introduction to Saint Phalle’s work, highlighting some of her most important contributions to 20th century art. From birthing mothers to harbingers of death, she created sculptures that celebrated and exposed the female form in works such as Pink Birth (1964) and Hon En Kathedral (1966). She also used real-life figures as inspiration: her early Nana sculptures are named after the artist’s women friends and family members. She later extended her practice to films such as Daddy (1973), artist’s books including AIDS: You Can’t Catch it Holding Hands (1987), and the Tarot Garden, a monumental sculpture park with figures modeled on the 22 named cards of the Major Arcana figures in the Tarot deck, the karmic cards of destiny.

Readymade man Changing the course of 20th-century art When is a urinal no longer a urinal? When Marcel Duchamp (1887 1968) declared it to be art. The uproar that greeted the French artist s Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal installed in a gallery, sent shock waves through the art world establishment that continue to reverberate to the present day. Duchamp made a career out of challenging our notions of what art is and, in the process, opened our minds to hitherto unknown possibilities. After an oblique version of Cubism in his early career, the artist made his name with Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), a groundbreaking blend of abstraction, Cubism, and Futurism, with a controversially mechanical titular nude. Around the same time, Duchamp began his forays into the now-iconic readymades seemingly random found objects which Duchamp would present as art, including Bicycle Wheel (1913), Bottle Rack (1914), and a snow shovel, labeled Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915). Duchamp went on to cause even further apoplexy among traditionalists with outrages such as L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), in which he presented a cheap copy of da Vinci s Mona Lisa with a mustache and beard penciled on and, for good measure, the auditory pun of the title (which, when read aloud in French, sounds like Elle a chaud au cul She has a hot ass ). This book distills all the daring and the scandal of Duchamp s art into one essential overview which introduces not only one pioneering creative but also a critical moment in Western art. It is here, amid the assaults on Old Masters and the fractured poetry of found objects, that the art world first transitioned from retinal experiences to what would evolve into conceptual practice.About the series: Each book in TASCHEN s Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions"

Like dreamers do: The lyrical mark-making of a modern maestroWith a career spanning seven decades, Catalan-born Joan Miro (1893 1983) was a polymath giant of modern art, producing masterworks across painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry, and ceramics, and embracing ideologies as varied as Fauvism, Surrealism, Dada, Magic Realism, Cubism, and abstraction.Over the course of his prodigious output, Miro evolved constantly, seeking to eschew categorization and the approval of bourgeois art critics as much as he pursued his own dreamlike worlds. Emerging into the public spotlight in the early 1920s, he first experimented with Fauvism and Cubism before developing a distinctive style of symbols and pictograms, arranged in elusive visual narratives, with frequent reference to Catalan life. As his career progressed, Miro moved towards Surrealism, and, despite never fully identifying with the movement, emerged as one of its most celebrated practitioners with techniques including automated drawing, Lyrical Abstraction, and Color Field painting. In later years, he diversified his media further, working with ceramics, textiles, and even proposing sculptures made of gas.Through his vivid colors, dreamlike fantasies, and enigmatic symbols, this book brings together the numerous strands of Miro s kaleidoscopic oeuvre to introduce his fascinating career, its interaction with major modernist movements, and its making of a modernist legend.About the series: Each book in TASCHEN s Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions"