Taschen is a luxury goods art book publisher founded in 1980 by Benedikt Taschen in Cologne, Germany.[Taschen: The Art of Making Books .] As of January 2017, Taschen is co-managed by Benedikt Taschen and his eldest daughter, Marlene Taschen.
Taschen focuses on making lesser-seen art and imagery available to bookstores. The firm has brought potentially controversial art and imagery, including Sexual fetish imagery, queer art, historical erotica, pornography, and adult magazines (including multiple books with Playboy magazine) into broader public view, publishing it alongside its books of comics reprints, art photography, painting, design, fashion, advertising history, film, and architecture. [Degen Pener: Taschen Books Chief Reveals New Projects, Talks 'Fifty Shades' and $12M Books, published in The Hollywood Reporter, 25 November 2014]
Taschen publications are available in a various sizes, from oversized tomes and limited editions, to small pocket-sized books. The company has also produced Calendar, address books, and postcards sets.
History
The company began as Taschen Comics, publishing Benedikt's comic collection.
[LinkedIn:
][https://www.linkedin.com/company/85545/ Company Profile]
In 1985, Taschen introduced the Basic Art series with an inaugural title on Salvador Dalí.[ Basic Art Series – The classic TASCHEN book] Today's series comprises over 100 titles available in up to 30 languages, each about a separate artist, from classical to contemporary.
Representation of artists
In the spring of 2014, the firm’s
Basic Art Series drew criticism in Swedish public media for the limited number of female artists represented. At the time, the series comprised 95 volumes, of which only five focused on women. Malmö Konsthall in Sweden first highlighted the disparity, following a project by the artists Ditte Ejlerskov and EvaMarie Lindahl.
Commentators noted that the imbalance reflected a broader tendency within the established art historical canon, which had traditionally emphasized male artists. In subsequent years TASCHEN expanded the series to include additional women such as Frida Kahlo
and Hilma af Klint, and has also published a range of titles dedicated to female artists, designers, and photographers across its wider catalogue.
The Helmut Newton SUMO
In 1999, Taschen expanded to the luxury market with the
Helmut Newton SUMO.
Signed and limited to 10,000 copies, the folio-sized publication quickly sold out. It later became the most expensive book published in the 20th century,[Karin Nelson: "Now Available in Small", The New York Times, 23 August 2009, retrieved 13 September 2017] with SUMO copy number 1 selling at auction for $304,000.[Marina Cashdan: "Artist edition books", in How to Spend It, 26 May 2015.]
This book paved the way for Taschen's GOAT – Greatest Of All Time, an homage to Muhammad Ali, which Der Spiegel called "the biggest, heaviest, most radiant thing ever printed in the history of civilization".[Thomas Hüetlin: " Alis letzter Sieg". Der Spiegel 41/2003.]
Further Collector's Editions followed, including titles with Nobuyoshi Araki, Peter Beard, David Hockney, Marvin E. Newman, David LaChapelle, Sebastião Salgado, Annie Leibovitz and The Rolling Stones, often reaching ten times their original price within a few years.[TASCHEN: Collector's Editions Catalogue 2013 .]
Book series
Taschen Basic Art
Taschen’s
Basic Art series, launched in 1985 with a monograph on Salvador Dalí, has become one of the publisher’s best-known and longest-running collections. Conceived as an affordable introduction to major figures in art history, each volume combines accessible texts with high-quality reproductions and is typically published in multiple languages. Over time the series has expanded to include more than 100 titles
, covering artists from the Renaissance to contemporary practice, including Leonardo da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Yayoi Kusama. The books are widely distributed in museums, bookstores, and academic settings, and have been credited with helping to democratise access to art publishing by offering scholarly yet inexpensive surveys to a global readership.
The Basic Art series now also incorporates the basic architecture books.
Bibliotheca Universalis
Taschen's
Bibliotheca Universalis is a series of famous artworks in an affordable (about 15
) hardback format (14 x 19.5 cm).
[ Bibliotheca Universalis: The World in Books, Taschen website (page visited on 3 September 2017).] They are generally multilingual, with English, German and French texts and legends. Some books are also published in Spanish, Italian and European Portuguese.
Taschen Basic Architecture
Taschen Basic Architecture is a series of books on architects published by Taschen. Each book looks at a different architect, with a biography and pictures of their work.
Sexy Books
Since the early 2000s Taschen has maintained a distinct catalogue of erotic and sexually themed titles marketed under its
Sexy Books line. The collection ranges from anthologies of vintage erotica (
Erotica Universalis,
History of Men’s Magazines) to contemporary photography (
Ren Hang,
Araki by Araki) and pop-culture surveys such as
The Art of Pin-upand
Sexy Record Covers (2025).
These publications often combine archival material with critical essays, situating erotic imagery within broader histories of art, design, and popular culture. While controversial, the line has been noted for treating sexual content with the same design quality and scholarly framing as Taschen’s art and photography monographs.
Critics have argued that this approach has helped preserve and legitimise visual traditions—such as pin-up illustration, fetish photography, and men’s magazines—that were often excluded from mainstream publishing or marginalised in institutional collections.
Locations
Through the mid-to-late 1990s, the company expanded by opening stores in other cities. Some dedicated flagship Taschen bookstores, conceived in collaboration with artists and designers such as
Albert Oehlen,
Beatriz Milhazes,
Jonas Wood,
Marc Newson,
Mark Grotjahn,
Philippe Starck, and
Toby Ziegler, are located in:
-
Berlin
-
Beverly Hills
-
Brussels
-
Cologne
-
Dallas (Taschen Library)
-
Hollywood
-
Hong Kong
-
London
-
Madrid
-
Miami
-
Milan
-
Paris
The firm has publishing offices in Berlin, Cologne, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong.[Degen Pener: Taschen Books Chief Reveals New Projects, Talks 'Fifty Shades' and $12M Books, published in The Hollywood Reporter, 25 November 2014]
Between 2014 and 2018, Taschen owned and curated its own 6,000-square feet art gallery space in Los Angeles, featuring exhibitions on Michael Muller, Mick Rock, Ellen von Unwerth, and Albert Watson.[ "Taschen Grand Opening With David Bailey and the Rolling Stones", The Huffington Post, 17 December 2014.] The publishing house employs more than 250 staff members worldwide and many freelance editors.[Jessica Berens: "A passion for Taschen" in The Observer, 4 November 2001.]
General bibliography
External links
