Chagall Basic Art

by Rainer Metzger and Ingo F. Walther

Published 1 November 1996
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) is widely regarded as epitomizing the "painter as poet". The worldwide admiration he commanded remains unparalleled by any artist of the 20th century. Chagall's paintings, steeped in mythology and mysticism, portray colourful dreams and tales that are deeply rooted in his Russian Jewish origins. The memories and yearning they evoke recall his native Vitebsk, and the great events that mark the life of ordinary people: birth, love, marriage and death. They tell of a world full of everyday miracles - in the room of lovers, on the streets of Vitebsk, beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Heaven and earth seem to meet in a topsy-turvy world in which whimsical figures of people and animals float through the air with gravity-defying serenity. This art album presents Chagall's work.

Picasso

by Ingo F. Walther

Published 1 May 1987
One name in the history of the 20th century art stands out over all others: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). As painter, graphic artist and sculptor, he displayed an inventive enterprise and innovative bravado that always kept him one step ahead of his contemporaries. As one of them, the painter Max Ernst, ruefully put it: "No one can touch Picasso. He is genius incarnate." The works selected here cover Picasso's entire output, from the less familiar to key masterpieces such as "Guernica", from the Blue and Rose Periods early in his career through his cubist and classicist phases and the formal experiments of the Thirties to his later involvement with politics in art.