Tate Gallery Bücher

"This new Tate Gallery Companion, a beautifully produced record of the collections of one of the world's great art museums, is illustrated with more than 300 full-colour reproductions accompanied by a comprehensive commentary. Each of the thirty-four sections is introduced by a brief illustrated essay followed by individual discussion of up to five major works reproduced in large format. Written by Simon Wilson, Head of the Tate Gallery Education Department, the lively and approachable text covers five centuries of British and foreign art. It treats the present as continuous with the past, giving equal attention to the work of the historic old masters, to that of the established masters of the modern era and to the more controversial achievements of the most recent generation of artists."--Publisher's description.

art, 1700's, british, paintings

Abstract art is now about seventy years old. It is one of the developments in art that will always be seen as a creation of the twentieth ccdntury. In the past, various writers in tracing the historical origins of the abstract movement, have described the works of the principal artists in terms of 'influence' and 'style' without considering the single important fact that abstraction is not a 'style' but what Delaunay called a 'change of understanding'. No stylistic definition, however broad, can encompass the work of painters as diverse as Kandinsky and Malevich. Mondrian and Kupka, Wyndham Lewis and Itten. How abstract art developed in its first crucial years c. 1910-20 is the theme of this book and the exhibition for which it has been published. The necessity for a new approach to the subject has encouraged an examination of the process by which artists gradually evolved a vocabulary of abstract form, not only in their methods of working, but also in their circumstances and theoretical preoccupations. Th various sections of the book deal with all those countries which produced painters who went on to completely abstract painting - the Netherlands, dominated by Germany and Central Europe dominated by Rusia dominated by Italy, England and the United States. They are centred round the activity in France - the Cubism of Picasso, Braque and Gris, and the 'pure' painters of Paris - Delaunay, Leger and Kupka. There are over 300 monochrome illustrations and 18 in colour.