The most comprehensive and opulently designed monograph published to date on the artist Friedemann Hahn (b. 1949) covers around 30 years of his impressive career as painter and graphic artist. Hahn rose to fame in the 1970s with his colorful and mystifying portraits of Hollywood stars including Humphrey Bogart, Lana Turner and Greta Garbo. He then devoted himself in the 1980s to depicting famous artists such as Van Gogh, Munch and Monet, before turning later to portraits of geishas and seafarers as well. For Hahn, the act of painting – the "vortex of creation" – always takes precedence over the subject, in keeping with his creed: "In a picture all that counts is the reality of the picture." Hahn lives and works in the Black Forest and has been a professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Art in Mainz since 1991. Numerous national and international exhibitions have paid tribute to his artistic work, including at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, the Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Flowers East Gallery in London & New York.