Van Gogh

This richly illustrated and expert study follows the artist from the early gloom-laden paintings in which he captured the misery of peasants and workers in his homeland, through his bright and colourful Parisian period, to the work of his final years, spent under a southern sun in Arles. Here, at last, he found the light that produced the unmistakable van Gogh style. At Arles, Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise, in the feverish burst of creative energy that marked his last two-and-a-half years, he produced the 465 paintings on which his immortality rests.

Toulouse-Lautrec

Today, the painter and graphic artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) is considered as one of the most inspired portrayers of human figures. This physically handicapped scion of the old French nobility was fascinated by life around Montmartre, whose cafes, cabarets, dance halls, and bordellos presented him with the "theatre of life."

More than any other artist, Toulouse-Lautrec captured the belle époque's pursuit of fleeting pleasure: directly and without flattery, his paintings, lithographs, and posters offer a masterly and timeless image of the age.

Symbolism

May 1884 saw the publication in Paris of a fin de siècle novel that became a perverse sensation on the European cultural scene. A Rebours (translated both as Against the Grain and Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans was written as a seductive textbook of decadence, an antidote to the "banality" of the dominant literary styles, Naturalism and Realism. Symbolism, whose influence would endure well into the modernist era, was an artistic religion-substitute, a spiritually charged cult of beauty. A Symbolist picture or sculpture is deliberately mysterious.

Пиво і філософія

Вічні теми та інтереси, пов"язані з пивом, - бадьора насолода, товариськість, заспокоєння, пізнання і духовність - завжди актуальні. Збірка статей науковців і броварів "Пиво і філософія" ілюструє, що кухоль пива з друзями може бути гранню складного, дивовижного і безмежно чарвного життя розуму.