Patrick Bade — the Urban Legend

Edvard Munch was Norway's most popular artist, and his brooding and anguished paintings, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the development of Expressionism.

Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was an artist on the forefront of Art Nouveau. Today, his distinctive depictions of lithe young women in classical dress have become a pop cultural touchstone. Patrick Bade and Victoria Charles offer readers an inspiring survey of Mucha’s career, illustrated with over one hundred lustrous images.

No living British painter between Constable and Bacon enjoyed the kind of international acclaim that Burne-Jones was accorded in the early 1890s. Burne-Jones’ oeuvre can be understood as an attempt to create in paint a world of perfect beauty, as far removed from the Birmingham of his youth as possible.

The smoothly metallic portraits, nudes and still lives of Tamara de Lempicka encapsulate the spirit of Art Deco and the Jazz Age, and reflect the elegant and hedonistic life-style of a wealthy, glamorous and privileged elite in Paris between the two World Wars. This book celebrates the sleek and streamlined beauty of her best work in the 1920s and 30s.

Courbet was by nature a revolutionary and, like every revolutionary, he was an extremist; in all his works, whether attractive or not to the observer, he proved himself a powerful painter, painting in a broad, free manner, with a fine feeling for colour, and with a firmness of pigment that made all his representations very real and stirring.

Beautiful, sensuous and above all erotic, Gustav Klimt’s paintings speak of a world of opulence and leisure, which seems aeons away from the harsh, post-modern environment we live in now. The flat, two-dimensional perspective of his paintings forms an oeuvre imbued with a profound sensuality and one where the figure of woman, above all, reigns supreme.