Art Dictionary | Hatje Cantz Verlag

THE ART MARKET

Confusing and uncertain: the art market is foreign even to many people interested in art, but at the same time it exerts a great fascination.

COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY

If photography had been invented as color photography - who would ever have missed black and white?

BAUHAUS

The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919. Despite its short existence, it still proves to be the most important school of art, design and architecture.

NEW OBJECTIVITY

With their paintings, they reacted to the traumatic experience of the WWI and a world that had come apart at the seams: the artists of New Objectivity.

1914 - ARTISTS AT WAR

The First World War left its mark on the work of numerous artists; the shock before the trembling of the world led them to poignant new themes and radically new artistic concepts.

ACTION PAINTING

Abstract expressionist painting is associated with one name in particular: Jackson Pollock. With daring techniques such as "action painting," the American continues to influence the art scene to this day.

NUDES IN ART

The nude is one of the oldest and most fascinating motifs in art. After all, the motif of the unclothed body offers virtually inexhaustible possibilities for depicting man's view of himself, his ideals, fears and dreams.

THE INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION IN VENICE

Every two years, architecture fans from all over the world make a pilgrimage to the Architecture Biennale in Venice: the most important international exhibition for architecture and urban development.

ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL

Ars Electronica, located on the frontier of art and technology, is a globally important media art festival - a platform that focuses on the future as it is currently being realized.

ART BASEL

Described as the "Olympus of the art market" and the "queen among art fairs", Art Basel is considered the world's best and most important fair for art from classical modernism to the present.

BAROQUE ART

No epoch in European cultural history is as characterized by contradictions as the age of the Baroque - yet this style of art, which is often dismissed as "pompous," is once again attracting increasing attention.

BERLIN BIENNALE

New, specially produced works by contemporary artists from all over the world, renowned curators: as an exhibition with international appeal, the Berlin Biennale has secured its firm place in the global round of biennials.

BIEDERMEIER

Biedermeier is on its way to no longer being regarded as a musty product of stuffy taste, but is being rediscovered as a highly cultivated art movement.

VENICE BIENNALE

The Biennale has been held in Venice every two years since 1895 and is one of the most important exhibitions of international contemporary art.

BODY ART

Body art emerged at a time when the youth of the Western world was rebelling. The avant-garde actions were often intended to trigger a shockingly liberating effect on the audience and break social and political constraints.

BRÜCKE

On June 7, 1905, four young Dresden students founded the artist group "Brücke". Their goal was to find new forms of pictorial expression with wild strokes and ecstatic colors. German Expressionism was born.

DADA

In their rebellion against bourgeois artistic standards, they favored incomprehensible and often shocking artistic procedures: the Dadaists, who questioned the classical concept of art more fundamentally than any movement before them.

THE ART OF PERFORMANCE

In the sixties and seventies of the 20th century, performance was the art genre of the hour, it promised nothing less than the encounter with naked life.

THE NEUE WILDE

Painting experienced a brief but fierce renaissance in the early 1980s. Young artists joined forces to paint against the formal asceticism of Minimal and Concept Art.

DOCUMENTA

If one wants to reduce the more than fifty-year history of Documenta to a common denominator, then one can probably say that - like no other major exhibition - it has repeatedly intervened in the respective current art discussion, adopted one or the other attitude and thus triggered controversies.

EXPRESSIONISM

Expressionism as an art of mental expression: images of reality represented as abstraction with strong colors. However, the Expressionists were not overthrowers of the social system, their revolution was mainly the formal means of art, the free play of colors and shapes.

PHOTOGRAPHY

More than any other visual medium, photography has shaped our perception of the world. It is an omnipresent medium. Against this backdrop, it is surprising that photography is taking up more and more space in the current art scene. Can a mass medium be art?

PHOTOREALISM

In the late 1960s, several young artists in the U.S. began to capture mostly everyday motifs of their immediate surroundings that expressed the "American way of life" with meticulous attention to detail in large-format paintings. Photographs served them as models.

IMPRESSIONISM

An exhibition in Paris in 1874 gave birth to what was probably the most exciting and up to then the newest style in 19th century art: Impressionism.