An overview of John Stezaker’s film still collages, this book showcases the evolution of the artist’s relationship with a specific material.

Leading British collage and appropriation artist John Stezaker began his ongoing series of film still collages in 1979 – the result of a period that marked a crucial change in the direction of the artist’s work, which had previously been centered around a text-based ‘conceptualism’.

The series moves with Stezaker’s changing interests, using stills from classic American-period Hitchcock films as raw material before shifting towards the undistinguishable mass of 1940s and early 1950s low-budget studio films. Featuring collages based on a combination of film still excisions and superimpositions, this ongoing series is catalogued comprehensively for the first time in this volume, which brings together Stezaker’s earliest film still collages with his most recent.

Full-colour illustrations are accompanied by an essay by David Campany and a conversation between the critic and the artist. John Stezaker (b.1949, Worcester) is one of the leading artists in contemporary photographic collage and appropriation. Employing vintage photographs, old Hollywood film stills, travel postcards and other printed matter, Stezaker creates small-format collages that bear qualities of Surrealism, Dada and found art. Stezaker studied at the Slade School of Art and has taught at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins School of Art, London. In 2012 he was awarded the Deutsche Börse photography prize following a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. His work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990s and is held in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Arts Council England; and Tate.

The largest surviving portion of the first major collection of Classical antiquities in Britain – the sculptures and inscriptions collected in the early 17th century by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel for his London house and garden – is in the Antiquities Department of the Ashmolean Museum. This handbook tracks their eventful history before they came to rest in Oxford.

Karl Fritsch (b. 1963), master of extravagant rings, returns with a publication that lures us deep into his world. Ruby Gold is a “no-frills” pared-back book, without pagination, without essays. Instead it comprises 81 rings from the past 20 years featuring embedded gemstones and such memorable slogans as “Fuck Off” and “Nudelsuppe” (Noodle Soup).

The jewellery artist’s unmatched mastery of material and expression is apparent in every single ring, and every piece possesses tremendous energy as a result of the delicate yet archaic handling of the precious metals: Karl Fritsch carves in silver, shapes in gold, sets rubies and zirconias as a child would decorate a cake – with self-confidence and with no regard for waste.

In between the detailed illustrations, Fritsch brings the rings and fingers into ironic dialogues with each other: “Ring: I am art. / Finger: Oh come on…” And: “Ring: I am a ring. / Finger: You are unwearable.”

Published to accompany an exhibition at Galerie Zink, Waldkirchen, Germany, 12 September – 20 December 2020. 

Text in English and German.

The career of architect Sergei Tchoban, born 1962 and educated in St. Petersburg, follows multiple yet closely linked trajectories in his native Russia and in Germany. He is a founding partner with the Moscow-based firm SPEECH as well as with Tchoban Voss Architekten, with offices in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden. His designs reflect a deep interest in local and historical contexts of a project rather than an aim to create singular iconic structures. His design process is deeply rooted in sketching and drawing by hand. In 2009 he established the Tchoban Foundation and in 2013 opened the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin as a home to his vast collection comprising ancient and modern masterpieces from around the world.

In four conversations with Kristin Feireiss, Tchoban offers very personal insights into his design process, his understanding of architecture, and his engagement as a collector and museum founder. An essay by the British writer and broadcaster Deyan Sudjic as well as some 130 illustrations round out this beautiful volume.

Howard Carter’s excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 was one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. The name of Egypt’s ‘boy king’ is now synonymous with the glories of this ancient civilisation, and the spectacular contents of his tomb continue to capture the public’s imagination. This book tells the story of the search for Tutankhamun’s tomb and its discovery using Howard Carter’s original excavation records that were deposited in the archives of the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford. The meticulous recording process and conservation work on the thousands of objects took Carter and his team an astonishing 10 years and for its time the entire enterprise was a model of archaeological investigation.

Against this backdrop of painstaking scholarship, the book also explores the phenomenon of ‘Tut-mania’, when the world was gripped by all things Tutankhamun, from jewellery and clothing to dance music and curses. In the final section, the authors re-evaluate what the tomb’s contents can tell us about the king and his time, and explore various projects that have in recent years sought to ensure the preservation of Tutankhamun’s tomb and its contents for future generations. For all of these projects, the Howard Carter archive in the Griffith Institute remains an invaluable resource.

The collection of drawings in the Ashmolean is one of the greatest treasures of the University of Oxford. It began spectacularly in 1843 when a group of drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo that had previously belonged to the portrait painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence, was bought by subscription. Lawrence’s collection was one of the greatest collections of Old Master drawings ever assembled and its dispersal was much regretted. The Raphaels and Michelangelos, however, were the jewels in its crown. Following their arrival in Oxford, their fame attracted a number of gifts and bequests of drawings and watercolours by Dürer, Claude Lorraine, Brueghel, J. M. W Turner, Henry Moore and many others.

This is a story not only of Old Masters but of benefactors – Francis Douce, Chambers Hall, John Ruskin and their successors – whose different tastes account for the variety of the drawings in the modern Print Room. It is a story also of the curators who bought them. In particular, it is the story of Sir Karl Parker who arrived at the museum in 1934 and left a collection when he retired in 1962 that comprehensively covered the history of the art of drawing in Europe from its origins to the present day. The exhibition, Master Drawings: Michelangelo to Moore, celebrates this history. It includes many of the finest drawings in Oxford, representing the work of many different artists: Raphael and Michelangelo; Dürer and the artists of the Northern Renaissance; Guercino and Rubens; Boucher and Tiepolo; German Romantics; J. M. W. Turner; Degas and Pissarro; the artists of the Ballets Russes; British twentieth-century artists from Gwen John to Hockney; and much else.

Qu Leilei now stands as a technically accomplished master, capable of handling brush and ink with the utmost competency and photographic-like quality. His visual language is well established, and it represents a fusion of east and west. Some ink painters have chosen to push boundaries by making traditional styles more abstract or ornamented. By contrast, Leilei has sought to blend the descriptive, realistic styles of the European Renaissance with Chinese ink painting. Moreover, he has constantly worked to achieve profound concepts in his work, ideas that have universal application.

This catalogue is a retrospective, an overview of the body of work Qu Leilei has produced up to the present day. Certain broad themes can be divined: a burning interest in the history of China, and what can be learned from it; a loving concern for human beings and their individual achievements; an absorption in the anatomy and depiction of the human body; an urge to warn against the perils of the world; and a heartfelt desire to integrate Chinese and western art practice and techniques. These themes have been pursued with ever-growing skill throughout the years.

The Wilshere Collection offers a remarkable insight into one Englishman’s enthusiasm for the early Christian church. A wealthy landowner travelling frequently to Italy, Charles Wilshere (1814-1906) saw it as his mission to acquaint the British with the then brand-new subject of early Christian archaeology and art. Newly discovered documentation, including correspondence held at the Vatican Library and the Biblioteca San Luigi, Posilippo, recount Wilshere’s acquisition of a remarkable collection of early Christian, Jewish and pagan gold-glass, sarcophagi and inscriptions, shipped to England for public display.

Previously unpublished evidence presents the reader with intriguing new information about the provenance of the collection. In addition to this, recent scientific analysis of the objects, now in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum, allows major new insights, notably into the origin of gold-glass and its use in fourth-century Rome.

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture’s, 2006-2021 monograph showcases the spectacular work of the firm from the first 15 years of its practice through drawings, renderings, model photography, photography of built work, competition entries, exhibition materials, master plans, interiors, and special research projects and publications.
The projects featured in the monograph cover a wide variety of AS+GG’s high-performance, energy-efficient, aesthetically striking architecture on an international scale in a wide range of typologies and scales, from low- and mid-rise residential, commercial, and cultural buildings to mixed-use supertall towers. Projects explored include supertall towers, large-scale mixed-use complexes, corporate offices, exhibition facilities, cultural facilities and museums, civic and public spaces, hotels and residential complexes, institutional projects, and high-tech laboratory facilities.

How many cubic metres does the little Michelin man actually take up? What insurance value does the potato peeler Rex have and how fragile is Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Dr. Komplex? The designer pack of cards The Happy Collector shows 52 objects from the design and decorative arts collection at the Museum of Design Zurich. Playfully – as a classical card game or top trumps – it presents not only the favourite objects and collection highlights of the museum, but also conveys important aspects of the collection procedure: from purchase, storage and handling to insurance and documentation. The Museum of Design Zurich is the leading museum for design and visual communication in Switzerland. The collection of international importance comprises around 500,000 objects from the areas of decorative arts, textiles, graphics, typography, as well as poster, furniture and product design. Sabine Flaschberger and Renate Menzi are its curators.

El-Gazzar, born in 1925 in Alexandria, is a leading figure in modern Egyptian art of the 20th century. He enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1944 and then joined the Contemporary Art Group founded by Hussein Youssef Amin, his master. With an innovative and unique expressionist style, it portrays the people of Cairo in a folkloric way. Later, he tried his hand at abstraction by representing industrial machines and their effects on humans.

Recognised during his lifetime, the production of El-Gazzar was exhibited in France from 1949, at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and at the São Paulo Museum in 1953. Today, his works are in private collections in Cairo, Alexandria, Rome, Paris and Brussels, but also in major institutions around the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.

This catalogue raisonné, published in English, comprises two volumes. The first is dedicated to the artist’s paintings and the second to graphic works, archives and photographs. It brings an understanding of the enigmatic work of the artist, but also of modern Egyptian art in general.

Jewelry Stories highlights the Museum of Arts and Design’s unique, world-class collection of studio and contemporary art jewellery from the US, Europe, Australia, and Asia, a medium that comprises one-third of its permanent collection. Artists working in this field create jewellery rooted in sculptural experimentation and the concept of art as a wearable medium. The pieces featured represent the history of art jewellery as told from a largely US perspective. Jewellery artists are inspired by such subjects as found objects and materials, as well as by politics and pressing social issues, allowing for the development of unique, personal narratives in each piece. Each of the jewellery stories is written by an expert on the artist or subject, thus the book also celebrates the contributions they have made to the field.

Published to accompany an exhibition at Museum of Arts and Design, New York (US), on permanent display.

Palazzo Vecchio portrays the architecture of the historic Florentine palace immortalised by the internationally-renowned photographer Massimo Listri. The first complete and organic photographic documentation of the building, updated in the wake of recent restoration and re-functionalization, the sequence of images runs page after page through the exterior and the interior of the palace. The alternation of rooms, courtyards and museum spaces, enriched by countless pictorial and sculptural elements, gives life, in Listri’s view, to a faithfully objective overview of the building that, since the end of the 13th century, has been the heart of Florence’s civic and political life, still today a place for meetings, debate and dialogue. The volume, edited by Sergio Risaliti, offers brief essays by experts on the subject such as Serena Pini and Carlo Francini, with a contribution by Mayor Dario Nardella.

Architecture and design exhibitions have long been important public sites of broadcasting, experimentation, position-taking, and the interrogation of fundamental aspects of the designed environment.

Just as individual exhibitions have constituted key benchmarks within the disciplinary history of architecture, the representation and display of space through exhibitions has operated historically as a crucial medium for shaping and embodying broader cultural attitudes toward the design of the built world. In recent years, the specific formats and challenges of exhibiting architecture and design, both built and speculative, have often been used as critical devices for identifying, communicating, and convening publics around shared matters of concern. These have increasingly included urgent questions of equity and justice, labor, gender, race, class, community, and lifestyle in relation to spatial issues of density, economy, policy, infrastructure, climate, and sustainability.

Futures of the Architectural Exhibition records a discussion of critical approaches to the representation of architecture through conversations with seven contemporary curators working inside and outside of the museum. Mario Ballesteros (Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura, Mexico City), Giovanna Borasi (Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal), Ann Lui (Future Firm, Chicago), Ana Miljački (Critical Broadcasting Lab, MIT), Zoë Ryan (ICA, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Martino Stierli (Museum of Modern Art, New York), and Shirley Surya (M+, Hong Kong) speculate on the specific challenges and potentials of exhibiting space.

This book accompanies a major exhibition in the Ashmolean Museum on the early work of internationally acclaimed German artist Anselm Kiefer. It focuses on his paintings, drawings, photographs and artist books created between 1969 and 1982, in the private collections of the Hall Art Foundation. Anselm Kiefer: Early Works is the first institutional show and publication in the UK dedicated to Kiefer’s early practice. The book introduces themes, subjects and styles that have become signature to Kiefer’s work, while providing a more intimate and complementary context for his large-scale installations that he is best known for today. The early works are accompanied by three recent paintings from the artist’s own collections and White Cube, chosen by the artist himself.

Art historians, artists, curators and experts of Kiefer’s art from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Britain and the US have contributed 46 original texts on individual works, organised in a chronological structure. An illustrated chronology at the end of the book compiled by Stephanie Biron from the Hall Art Foundation provides an overview of the artist’s early practice and life, to contextualise the works.

The book begins with Kiefer’s iconic Occupations and Heroische Sinnbilder series, created in 1969 and 1970, which Kiefer views as his first serious works. Kiefer was among the first generation of German post-war artists to directly confront the country’s troubled past and identity. Full of complex references to German socio-political history but also to culture, literature and his personal life, Kiefer’s early works carry a unique iconography, linking classic ideas of great art with a distinctive understanding of concrete artistic materiality. The landscapes in his watercolours are historically charged; hand-written words on paintings are closely linked with poetry well known to most German viewers; motifs and symbols point at Nazi ideologies and a collective feeling of guilt.

Marking the remarkable century of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, from humble beginnings in London’s East End in 1915 to a fully-fledged mainstream art museum, under its banner ‘Art, Identity and Migration’, this publication vividly illustrates rarely-seen masterworks from its collection by some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, including Soutine, Chagall, Auerbach, Bomberg, Kitaj and Kossoff. Further highlights include the ‘Whitechapel Boys’; Les Peintres Juifs de L’Ecole de Paris, Official War artists from both conflicts; mid-century émigrés influencing the direction of the arts, and contemporary artists making ground-breaking work across new media. This unique collection, primarily of artists born into the Jewish faith, many shaping modern British, European and American art history, represents a distinct visual survey of artistic and social life in Britain and the cultural heritage of British Jewry. A range of texts provides a fascinating context for a collection born ‘Out of Chaos’.

Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music — works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself.

Lesley Dill – Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. It is testimony of Dill’s ongoing investigation into the significant voices and personas of America’s past. For the artist, the American voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness out there and wilderness inside us.

The plates, in colour throughout, are supplemented with essays by Lesley Dill, Brooklyn-based writer Nancy Princenthal, Figge Art Museum’s curator Andrew Wallace, and researcher and tribal historian Juaquin Hamilton-Youngbird. The book also features a literary text by writer by Tom Sleigh and a poem by author and poet Ray Young Bear.

King Stag is a play originally written in 1762 by Italian playwright and champion of Commedia dell’arte Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806). It is about love and conspiracy at the court of King Deramo. In search of a bride, Deramo falls victim to the intrigues of his adversary Tartaglia and is temporarily transformed into a stag.

In 1918, on the occasion of a major art exhibition staged in Zurich by the modernist association Swiss Werkbund, Swiss dramatist René Morax (1873–1963) and director Werner Wolff (1886–1972) produced a modern adaption of Gozzi’s fairy-tale play that turned it into an amusing parody of Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Gustav Jung’s psychoanalysis, which had caused much controversy in Zurich at the time. The production was conceived as a puppetry, for which avant-garde artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) designed the stage sets and created an ensemble of 17 radically abstracted marionettes that broke with every tradition of the genre.

This book offers the first English translation of Morax and Wolff’s adaption of King Stag. The text is supplemented with photographs of a restaging of the puppetry, produced especially for this volume, featuring Taeuber-Arp’s striking marionettes. Essays by distinguished scholars explore the genesis of the original 1918 production and place it in historical context, shed new light on the play and its model, the Commedia dell’arte, and highlight its significance for Switzerland’s avant-garde.

The Ashmolean is fortunate in having the finest collection of Indian art in Britain outside London, one which includes many works of great beauty and expressive power. For this we are indebted above all to the generosity, knowledge and taste of our benefactors and donors from the 17th century to the present. This book offers a short account of how the collection developed and a selection of some of its more outstanding or interesting works of art. While it is written mainly for the general reader and museum visitor, it includes many fine objects or pictures, some of them unpublished, that should interest specialist scholars and students.

Since 1987, the Ashmolean has made many significant new acquisitions of Indian art and these are highlighted in this collection. As the book’s title implies, it also ventures beyond the bounds of the Indian subcontinent by including works from Afghanistan and Central Asian Silk Road sites as well as many from Nepal, Tibet and Southeast Asia. From the early centuries AD, Indian trading links with these diverse regions of Asia led to a widespread cultural diffusion and regional adoptions of Buddhism and Hinduism along with their related arts. Local reinterpretations of such Indic subjects, themes and styles then grew into flourishing and enduring artistic traditions which are also part of the story of this book.

The selection of works ends around 1900. By the 16th century and the early modern period in India, growing European interventions and Western artistic influences under Mughal rule saw a significant shift in sensibility and the practice of more secular and naturalistic forms of court art such as portraiture. By the late 19th century, fundamental cultural changes under British rule and the advent of new technologies brought about a gradual decline in many of India’s traditional arts.

On 5 February 1916, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, together with Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and Jean Arp, inaugurated the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. The evening marked the birth of Dada as an artistic movement, and Cabaret Voltaire with its legendary performances became a place of historic significance. It was soon to be followed by the short-lived, while no less significant, Gallery Dada in Zürich, where the Dadaists staged four exhibitions over the course of half a year. Dada’s further evolution was significantly shaped by these two spaces, each with its own particular atmosphere, constituting the differing poles of the Dada movement. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Spring 2016 to celebrate the Dada centenary, this new book for the first time tells the full story of Dada’s genesis. It sheds light on the early years of 1916 17 in Zürich in historical context and, from today’s point of view, and also explores the intellectual and social background that informed Dada, considering aspects such as the Great War, psychoanalysis, or the art scene of the time. Genesis Dada illustrates how Dada turned into a worldwide phenomenon with which artists and intellectuals such as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, or Man Ray were associated, and which has lost nothing of its momentum and topicality over time. Also available: Dadglobe ISBN 9783858817754

The essays in this lavishly illustrated volume offer a multi-faceted portrait of American financier J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) as a collector of art. A riveting exploration of Morgan’s acquisitions from antiquities to medieval manuscripts to Old Master paintings and European decorative arts, Morgan—The Collector introduces the reader to how and why he amassed his vast collection. The lively essays also serve as a tribute to Linda Roth, curator at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, who dedicated much of her forty-year career to researching Morgan and the over 1,500 works from his collection now in the museum. This much-needed publication focuses on Morgan as a collector and is directed at both a scholarly and more general audience that is interested in the history of collecting, America in the Gilded Age, Pierpont Morgan, and European art.

Anna Reivilä (b. 1988, Helsinki) is a land artist and photographer living and working in Porvoo, Finland. In her book Nomad she studies the relationship between humanity and nature by referring to the Japanese bondage tradition. She explores the symbolism of bondage, regarding connections among people and the divine. The Japanese word for bondage, kinbaku-bi, literally means the beauty of tight binding. It is a delicate balance between being held together and being on the verge of breaking. In Reivilä’s photographs the ropes outline the shapes of the objects while exploring the boundaries of humanity.