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Caspar David Friedrich

The solitude of man and the bleak beauty of nature are prominent themes in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the great romantic painter whose importance and influence have often been underestimated.

Lucian Freud

British artist Lucian Freud is widely considered the most important figurative painter working today. Master portraitist and specialist in nudes, Freud uses impasto to create depth and intensity while restraining his color palate to mostly muted hues. His portraits may be physically unflattering to their subjects, but they are honest, frank, and unapologetic. "I paint people," Freud has said, "not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."

Lucio Fontana

Italian artist Lucio Fontana tore apart the modern art establishment—literally. Trained initially as a sculptor, Fontana (1899-1968) blurred the lines between painting and sculpture by creating works that combined both form and color in a spatial context, most famously exemplified by his slashed canvases of the 1950s and 60s.

Expressionism

During the first two decades of the 20th century, many artists famously experimented with nonrepresentational expression. Taking cues from ideas hinted as by artists such as El Greco, Goya, Van Gogh, and Munch, Expressionists sought to transform reality rather than depict it in any sort of literal fashion. Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky are among Expressionism's most famous exponents.

Featured artists include:

Ernst

Max Ernst - Outstanding for his varied style and technique

Max Ernst (1891-1996) is one of the most important figures of Dadaism and Surrealism. As a student in Bonn, he found himself drawn to the Dada movement that had arisen in counter-reaction to the mass slaughter of World War I.

Ensor

James Ensor - The great Belgian painter of macabre and ghoulish scenes

It was never a sure thing that James Ensor, the great Belgian painter of macabre and ghoulish scenes, would become a nationally revered figure. James Ensor was unusual in many ways. Apart from his training in Brussels, he spent his entire long life in Ostend, seemingly the opposite of cosmopolitan. Later on he was expelled by the group Les XX for a particularly controversial canvas: "The Entry of Christ into Brussels", which he had painted in 1889.

El Greco

Cretan-born painter Domenicos Theotocopoulos, better known by his Spanish nickname, El Greco (c.1541-1614), studied under Titian in Venice before settling down in Toledo. Commissioned by the church and local nobility, El Greco produced dramatic paintings marked by distorted figures and vibrant color contrasted with subtle grays. Though his work was appreciated by his contemporaries, especially intellectuals, it wasn`t until the 20th century that it was widely embraced and admired, influencing in particular the Expressionist movement.

Egypt Art

Treasures from the ancient land of the Pharaohs

Dürer

Dürer's art - Absolute fidelity to every detail

Five full centuries lie between us and the life of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). His ability to represent a subject with an absolute fidelity to every detail seemed miraculous to his contemporaries, and still astounds us now: we need only think of his water-colours of plants and animals.

In addition, Dürer was the first painter to devote such close attention to the art of the self-portrait. No artist before him painted as many as he. The works by Dürer collected in this book show the full range of this artist's unique genius.

Willem de Kooning

The leader of the abstract expressionists

"If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous... It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today." —Willem de Kooning