The Ashmolean Museum is fortunate in having the most comprehensive British collection of the art of the Indian subcontinent outside London. Especially strong in sculpture, this rich representation of Indian art from prehistory to the twentieth century has come about through the generosity of our benefactors over more than three centuries. The Museum’s first major Indian sculpture acquisition, a stone Pala-style Vishnu image of the eleventh century, was given in 1686 by Sir William Hedges, a governor of the East India Company in Bengal. From the late nineteenth century, a substantial core of the present collection was assembled at the University’s former Indian Institute Museum (1897-1962), precursor of the Department of Eastern Art, which opened within the Ashmolean in 1963. Since that date many more Indian objects of all periods have been acquired by gift, bequest or purchase.

Contents: Introduction; Prehistoric South Asia; The Northwest; North & Central India; Eastern India and Deccan; Miscellanea; Bibliography.

Buddhist Art of Gandhara is a scholarly catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum’s important but still largely unpublished holdings of the Buddhist sculpture and related art of the historic Gandhara region (modern North West Pakistan / East Afghanistan) in the early centuries AD (c. 0-600 AD). This region was a major centre of Buddhist culture and facilitated the transmission of Buddhism and its art from India via the Silk Road to Central Asia, China and the Far East. The book contains introductory essays, with additional illustrations, suitable for the general reader as well as the specialist. Contents: General introduction; 1. Stupas and reliquaries; 2a. Life panels; 2b. Panels and fragments; 3a. Buddhas; 3b Bodhisattvas; 4. Stuccos; 5. Bronzes; 6. Deities; 7. Household objects; Bibliography, Index.

Illustrated from the Ashmolean’s collection of contemporary sculpture, this book provides a context in terms of the Ashmolean’s world-famous collections of antique and renaissance sculpture and the development of twentieth-century sculpture as a whole. It makes accessible for the first time many pieces by, among others, Epstein, Frink, Maillol, Moore, Underwood and Zadkrine. It includes mainly small bronzes, but some larger works are featured.

The Jewish Journey tells the history of the Jewish people from antiquity to modern times through 22 objects from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, brought together here for the first time. Many of the objects are little-known treasures and all 22 have remarkable stories. Spanning 4000 years of history and covering 14 different countries, the objects trace the evolution of Jewish life and culture from its earliest beginnings in Ancient Mesopotamia through time and space to the modern day.

Before they became two of America’s most iconic pop artists, Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana were young aspiring creatives, living in New York. There, they met and befriended William John Kennedy, who would take some of the first photographs of these artists in their career. Many photographers worked with Andy Warhol, but few so early on in his career or in a such a uniquely collaborative fashion. After establishing a friendship with Robert Indiana and taking some of the first, important close-up images of him in his studio, Kennedy went on to work in a similarly creative way with Warhol.

These striking images of the young Warhol and Indiana were lost for nearly 50 years before being rediscovered. They were immediately recognised as important documents by the Warhol Museum and by Robert Indiana, and presented in the Before they were Famous exhibition, which travelled to London and New York. The story of the re-discovery of these photographs was made into an acclaimed documentary in 2010 – Full Circle: Before They Were Famous, Documentary on William John Kennedy.

William John Kennedy: The Lost Archive: Photographs of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana will be the first of William John Kennedy’s books devoted solely to the time he spent with Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana. The book features pictures of both artists as well as images of Taylor Mead, UltraViolet and other members of Warhol’s circle.

Ancient Mesopotamia and Iran are usually treated separately or as part of a much broader ‘Ancient Near East’. However, the developments that lie at the root of our own world – farming, cities, writing, organised religion, warfare – were forged in the tensions and relations between the inhabitants of lowland Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) and the highlands of Iran. Mountains and Lowlands explores this relationship providing a detailed but accessible account covering the period 6000 BC-AD 650, from the development of the first agricultural communities to the coming of Islam. The story is told through the superlative Ancient Near Eastern collections in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, supplemented by images of photographs of archaeological sites and of iconic pieces in other collections including the Louvre, Paris. The discussion is further supported by six maps commissioned especially for this publication. Contents: 1. Introduction 2. From Village to City: 6000-3000 BC 3. From City to Kingdom: 3000-1500 BC 4. From Kingdom to Empire: 1500-500 BC 5. From India to Egypt: 500 BC-AD 650

This handsome volume of works from the renowned collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts – the best-known museum in the world dedicated to recognising the achievements of women artists – is a fascinating record of women’s diverse accomplishments from the Renaissance to the first decade of the 21st century. Prior to the establishment of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the work of great women artists had been ignored, forgotten, or denied; they had been largely left out of museums and histories of art.

Founded in 1987 by Wilhelmina Cole Holladay in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of Women in the Arts boasts a growing membership that is among the top ten in the world. The museum’s multifaceted treasures include paintings, sculpture, photographs, prints, and crafts produced over the past five centuries by an international array of women artists.

Included here, in full colour, are works by Lavinia Fontana, Judith Leyster, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Hester Bateman, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Camille Claudel, Berenice Abbott, Maria Montoya Martinez, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Lee Krasner, and many more.

Young Rembrandt concentrates on the first ten years of the career of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). Born in Leiden, he trained there with Isaac van Swanenburg and in Amsterdam with Pieter Lastman. After a short stay in Amsterdam he returned to Leiden and set up a studio where he began his extraordinary career, painting scenes from the Bible and classical mythology and history, as well as a handful of genre scenes and portraits. His progress is remarkable: from the earliest hesitant paintings of the Five Senses in about 1624 to the wonderfully assured Jeremiah of 1630 it is almost possible to trace his development and his increasing fluency and self-confidence from month to month and certainly from year to year. Published to accompany exhibitions at the Lakenhal, Leiden from November 2019 to February 2020, then at the Ashmolean Museum from February to June 2020.

Built in 1913 for a local politician and engineer and beautifully situated on the shore of Lake Zurich, this handsome villa today is home to the Jacobs Foundation and the Johann Jacobs Museum. It was acquired in the 1980s by the Jacobs family, who had been in the coffee, tea, and cocoa trade in Bremen since 1895 but eventually sold the business to an international conglomerate in the 1990s. The Johann Jacobs Museum focuses on the history and present of global trade routes. Its exhibitions and educational program revolves around cultural hybrids that develop sometimes intentionally, sometimes incidentally along the main routes and byways of trade.

This new book tells the story of the Jacobs House and offers an introduction to the goals of the Jacobs Foundation and the museum. It also documents the building’s extensive reconstruction by Basel-based architects Miller & Maranta, who have made major changes to its structure with equal measures of radicalism and sensitivity while entirely preserving its character and style.

Text in English and German.

This book is an edited record of the papers given at the two-day symposium ‘Italian Maiolica and Europe’ held in Oxford on 22 and 23 September 2017. It is, in effect, a celebration of his long service in the Ashmolean Museum as the Keeper of Western Art. Museum collections develop their great strengths in one of two ways: through gifts of private collections and through the knowledge and enthusiasm of curators. The Ashmolean’s renowned and important collection of Italian Maiolica owes its foundation to the former and the bequest of C.D.E. Fortnum. But it has grown and developed in remarkable ways over the last three decades thanks to the energy and expertise of Professor Timothy Wilson. During his 27 years as Keeper of Western Art, Tim was responsible for a truly extraordinary range and number of important acquisitions across the fine and decorative arts. As one of the world’s leading scholars of Italian Maiolica, it was only natural that he would continue to build on Fortnum’s legacy.

“In conclusion, I have nothing but praise for this book. The production values are top-notch and I am so pleased that Milner both took his time to write this book, and was able to see it through to completion together with Matternes.” — The Inquisitive Biologist
The first career-spanning volume on Jay Matternes (b. 1933), whose scientific rigor and artistic skill set a new standard in natural history illustration.

Millions have grown up inspired by Jay Matternes’ murals of extinct mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History. Others have savoured his depictions of human origins in such prestigious publications as Science, National Geographic, Scientific American, and Natural History. Matternes’ art has also graced popular books by such trailblazing wildlife scientists as Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Louis Leakey.

Now, for the first time, the entire scope of Matternes’ achievement is revealed in this full-colour retrospective, prepared with the artist’s full cooperation and featuring many works never before published. Here are his depictions of living species, whose anatomical accuracy and vivid detail owe much to Matternes’ lifelong devotion to painting from nature: the wildlife of Africa, the birds of America, chimpanzees and gorillas, and more. Here, too, is his paleoart, meticulously reconstructed from the fossil evidence and ranging from dinosaurs, through the rise of mammals, to our hominid ancestors — including Matternes’ groundbreaking reconstruction of the 4.4-million-year-old hominin Ardipithecus, on which he laboured in secrecy for more than a decade. The highly readable text includes, among other special features, selections from the artist’s 20-year correspondence with the late Dian Fossey.

Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter will be an essential volume not only for aspiring illustrators and paleoartists, but for anyone with an interest in the natural world and how we visualise it.

Show Time initially awakens thoughts of glittering entertainment, shiny surfaces, and fancy stunts — a world that does not really belong in a museum. But here the title is associated with something more literal: time being shown to us.

In Sabine Groß’s (*1961) exhibition at the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte Saarbrücken, archaeological finds meet contemporary art for the first time. As a professor of sculpture, Groß has specialised for many years in this type of confrontation, practising a kind of “archaeology of the future” in which she presents recent significant works of art as potential archaeological objects.

Published to accompany an exhibition Sabine Groß. Show Time – Eine Archäologie der Zukunft, which runs from 11 December 2020-7 November 2021 at Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Saarbrücken, Germany.

Text in English and German.

During the German occupation, a Jewish Dutch couple had to sell a painting to go into hiding. Their daughters were placed in a children’s home, but were rounded up in early 1944 and deported to Auschwitz, where they died. The parents survived the war and did not discover their children’s fate until 1946. The search for the painting also remained fruitless for a long time, until Origins Unknown Agency discovered that it had ended up in a German museum. The museum had previously tried unsuccessfully to trace its provenance. Thanks to the Origins Unknown Agency, the heirs of the original owner were found. The German museum and the heirs agreed that the painting, an 1882 work by Camille Pissarro, would remain at the museum. As part of the compensation, the painting will be kept on display from November 2024 to February 2025 at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

The Flemish Primitive artist Hans Memling (c. 1435–1494), who played a crucial role in early Netherlandish painting, is inextricably associated with Bruges. Among his most impressive creations are the St John Altarpiece and the St Ursula Shrine, which he created for St John’s Hospital in the city. Seven more of this 15th-century master’s finest works can also be seen in Bruges, at what is now the St John’s Hospital Museum and at the Groeninge Museum.

This book describes Memling’s breathtaking paintings in close detail, while offering readers the opportunity to (re)discover his oeuvre as a whole.

Text in English and Dutch.

British Conceptual artist John Stezaker (b. 1949) is known for his distinctive, often deceptively simple, collages. He has been making art since the 1970s, but achieved prominence relatively recently.

In 2011, he had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and, in 2012, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, even though he does not take photographs.

Stezaker says collage is about ‘stuff that has lost its immediate relationship with the world’ and involves ‘a yearning for a lost world’. A collector, he works from an archive of out-of-date images — mostly old film stills, vintage actor head shots, and antique postcards. These images come in standard sizes and are highly conventionalised — all variations on themes.

Art critic David Campany says, Stezaker ‘is drawn to that very slim space between convention and idiosyncrasy.’

In addition to collages, Lost World includes poignant found-object-sculptures: a selection of antique mannequin hands, offering a repertoire of gestures. There’s also a film, Crowd, presenting hundreds of film stills of crowd scenes, each for one frame only, in a bewildering blur.

This book looks at bronze through the remarkable collections of European bronze sculptures in the Ashmolean Museum of the University of Oxford. Largely thanks to the generosity of Charles Drury Edward Fortnum (1820–1899), the Ashmolean houses one of the world’s great collections of Renaissance and Baroque small bronzes.

The book provides a survey of the collection and an overview of the development of small bronze sculpture during a period of six centuries running from c.1200 to around 1800, although most of the works illustrated here were made within the shorter time frame of c.1450–1650. Any such survey is inevitably shaped by the strengths of the collection, which is conditioned by Fortnum’s taste, notwithstanding later acquisitions that have broadened its scope. He especially loved earlier Italian bronzes and so-called utensils — objects such as inkstands, candlesticks, salt-cellars, mirrors and seals — that are functional as well as beautiful. Fortnum was less interested in sculpture from the later 1500s onwards although, as this selection shows, he acquired some very interesting bronzes from the 17th and 18th centuries that deserve to be better known.

More than any other civilisation, China is renowned for its long tradition of ceramic production, from its terracotta and stoneware works in ancient times to the imperial porcelain manufactured at Jingdezhen from the end of the fourteenth century. These works have been admired and collected over centuries for their outstanding quality and refinement. Now two hundred masterpieces from prominent private collections around the world have been brought together for the first time in a new book. The Baur Collections in Geneva, formed between 1928 and 1951, and the Zhuyuetang Collection (the Bamboo and Moon Pavilion in Hong Kong), which has been building since the late 1980s, reveal the elegance and variety of imperial monochrome porcelain wares produced during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, which followed on from the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) periods. These restrained pieces – both profane and sacred – exemplify the values of simplicity and modesty espoused by classical Chinese texts. With chapters devoted to the historical, cultural and technical contexts in which these pieces were made, this book will be a key reference on Chinese monochrome ceramics for all lovers of the subject, as well as students, researchers and connoisseurs.

Text in English and French with Chinese summaries.

“…his stories are always interesting, lively and well written, giving an insight to the art world as he experienced it.” — Literary Review

“If you read one book on art this year, it must be this brilliant critique of art today seen through the lens of retired museum curator Julian Spalding.” — International Property & Travel

Julian Spalding’s career as a curator and creator of museums was amongst the most controversial and effective of his time. In this collection of essays and memoirs he revisits some of the important events and battles of the last 40 years, when he spearheaded resistance to the cult of conceptual art being promoted from the centre. Witty, illuminating, coruscating and blazingly intelligent, this book is a vital guide to the ways in which we consume art today, for good or ill. 

The term “migration of form” describes a curatorial method that takes aim at the contradictions of the Western museum traditions and the ways exhibitions we have been conceived and designed. The method addresses transcultural entanglements in the past and present from which objects emerge, rather than working with distinctions such as art and non-art or cultural identities and concepts such as “Africa” or “Renaissance.” It proposes a new type of museum for global audiences that serves as a platform for discourses on urgent sociopolitical topics and as a space of experimentation with new ideas and forms of display.

This book explains and applies the “migration of form” by offering insights into the curatorial method Roger M. Buergel has experimented with at Zurich’s Johann Jacobs Museum and other venues in Europe and Asia. Descriptions of single exhibitions on global trade, raw materials, or artists such as Maya Deren and Allan Sekula are complemented by concise texts which illuminate the theoretical foundations of the curatorial process. Richly illustrated, the volume invites a timely and broadened view of art and cultural history.

The luminous work of Bill Armstrong has long stretched the boundaries and expectations of contemporary photography. In his explorations and subversion of the ostensible objectivity and precision that have distinguished photography among the visual arts, Armstrong foregrounds the medium’s qualities that photographers had been attempting to exploit since the beginning of the twentieth century: colour and focus.

All a Blur showcases Mr. Armstrong’s Infinity series, an ongoing project he has been working on for over 25 years. The book presents 21 different portfolios, all made by using his unique process of photographing a collage of found or appropriated images extremely out of focus or distorted by handheld time exposures. The variety of subjects and results he achieves with this process is so broad it has been said that he has developed a medium of his own invention that lies at the intersection of photography, painting and collage.  

With mysterious and poetic images that reflect on history, philosophy, identity and spirituality, Armstrong conjures a unique alternate reality that might exist in dreams, in memory, or, perhaps, in a parallel universe. At the same time, the subject of the work is colour. By taking away focus and the usual expectations of photography, Armstrong is able to investigate the qualities and effects of pure colour in a profound way, freed from the limits of representation.

Michaelina Wautier (1604–1689) is a name unfamiliar even to connoisseurs of Old Master painting. This handsome book seeks to correct that, by exploring the surviving portraits, history paintings, genre scenes and still-lifes that can be identified as hers. Born at Mons, Wautier pursued a successful career in Brussels, which was then ruled by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, whose collection ended up at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. This handsome book, produced by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in collaboration with the Royal Academy, brings together all the latest scholarship on the artist, alongside several exciting new attributions.

The appearance of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) in the early 1980s and its subsequent rapid spread around the world has left deep marks in society. The illness itself and its effects on society have also caused manifold responses by artists and activists in many countries. United by AIDS, published in conjunction with an extensive group show on the topic of loss, remembrance, activism and art in response to HIV/AIDS at Zurich’s Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst), sheds light on the multi-faceted and complex interrelation between art and HIV/AIDS from the 1980s to the present. It examines the blurred boundaries between art production and HIV/AIDS activism and showcases artists who played – and still play – leading roles in this discourse. Alongside images of artworks and brief texts on the represented artists, the book features voices from the past and present. Essays by Douglas Crimp, Alexander García Düttmann, Raphael Gygax, Elsa Himmer, Ted Kerr, Elisabeth Lebovici ,and Nurja Ritter broaden the view of the international discourse on HIV/AIDS and society’s confrontation with the disease. Published to accompany an exhibition: ‘United by AIDS – An Exhibition about Loss, Remembrance, Activism and Art in Response to HIV/AIDS’ at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich from 31 August to 2 November 2019.

Lee Mullican (1919-98) was best known for his inimitable West Coast-inspired explorations in abstraction, infused with mysticism and the transcendent. First exhibited as part of the pivotal exhibition of the Dynaton Group, which Mullican co-founded with fellow artists Gordon Onslow Ford and Wolfgang Paalen, his works are today widely collected and held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many others. The first book in more than a decade to focus on this important figure in twentieth-century American art, Cosmic Theatre: The Art of Lee Mullican surveys a key theme running through the artist’s career, framing his unusual hybridisation of symbolic figuration, abstracted landscapes, and abstract space with his long-time fascination with the sky and the galaxy beyond. The book explores the development of the Mullican’s work in the context of his time and his biography, looking also at the implications of Jungian philosophy in relation to his admiration of pre-Columbian and Native American cultures. Michael Auping’s essay is complemented by fifty full-colour illustrations, featuring major rare paintings and drawings by Mullican from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Since 2006 Young-Jae Lee (b. 1951), the head of the ceramic workshop Margaretenhöhe Essen, has been creating her Spinatschalen (Spinach Bowls) – round-bodied vessels on simple standing rings, whose diverse glazes bring out the aesthetic appeal of these impressive dishes. Behind the purist form of Lee’s bowls lies a long history stretching back to Korean vessels of the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) by way of Japanese tea bowls. This publication reveals much more than just the genesis of the Spinatschalen; it unlocks a piece of ceramic history. Negotiating the complex historical and cultural relationships between Japan and Korea against which the tea bowls evolved, it uses examples from Museum Folkwang to also illustrate the German reception of East Asian ceramic vessels at the dawn of the 20th century.

Text in German.