Virtu Art Books
Expressionist Movement: Roots of Modernism
Koloman Moser: Master of Viennese Modernism
Having trained at the Kunstgewerbeschule, where he was later to become a teacher, he
broke away from the Establishment and in 1897 co-founded the Vienna Secession, whose
first President was Gustav Klimt. Moser had begun his career with fashion drawings and
book illustrations, but soon he was working in ceramics, furniture, jewelry, fabrics and
all aspects of interior design. In 1903, together with his friend and colleague Josef
Hoffmann, he founded the Wiener Werkstatte, whose workshops were to set trends that
spread far beyond the boundaries of Vienna. As a teacher, artist and craftsman, Moser
had an immense influence on the tastes of his time, and his talents ranged from stained
glass to the design of stage sets and postage stamps. He devoted the last years of his
life to painting, and in recent times his reputation in this field too has steadily
grown. Maria Rennhofer's book provides a comprehensive account not only of Moser's life
and work, but also of the flourishing artistic environment which he did so much to create
and shape.
The Expressionist Roots of Modernism
This study contends that it was not in France but in Germany between 1906 and 1914 that
artists took the fundamental steps, intellectually as well as artistically, that were to
determine the course art was to take for the rest of the century. It was the Russian emigre
in Munich, Vassily Kandinsky, who first argued the case for total abstraction in art and
for a total right of self-expression. This led directly to non-objective painting, to the
nihilism of Dada, and eventually to the post-1945 New York School. The author shows that
artists have long gone beyond abstraction in their exploitation of that search for
originality, granted to them by the theoretical position taken up in the second decade of
the 20th century in Germany
German Expressionist Painting
Paperback
Publisher:
University of California Press
German Expressionist Prints: The Specks Collection at the Milwaukee Museum of Art
Paperback
Publisher:
Hudson Hills Press