Gardens are refuges, ideal and protected places, sometimes enclosed, limited, and artificial, occasionally natural and wild. An artist’s private view of a garden, his garden, will show it to be a special place, a locus amoenus, or else he selects a single plant from the garden, and depicts it, with botanical precision, in all of its beauty. The spectrum ranges from the medieval Garden of Eden and detailed studies by Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries, to Peter Paul Rubens’s courtly, gallant games in a royal park, Van Gogh’s gnarled trees in the courtyard of a sanatorium, and a video installation by Fischli/Weiss. More than mere images of gardens, these works are always landscapes of the soul. This opulently illustrated, impressively comprehensive volume features close to four hundred pages of blooming dreams.(German edition ISBN 978-3-7757-1870-7)
 
Artists featured (selection):

 
Max Beckmann, Joseph Beuys, Arnold Böcklin, Pierre Bonnard, Lovis Corinth, Camille Corot, Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, Max Ernst, Fischli/Weiss, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Lucian Freud, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Klee, Max Liebermann, August Macke, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Camille Pissarro, Peter Paul Rubens , Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Thomas Struth, Antoine Watteau
 

Exhibition schedule: Städel, Frankfurt/Main November 24, 2006 – March 11, 2007 · Lenbachhaus, Munich, April 5–July 8,2007