The Great Masters of Art

Käthe Kollwitz is the woman artist from 20th-century Germany whose works are best-known internationally. She also enjoys the highest esteem beyond the boundaries of Europe. The inimitable, touching language of her graphic and sculptural works is universally understood and her haunting message is more topical than ever.

Max Beckmann (1884–1950), the outstanding Expressionist painter, is regarded as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. His works, jostling with figures and full of colour, are packed with highly symbolic messages. They are critical of the times in which he lived and bear witness to Beckmann’s struggle with existential questions and his constant search for truth.

His paintbrush set everything in motion: the landscape of Provence, the colourful still lifes, his portraits and the picturesque coast of southern France. More than any other artist, Paul Cézanne, the “Father of Modernism”, captured the light and the play of colours of the South in his pictures and lent them through his new pictorial language a liveliness and dynamism which continue to fascinate viewers to this day.

Frida Kahlo has become an icon of art with her powerfully expressive work. Her pictures not only reflect a view of herself, her fears, the biography of her illness, her passions and her joie de vivre; they also take up subjects which were regarded by society as taboo. As a pioneer of the feminist movement, this Mexican artist serves women the world over as a figure of identification.

The spiritually inspired pictures of Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) have their roots in the desert of California, a place where the artist settled in 1932 and where she lived until her death. She wrote of her highly symbolic paintings that her pictures were “like little windows”, which opened up a view into the interior, her “message of light to the world”.

The youngest member of the Blauer Reiter group was overshadowed for a long time by fellow painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, and Paul Klee. But in recent years, Heinrich Campendonk has enjoyed an unparalleled rediscovery and a new critical assessment of his extensive oeuvre.

Gustav Klimt is the one artist whose name we associate in particular with Viennese Jugendstil and the “Golden Age”. As a sought-after painter of frescoes and the founding president of the Vienna Secession, the portraitist of fashionable ladies and an illustrator of unashamed eroticism, Klimt was both the enfant terrible and the darling of Viennese society.

Conrad Felixmüller (1897–1977) is regarded as one of the most important representatives of the Second Generation of German Expressionism. He celebrated initial major successes with his art during the Weimar Republic. This volume illustrates the life and work of this unusual artist, whose creative career reflects more than half a century of art and contemporary history.  

The painter Hans Purrmann (1880–1966) ranks among the most important painters in the history of twentieth-century art. His vibrant Colourism drew on the works of Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne, but he achieved independent international acclaim over the course of an eventful life lived between Munich, Paris, Berlin, Florence and Switzerland.  

“I was thrilled”, was Andy Warhol’s enthusiastic reaction to the pictures of Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944). Many of the elements of her work inspired his Pop Art. During Stettheimer’s life her sensuous and ironic paintings with their numerous figures were valued highly by artists and curators, although the general public remained largely unaware of their merits. Only after her death did her close friend Marcel Duchamp organise a retrospective in the Museum of ...