Anyone interested in thehistory of nazi espionage will find that this book is a must-read. Absolutely riveting. Highly recommended.

This book brings together 40 prints of the artist's paintings in beautiful colour, as well as a lengthy text which precedes them, with photographs of Modigliani, and examples of his sculptures and caryatids. Werner presents M as a tragic figure since his health was poor - he suffered from tuberculosis all his life, and he died relatively young at 35, without receiving any substantial recognition of his work. Much is made of his excessive social life in Paris, though M was Italian, where he is said to have indulged in alcohol and hashish. He focused on painting after he was unable to continue with sculpture because of his lack of money, the difficulty in obtaining materials, and the affect of the stone dust on his weak lungs. Werner also tells us that M suffered from a psychoneurosis, and calls him a "solipsist who produced exclusively self-portraits, symbolic representations of his own tortured soul". However these arguments do not appear to relate to the nature of his painting. His work is calm, not tortured, and the idea that his infamous style of Expressionist distortion is meant to reveal a "paranoiac autism" seems silly. The photos we see of M show that he does not resemble his skittle-shaped, swan-necked, almond-eyed portraits. Even the notion that some of the subjects having closed eyes meaning an inner directed concentration based on a fear of the world, does not appreciate the stylistic choice he made to express his form of conception upon reality. He had trained as a draftsman and considered his work "illuminations", accentuating attributes to the point of caricature. The faces of his sculptures bear the same kind of visage. His work is both striking in his use of colour, where he favoured strong lines and prefered primary blacks and reds; and tender in the delicate way he treats the subjects, whether they be Parisian socialities, other artists, his two mistresses - Beatrice Hastings and Jeanne Hebuterne, or working class models like maids and peasants. What ultimately makes the work of Modigliani great is how one can return to the prints again and again, to revel in their mannered elegance, their sadness and beauty, and his unique balance between naturalism and abstraction.

Gustav Klimt is amazing. I love his work and I have most recently become more intrigued by his ideas and sketches. If you like Klimt, check out Auguste Rodin, and Egon Schiele also. They all have similar sketch stylizes and imagery. I am an art major and I specialize in painting portraits, so Klimt's sketches are a natural way for me to go. I love his work so I loved this book but as another reviewer stated, the images were too light. The drawings were awfully faint and on gray paper, I would have liked them to be printed darker or at least on white paper. Also there were a lot of his major sketches for his masterpieces missing that I've found in other books. Over all it's a very good book for a nice price.

What more is there to it? Maybe that's all art's good for: giving you a hard time. I thought the reproductions in this book were a little faded and that's why i gave it four stars and not five, as the drawings deserved. Also, i did not found some drawings i was sure to find here. Great if you want an introduction to Klimt, the explicit erotic artist.

this is an amazing book! as an amateur graphic artist, this has been an invaluable reference and inspiration to me. all of the drawings are of figures, mostly women, mostly naked. they were largely done without direction to his models while they lounged around his loft so they are very intimate, sensual, and sometimes erotic.
his style is so lucid, i can stare at the images forever. the line is so smooth and light(usually pencil, sometimes charcoal), that the images seem like stencils. the body is basically a contour drawing and then the hair is captured in typical art nouveau style, with stylized strands moving in one direction.
i can't say enough about this book. the work is so simple and stunning...when i try to relate what it means to me, i can't think of a thing to say.