The term ‘craftsmanship’ is associated with individuality, uniqueness, decorative potential, artistic quality, attention to material and to process. But what does craftsmanship mean today? This exhibition catalogue of nearly 600 pages explores the meaning of craftsmanship in the context of the outstanding collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst (Frankfurt, Germany) in a monumental survey of 700 items dating from 1945 to the present. Scale reproductions of plates, furniture, cutlery, jewellery and vases highlight their surprising variety of form. In their essays, the ten authors take diverse approaches to the broad terrain of craftsmanship: from the relationship between East Asia and Western ceramics, via the handicrafts of the Romantic period, to the adventure that is arts and crafts today. The title plays on the perceived parallel between the ability of the cactus to survive and thrive in adverse conditions, and the future of the hand-made object in an industrial world.

John Ruskin assembled 1470 diverse works of art for use in the Drawing School he founded at Oxford in 1871.  They included drawings by himself and other artists, prints and photographs. This book focuses on highlights of works produced by Ruskin himself. Drawings by John Ruskin are uniquely interesting.  Unlike those of a professional artist they were not made in preparation for finished paintings or as works in their own right.  Every one – and they number several thousand, depending on what can be considered a separate drawing – is a record of something seen, initially as a memorandum of that observation but with the potential to illustrate his writings or for educational purposes, notably to form part of the teaching collection of the Drawing School he established after election as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. In addition, because of the range of interests of arguably the only true polymath of his time, every drawing touches on some interesting aspect of art and architecture, landscape and travel, botany and natural history, often connected with his writings and lectures.  Ruskin’s life is one of the best documented of any in the 19th century, through letters, diaries and the many autobiographical revelations in his published writings: this allows the opportunity to give almost any drawing a level of context impossible for any other artist.  When there is so much background information, a single drawing reveals much about its creator, and becomes a window into the great sprawling edifice of his life and work.

Francisco de Goya and Edvard Munch revolutionised art through their groundbreaking pairing of raw realism and unique imaginative power. Exploring inner worlds and existential questions, they had a formative impact on art history and our understanding of our times.

The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Goya and Munch: Modern Prophecies, the first comprehensive presentation of these two artists in tandem. It is lavishly illustrated with reproductions of all the exhibited works and features texts by Trine Otte Bak Nielsen, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Janis Tomlinson, Ute Kuhlemann Falck and Ask Salomon Selnes.

Tony Sarg (1880–1942), an American artist born in Guatemala to a diplomatic family, first achieved professional success as an illustrator in London and New York. But in the 1920s, he gained even greater renown for his touring puppet shows based on classic tales like Alice in Wonderland and Robinson Crusoe. Fusing the time-honoured craft of traditional marionette shows with a playful modern sensibility, Sarg’s productions were foundational to American puppetry: Jim Henson can be considered a direct artistic descendant. Yet this was only one facet of Sarg’s varied accomplishments: he was also a pioneer in animated films and children’s books, and, as a longtime designer for Macy’s, he invented the gigantic balloons used in the firm’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (He also employed one of his parade balloons in the famous Nantucket Sea Serpent hoax of 1937.)

This abundantly illustrated volume, published to coincide with a major exhibition organised by the Norman Rockwell Museum, is the first to survey Tony Sarg’s protean career. It brings together imagery and artifacts from numerous public and private collections, and includes special sections on Sarg’s long association with the island of Nantucket and his influence on American puppetry. Tony Sarg: Genius at Play will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of popular culture.

Based on documentation originating in the environmental sciences, history of science, philosophy and art, Architecture of Nature explores the materiality and the effects of the forces at play in the history of the earth through the architect’s modes of seeing and techniques of representation. This book presents research work developed for the past eight years in the Advanced Research graduate studio ‘Architecture of Nature/ Nature of Architecture’, created and directed by Diana Agrest at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union. Architecture of Nature departs from the traditional approach to nature as a referent for architecture and reframes it as its object of study. The complex processes of generation and transformations of extreme natural phenomena such as glaciers, volcanoes, permafrost, and clouds are explored through unique drawings and models, confronting a scale of space and time that expands and transcends the established boundaries of the architectural discipline.

During the cherry blossom season of April 1924, 100 years ago, on his only trip to the Land of the Rising Sun, Alfred Baur, an extraordinary entrepreneur and founder of the Museum of Far Eastern Art in Geneva, was charmed to discover the sparkling poetry of the “images of the floating world” (ukiyo-e), combined with the landscapes of the great masters of the print and the delightful motifs found throughout the objects in his superb collection of Japanese art.

Echoing his taste and pioneering spirit, and as part of the celebrations marking the 160th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Switzerland and Japan, this book, thanks to contributions from leading specialists in the fields of handicrafts and textiles, takes an in-depth historical, technical and comparative look at the desire for lightness that underpins the aims, aesthetics and meaning of the work of Michiko Uehara, a virtuoso weaver.

In her studio bathed in the subtropical sunshine of Okinawa, in the archipelago in the far south of Japan where she was born and which is renowned for its textiles, she succeeds in pushing the material to the very edge of nothingness, weaving and dyeing sublime fabrics in three-denier threads*, as fine and transparent as “a dragonfly’s wing” (akezuba in the local language).

This bonding relationship – combining the physical and the spiritual – which links Uehara to silk fibres and more generally to nature itself, gives rise to “woven air”, as she puts it: an aerial, rhythmic journey, free of borders and attuned to living things.

As this book suggests, this quest is not unrelated to some of the research carried out by Swiss explorer Bertrand Piccard, whose solar aircraft, a giant, silent dragonfly whose carbon-fibre ribs combine extreme strength and lightness, intelligently weaves a harmonious path between humanity, earth and sky…

* The Denier (Den) is a measure of continuous thread, i.e. its weight in grams per 9000 metres of thread; i.e. 1 Den = 1 gr./9000m of thread

Text in English and French.

This is the exceptionally rich story of Rembrandt’s fame and influence in Britain. No other nation has witnessed such a passionate – and sometimes eccentric – enthusiasm for Rembrandt’s works. His imagery has become ubiquitous, making him one of the most recognised artists in history. In this book, some of the world’s leading experts reveal how the taste for Rembrandt’s paintings, drawings and prints evolved, growing into a mania that gripped collectors and art lovers across the country. This reached a fever pitch in the late 1700s, before the dawn of a new century ushered in a re-evaluation of Rembrandt’s reputation and opportunities for the wider public to see his masterpieces for themselves.

The story of Rembrandt’s profound and inspirational impact on the British imagination is illustrated by over 130 sumptuous works by the master himself, as well as by some of Britain’s best-loved artists, including William Hogarth, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Eduardo Paolozzi and John Bellany.

Foreword; Introduction; 1 Rembrandt’s Fame in Britain, 1630 1900: An Overview- Christian Tico Seifert; 2 Rembrandt and Britain: The Modern Era – Patrick Elliott; 3 ‘The Finest Possible State’: Cataloguing and Collecting Rembrandt’s Prints, c.1700 1840 – Stephanie S. Dickey; 4 From Studio to Academy: Copying Rembrandt in Eighteenth-century Britain – Jonathan Yarker; 5 Regarding Rembrandt: Reynolds and Rembrandt – Donato Esposito; 6 Rembrandt: Paragon of the Etching Revival – Peter Black; 7 Rembrandt and Britain: A ‘Picture Flight’ in Three Stages, 1850 1930 – M.J. Ripps; Catalogue; Bibliography.

May Morris (1862–1938) is recognised today as a pioneer of the Arts and Crafts movement, a leading exponent of decorative needlework and a campaigner for women artists. Despite being one of the foremost practitioners of her generation, it was design that May described as ‘the very soul and essence of beautiful embroidery’. One of the largest collections of May’s designs, from roughly sketched ideas to finished patterns, is held by the Ashmolean Museum. This book showcases a selection of 25 of these designs, which are published here for the first time, positioning May’s output within the artistic developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as equipping embroiderers with the tools to create their own projects based on the work of this remarkable needlewoman. 

A Year in the Vineyard is a tribute to the cycle of the vine. From winter pruning to vine leaves capturing the energy of the late autumn sun, the narrative is spun through vignettes about activities in vineyards around the globe, accompanied by photographs and background paintings. The book honours seasonal rhythms and rituals without glossing over potential risks, such as hail piercing acres of nascent chardonnay in Champagne or wildfires in the Napa Valley. The hope is that each spread captures a gesture, a step in a dance with the natural world, thus providing an experiential understanding of the axiom ‘wine is made in the vineyard’ and of the notion that fine wines are achieved in tandem with nature, not through triumph over the elements. It also shows wine growers as operating on the front line of the climate crisis, posing questions and offering potential remedies in response to the earth’s changing ecology.

Building on his interest in evolution, philosophy, and society, in his project A Gift From Him Maximilian Prüfer (b. 1986) explores the destruction of natural habitats to make way for agriculture in China. To this end, Prüfer took two trips to the Szechuan Province, where the fruit trees need to be pollinated by hand due to insect deaths caused by the increased use of pesticides. These developments are attributable to Mao’s campaign to “Destroy the Four Olds,” which entailed the killing of around two billion sparrows in order to restore the natural equilibrium. Prüfer documented the entire manual pollination process in photos, collected items, and films which make for an ambivalent exploration of the cultural evolution of humankind.

Text in English and German.

The Baga, along with the Nalu and the Landuma, are a small rice-growing community living along the coast of Guinea, in West Africa. They became famous following the discovery of their extraordinary sculptures by explorers, colonial administrators, ethnologists, collectors, and art dealers towards the end of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, the art of the Baga is admired in the public and private collections of northern European countries. Their works consist mainly of different types of wooden masks and statues of various sizes, as well as wonderful percussion instruments, chiefs’ seats, and other skilfully carved utilitarian objects. All these sacred objects were once created and used as important features in their ritual behaviour based on the manifestation of their divinities, ancestor worship, rites of passage, secret brotherhoods, and the performance of important social ceremonies like weddings, funerals, and harvesting. But more recently they have also included entirely new sculpted works created by talented, highly skilled craftsmen who were influenced by colonisation and newly introduced religions, while at the same time finding inspiration in traditional myths and legends. Fascinating examples of this eclecticism are the figures of colonists depicted standing, on horseback, or riding birds, the many different kinds of female busts representing Mami Wata, the sea goddess, winged figures, bestiaries associated with tales and legends, and the personifications of the heroic founders of their villages. To this day, the young men of the Baga continue to make certain commemorative and emblematic objects, such as the large D’mba mask, and still produce sculptures connected with their history and culture. All these artefacts have their place in the dances and events that play such an important part in village life and in relations between villages and beyond.

Supported by a wealth of photographs of archaeological objects, this book delves into a fascinating world of ancestral spirits, revealed by the surprising richness and variety of these pre-Columbian pieces fashioned out of various materials. These works, on exhibition in the Museo Casa del Alabado, in Quito (Ecuador), outline the pre-Columbian view of the world centred on a flow of energy aimed at preserving life. These pieces evoke this primordial energy emerging from mother earth, the source of the good deeds performed by spirits and the ancestral guardian of the permanent renewal of the world of daily life, where spirits constantly draw on the balance of the forces ensuring their survival. Pre-Columbian art has the extraordinary capacity to express the power of reciprocal opposites which together provide a meaning to the existence of animate and inanimate beings.

Hard materials, such as stones and shells, served to embody powerful spirits, such as carts, macaws, or primordial ancestors. Ceramics were suitable for the depiction of ordinary plants and animals. The extraordinary growth of metalworking skills led to the creation of ornamental pieces designed for the elite (chest decorations, nose jewellery, earrings, and crowns) whose purpose was to reflect the power of the sun.

Each picture in the book is accompanied by notes explaining the function the article would have served, while acknowledging that these pieces have lost none of their expressiveness in the modern world.

Text in English and Spanish.

Great Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the epicentre of the development of modern industrial design. This book – the fourth volume in the MoMA Design Series featuring works in the Museum’s collection – explores this legacy, tracing the growth of British design from the eighteenth century to the Millennium Dome and beyond. In its more than two-hundred-year scope, British Design explores the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes of World War II, the Mini car and Dyson vacuum cleaner, the ‘Cool Britannia’ cultural explosion in the late 1990s, and British designers’ take on the digital devices that define entertainment and communication in the early twenty-first century. An introduction by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, provides an overview of design culture in Great Britain; an essay and timeline by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, curator, former design critic for The New Statesman, and author of World Design and New American Design, illuminates the masterpieces of modern British design superbly reproduced in the volume’s plate section.

In Edo Japan, woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e (“pictures of the Floating World”) captured the entertainment culture of the urban elite and eventually many other subjects as well. These beautiful prints were the result of a meticulous craft process, in which an artist’s initial drawing was translated by expert carvers into multiple printing blocks for different colours. In this attractive volume, Sarah E. Thompson, curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, provides a highly readable overview of the cultural and artistic history of ukiyo-e, showcasing 120 exceptional prints from the museum’s world-class collection, by masters including Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. She explores each of the principal genres in turn: beauty and fashion, the kabuki theatre, landscape, nature, history and literature, and fantasy. Pictures of the Floating World features a traditional Japanese stab binding and is housed in a durable slipcase together with three remarkable prints, suitable for framing. It will be a must-have for all art lovers.

The new French art movement known as ‘impressionism’ blew through Europe like ‘a breath of fresh air’. This publication focuses on artists from Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, including important representatives of the movement such as Anna Ancher, Lovis Corinth, Isaac Israels, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Peder Severin Krøyer, Max Liebermann and Max Slevogt. A selection of highlights from the collections of three museums showcases the individual varieties of ‘Northern Impressionism’. The catalogue accompanies the touring exhibition of the same name, a cooperation between the Museum Singer Laren, the Museum Kunst der Westküste, Alkersum/Föhr, and the Landesmuseum Hannover.

Text in English and Dutch.

Pont-Aven has lent its name to one of the most famous schools of painting in modern art and is now automatically associated with Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. In 1888, in this Breton village in southern Finistère, the two painters set about inventing the features of a completely new style of painting: Synthetism. Breaking with academic orthodoxy and heavily influenced by Japanese prints, they introduced novel aesthetic principles distinguished especially by a belief in simple forms and the use of colour applied in large patches edged by a dark line. This approach further distanced itself from the art that preceded it in its taste for matt tones and the rejection of traditional perspective. This new book reveals to a wider public the important collection that Alexandre Mouradian amassed in only a few years. The collection reflects its creator’s great passion for the artists of the Pont-Aven group, as well as others in Brittany and beyond who embraced the new ideas of Bernard and Gauguin without ever losing their individuality. Whether in painting or printmaking, each of these was able to move beyond the imitation of observed reality to express the deepest aspect of his personality: his emotions. The works selected by the collector eloquently show the international reach of what was not strictly speaking a school, in the full sense of the term. Since the private Paris academies were closed during the summer, artists from all over Europe went to Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu to seek inspiration and ‘to dare’ like Gauguin. Written contributions by Jean-Marie Rouart of the French Academy and the author and art historian Adrien Goetz, are supported by detailed notes on the works by the museum curator Estelle Guille des Buttes, providing invaluable insights into this exceptional collection.

Switzerland has been globally connected and entangled with colonies established by the seafaring European nations in Africa, the Americas, and Asia since the 16th century. Colonial — Switzerland’s Global Entanglements offers a timely overview of this highly topical matter, placing a wide range of aspects in historical context and addressing as well questions of colonial continuities.

Contributions by distinguished scholars and experts from various disciplines investigate questions such as the involvement of Swiss companies in the trade with enslaved people, Swiss mercenaries in the service of colonial powers, the colonial legacy of the country’s missionary societies, and the research and collection of artefacts by Swiss scientists in former colonies. Light is shed also on the involvement of anthropological institutes at the universities of Zurich and Geneva in scientific racism.

Conceived as an illustrated reader, this volume is both an invitation and a stimulus to explore and to engage critically with Switzerland’s history of global interdependence.

Text in French.

Inwelt by Maximilian Prüfer (b. 1986) is the continuation of the 2016 publication Brut and encompasses the various series of works by the artist in the intervening period. Prüfer’s work employs a number of procedures of his own invention that reveal the traces left by insects and other natural phenomena. He analyses animal behaviour in order to then compare it to human behaviour. For instance, in his series Forming Thoughts, which he began in 2020, the artist explores the pathways and tracks made by ants. In doing so, he attempts to establish a direct link to neurological structures and to draw conclusions regarding the behaviour of creatures that live as collectives, as well as humankind’s understanding of nature.

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.

Collecting objects gives enormous pleasure to approximately one third of the population, providing such benefits as intellectual stimulation, the thrill of the chase, and leaving a legacy. On the other hand, the same pursuit can engender pain; for example, paying too much for an object, unknowingly buying a fake, or dealing with the frustrations of collection dispersal. Until recently, there was no objective way to enhance the positive (pleasure) aspects of collecting and minimise the negative (pain). Now, for the first time, scientific research in neuro- and behavioral economics gives us a way to turn this around.

Neuroeconomics is the study of the biological foundation of economic thought, while behavioral economics incorporates insights from psychology and other social sciences into the examination of monetary behavior. By using examples from these disciplines, Shirley M. Mueller, MD, relates her own experiences as a serious collector and as a neuroscientist to examine different behavioral traits which characterise collectors.

The contents of this book are cutting edge, unique and sure to get attention. Mueller breaks new ground in an area not previously explored. Her information is relevant not only for collectors, but also for colleges, and universities which teach collection management, plus museum staff who interact with collectors and dealers of objects desired by collectors. Heavily illustrated with ceramics from Mueller’s collection and packed with useful information, this book will become a required vital resource.

An elegant photographic book highlights BFF’s new headquarters. Viale Scarampo, in Milan, saw the inauguration in 2025 of the BFF Banking Group’s new headquarters, a building whose transparent airiness and environmental and social sustainability ensure it provides an entirely original contribution to the city’s skyline. Designed by OBR (Open Building Research), the structure places the accent on the brightness of its interior and does not seek to compete in height with the skyscrapers of the nearby City Life district. The book is organised in a series of alternating photographs and text, drawing attention not only to the architectural features and the building’s functional characteristics, but also to the aim of creating a working environment that is intimately linked to its surroundings, in contrast to the traditional view of corporate architecture.

Casa BFF is not only the headquarters of a B2B bank, it is also a building that embraces the neighbourhood and the city as a whole, starting with the museum it houses, which is accessible to all and contains the BFF Collection of post-war Italian art. Here the visitor will find works by Valerio Adami, Franco Angeli, Enrico Baj, Alberto Burri, Lucio Del Pezzo, Lucio Fontana, Gianfranco Pardi, Mario Schifano, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Giò Pomodoro and Emilio Tadini. The Bank inaugurated the museum with an exhibition dedicated to Enrico Baj’s series of 40 etchings inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The book does full justice to the exhibition spaces, as well as to the works that hang on the building’s walls.

Text in English and Italian.