Search results for ""author susanne meyer-büser""

For eight years before the First World War, a young Georges Braque and his friend Pablo Picasso shaped what was perhaps the most revolutionary stage in the history of modern painting: Cubism. This catalog of the accompanying exhibition focuses on Braque’s turbulent pre-WWI period to reveal the processes by which the artist developed or reinvented his style in rapid succession— from Fauvism, Proto-Cubism, Analytical Cubism, papier collé to Synthetic Cubism. The amazing speed and intensity of Braque’s evolution stands as a remarkable parallel to modern art’s shifting focus from representation to abstraction. Bringing together sixty works from museums and private collections around the world, this book offers scholarly assessments that contextualise Braque’s career amidst unprecedented technological advances, new schools of thought, and an overall acceleration of everyday life in Western Europe. This includes the invention of moving pictures, which held a particular fascination for the young artist. Film stills and documentary and archival material help readers make the connection between dynamization and the development of aesthetic forms in the visual arts, between the visual innovations of the pre-war period and the flood of media images in which we live today. More than half a century after Braque’s death, this exploration of his remarkable career brings us closer to understanding the artist whom Guillaume Apollinaire considered the “touchstone” of Cubist art.

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An insatiable Hunger for Life Clenched, raw and of a pressing urgentness: Chaïm Soutine’s expressive paintings are testimonies to a sense of human vulnerability and an existence on the margins of society. Intensely coloured, his meaty impasto portraits are thrown onto the canvas with broad brushstrokes, his agitated, frenetic landscapes and the paintings of slaughtered animals are expressions of an intense hunger for life and, at the same time, a deep alienation in an unsteady world that offers no support. Despite the recognition his work received, Soutine remained an outsider throughout his life, a stranger to the social manners of his adopted home in France. This catalogue focuses on the early masterpieces and series created between 1919 and 1925: Under the overarching theme of emigration and uprooting, the contributions reveal the traces of Soutine’s Jewish origins in his work, illuminate the significance of his motifs from the fringes of society as well as of blood and animal carcasses as metaphors; and show the influences of Soutine’s art up to the present day.

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