By Hajo Düchting The founder of abstract art The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who later lived in Germany and France, is one of the pioneers of twentieth-century art. Nowadays he is regarded as the founder of abstract art and is, moreover, the chief theoretician of this type of painting.

By Susanne Deicher, Piet Taschen Less is often more - such is Piet Mondrian's approach to art. His main pictorial elements are horizontals and verticals, his preferred colours yellow, red and blue.

By Michael Gibson Part of the "Big Art" series of illustrated texts, this one covers Symbolism.

By Gilles Néret Matisse, the bard of colour, and Picasso, the breaker of moulds: together, these two giants shaped the world of modern art. They were, as Picasso once said, "North Pole, South Pole."

By Carsten-Peter Warncke, Ingo F. Walther "The definitive introduction to the scope and range of Picasso's work." The Times, London

By Robert Descharnes, Gilles Néret

The art of American painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) is splendid with colour and laden with hidden sensuality. O'Keeffe's name rests mainly on the large-format flower pictures that have assured her an unusual place in the annals of art, between realist and abstract.

By Dietmar Elger In six chapters -- The Brucke Group of Artists, Northern German Expressionism, The Blaue Reiter, Rhenish Expressionism, The City and Expressionism in Vienna -- this publication deals with a specifically German artistic revolution, a phenomenon that has quite accurately been described as "the most significant German contribution to 20th century European art.

In the late nineteenth century, the first discoveries of prehistoric painting were greeted with incredulity. How could there have been such deft and skillful artists in the world over 30,000 years ago? Noted art historian Nigel Spivey begins with this puzzle to explore the record of humanity’s artistic endeavors and their impact on our own development.

"Great art has dreadful manners," Simon Schama observes wryly at the start of his epic and explosive exploration of the power, and whole point, of art.

A new selection of post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gough's letters, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh put a human face on one of the most haunting figures in modern Western culture. In this Penguin Classics edition, the letters are selected and edited by Ronald de Leeuw, and translated by Arnold Pomerans in Penguin Classics.