Murder In Art Nouveau

Why are the director of the Hagen Osthaus Museum and his deputy murdered? Why is a well-known art forger reactivated? On which wise disappeared valuable paintings from the museum during the Nazi era? And what has the Naples Camorra to do with all this? Questions upon questions that lead to a real confusion. In any case, the murders are causing excitement in Hagen. The police is initially faced with a mystery. Can this complicated case be solved?

A New York Times Notable Book: This national bestseller is a vivid biography of the meteoric rise and tragic death of art star Jean-Michel Basquiat Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat was the Jimi Hendrix of the art world. In less than a decade, he went from being a teenage graffiti artist to an international art star; he was dead of a drug overdose at age twenty-seven. Basquiat’s brief career spanned the giddy 1980s art boom and epitomized its outrageous excess. A legend in his own lifetime, Basquiat was a fixture of the downtown scene, a wild nexus of music, fashion, art, and drugs. Along the way, the artist got involved with many of the period’s most celebrated personalities, from his friendships with Keith Haring and Andy Warhol to his brief romantic fling with Madonna. Nearly thirty years after his death, Basquiat’s story—and his art—continue to resonate and inspire. Posthumously, Basquiat is more successful than ever, with international retrospectives, critical acclaim, and multimillion dollar sales. Widely considered to be a major twentieth-century artist, Basquiat’s work has permeated the culture, from hip-hop shout-outs to a plethora of products. A definitive biography of this charismatic figure, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art is as much a portrait of the era as a portrait of the artist; an incisive exposé of the eighties art market that paints a vivid picture of the rise and fall of the graffiti movement, the East Village art scene, and the art galleries and auction houses that fueled his meteoric career. Basquiat resurrects both the painter and his time.

Revolutionary essays on design, aesthetics and materialism - from one of the great masters of modern architecture Adolf Loos, the great Viennese pioneer of modern architecture, was a hater of the fake, the fussy and the lavishly decorated, and a lover of stripped down, clean simplicity. He was also a writer of effervescent, caustic wit, as shown in this selection of essays on all aspects of design and aesthetics, from cities to glassware, furniture to footwear, architectural training to why 'the lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power'. Translated by Shaun Whiteside With an epilogue by Joseph Masheck

Meet PARIS Paris Mackenzie is a sixteen-year-old from Chicago with an irrepressible personality and a passion for Sherlock Holmes. When she visits her namesake city at the turn of the century, Paris finds all the glamour and romance she ever dreamed of. But the city’s glittering façade hides a dark underside, whose danger is like a magnet to the intrepid Paris, pulling her closer and closer to treachery, deceit. . . and even murder. A SCENT OF MURDER World-famous artist Claude Monet has invited Paris and Marcel to visit him in the tranquil French countryside at Giverny. But the waters of Monet’s private pond are distinctly troubled when a dead man is found floating amid the lilies. Only Paris believes it is more than an accident. Before long her persistence uncovers a wicked web of duplicity, fraud, and murder threatening one of the world’s greatest artists.

One Sunday in March they had been marooned at the club, Steingall the painter and Quinny the illustrator, and, having lunched late, had bored themselves separately to their limits over the periodicals until, preferring to bore each other, they had gravitated together in easy arm-chairs before the big Renaissance fireplace. Steingall, sunk in his collar, from behind the black-rimmed spectacles, which, with their trailing ribbon of black, gave a touch of Continental elegance to his cropped beard and colonel's mustaches, watched without enthusiasm the three mammoth logs, where occasional tiny flames gave forth an illusion of heat. Quinny, as gaunt as a militant friar of the Middle Ages, aware of Steingall's protective reverie, spoke in desultory periods, addressing himself questions and supplying the answers, reserving his epigrams for a larger audience. At three o'clock De Gollyer entered from a heavy social performance, raising his eyebrows in salute as others raise their hats, and slightly dragging one leg behind. He was an American critic who was busily engaged in discovering the talents of unrecognized geniuses of the European provinces. When reproached with his migratory enthusiasm, he would reply, with that quick, stiffening military click with which he always delivered his bons mots: "My boy, I never criticize American art. I can't afford to. I have too many charming friends." At four o'clock, which is the hour for the entrŽe of those who escape from their homes to fling themselves on the sanctuary of the club, Rankin, the architect, arrived with Stibo, the fashionable painter of fashionable women, who brought with him the atmosphere of pleasant soap and an exclusive, smiling languor.

An art catalogue for the traveling museum exhibition ALPHONSE MUCHA: MASTER OF ART NOUVEAU

On the evening of May 16, 1937, the train doors opened at the Porte Dorée station in the Paris Métro to reveal a dying woman slumped by a window, an eight-inch stiletto buried to its hilt in her neck. No one witnessed the crime, and the killer left behind little forensic evidence. This first-ever murder in the Paris Métro dominated the headlines for weeks during the summer of 1937, as journalists and the police slowly uncovered the shocking truth about the victim: a twenty-nine-year-old Italian immigrant, the beautiful and elusive Laetitia Toureaux. Toureaux toiled each day in a factory, but spent her nights working as a spy in the seamy Parisian underworld. Just as the dangerous spy Mata Hari fascinated Parisians of an earlier generation, the mystery of Toureaux's murder held the French public spellbound in pre-war Paris, as the police tried and failed to identify her assassin. In Murder in the Métro, Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite unravel Toureaux's complicated and mysterious life, assessing her complex identity within the larger political context of the time. They follow the trail of Toureaux's murder investigation to the Comité Secret d'Action Révolutionnaire, a secret right-wing political organization popularly known as the Cagoule, or "hooded ones." Obsessed with the Communist threat they perceived in the growing power of labor unions and the French left wing, the Cagoule's leaders aimed to overthrow France's Third Republic and install an authoritarian regime allied with Italy. With Mussolini as their ally and Italian fascism as their model, they did not shrink from committing violent crimes and fomenting terror to accomplish their goal. In 1936, Toureaux -- at the behest of the French police -- infiltrated this dangerous group of terrorists and seduced one of its leaders, Gabriel Jeantet, to gain more information. This operation, the authors show, eventually cost Toureaux her life. The tale of Laetitia Toureaux epitomizes the turbulence of 1930s France, as the country prepared for a war most people dreaded but assumed would come. This period, therefore, generated great anxiety but also offered new opportunities -- and risks -- to Toureaux as she embraced the identity of a "modern" woman. The authors unravel her murder as they detail her story and that of the Cagoule, within the popular culture and conflicted politics of 1930s France. By examining documents related to Toureaux's murder -- documents the French government has sealed from public view until 2038 -- Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite link Toureaux's death not only to the Cagoule but also to the Italian secret service, for whom she acted as an informant. Their research provides likely answers to the question of the identity of Toureaux's murderer and offers a fascinating look at the dark and dangerous streets of pre--World War II Paris.