Linda MacNeil: Jewels of Glass is the first in-depth monograph to explore the development of leading American jeweller Linda MacNeil’s jewellery and her contribution to late twentieth- and twenty-first century jewellery. MacNeil has inserted her voice into contemporary American jewellery as an innovator transforming glass into proxies for precious gemstones. She and her work have straddled the fields of Studio Glass and Studio Jewellery. A pioneer over her forty-and-counting-year career, she has united glass with metal and, recently, with precious gems. Exploring materiality and methodology, she uses historical precedent as a jumping off point to make stunning, wearable jewellery. This scholarly study presents approximately fifty of MacNeil’s most significant pieces. Davira S. Taragin’s essay interweaves MacNeil’s biography with discussions of the development of her aesthetic. Noted jewellery historian Ursula Ilse-Neuman contextualises MacNeil’s achievement within the art jewellery movement in general and the use of glass in jewellery over the centuries.

The third brilliant volume in the Humanitas series captures the vibrant lives of the Burmese people.
Following the success of Humanitas and Humanitas II: The People of Gujarat, photographer Fredric Roberts now turns his lens to the captivating and controversial country of Burma. The result of eight years of travel throughout the region, the approximately 120 photographs in Humanitas III focus on the spiritually rich lives of the Burmese people. Featuring temples, portraits, scenes of everyday life, and incredible landscape, Humanitas III offers a rare view of a country that has been closed to —or avoided by— many photographers due to its social isolation and reputation for political repression.
Cicero coined the term humanitas (literally, “human nature”) to describe the development of human virtue in all its forms, denoting fortitude, judgment, prudence, eloquence, and even love of honour—which contrasts with our contemporary connotation of humanity (understanding, benevolence, compassion, mercy). The Latin term is certainly a fitting book title as we are struck with respect and awe for Roberts’s subjects’ individual fortitude and eloquence rather than pity for their plight: each photograph tells us a compelling story.
Curated by Britt Salvesen, the department head and curator of the photography department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, many of the images present subjects looking directly at the photographer and at the reader, effortlessly prompting a cross-cultural dialogue. Essays by Teri Edelstein and Emma Larkin, an expert journalist/author covering Burma, provide context for Roberts’s photographs by describing the lives of the Burmese peoples.

Farmer: Photographic Portraits by Pang Xiaowei represents a curated selection from more than 1000 portraits taken by Pang Xiaowei during a mammoth mission to photograph farmers from every province in China. It is a monument to China’s agricultural workforce that affords them the recognition they deserve and celebrates their dedication to their country.

The farmers of the Chinese mainland help feed 1.39 billion people. This powerful series of portraits captures the souls of these men and women: their hardiness, their work ethic, their dedication to the land.

Portraiture is one of the strongest visual methods of communication. As Pang Xiaowei says, “Portraits have a language; they can tell us so much. Portraits have force, and that force is directed towards our hearts.” Looking into the eyes of the farmers featured in this book, that connection is evident. These portraits forge a link between the observer and the subject, building on the ancient Chinese tradition of ‘spirit resonance in portraiture’ (chuan shen xie zhao). This aspect of Xiaowei’s photography is explored in an accompanying essay by the celebrated Chinese artist, Chen Lvsheng. 

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.

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.

Since the 1960s, Berlin-born artist Dieter Appelt (b. 1935) has traced the losses of modern society through his camera lens. The trained musician and opera singer discovered photography as a means of reconnecting with nature, mythology, and mortality. In countless activities that he documented with his camera, Appelt incorporates his own body into the images with a poetic approach, exploring its fragility and relationship with nature. Time and again, he circles around existential questions of life and death, memory and recurrence.

The Lindenau Museum in Altenburg is honouring Dieter Appelt with the 2025 Gerhard Altenbourg Prize for his life’s work and has dedicated an exhibition to him. This publication provides an extensive and profound insight into Appelt’s artistic development and, in addition to important projects and large-scale series of photographs, also documents drawings, objects, and films from the artist’s oeuvre.

Text in English and German.

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.

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

Manhattan Project is a collection of photographs that capture the evolving landscape of Manhattan’s West Side over the past decade. Exploiting the revelatory power of photography, these images explore a city’s architectural transformation.

While Jan Staller’s earlier work focused on industrial decay, these new photographs explore the rise of high-rise construction. By isolating and zooming in on building materials, Staller elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. The resulting images, reminiscent of drawings or abstract paintings, reveal the hidden beauty and formal qualities of these often-overlooked elements.

This project reimagines the city not as a monolithic entity, but as a composition of intricate details. It celebrates the interplay of light, form and texture, inviting viewers to rethink the familiar and discover the artistic potential of the urban environment.

Text in English and French.

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.

This exhibition catalogue for a show at the Neue Sammlung (Design Museum) in Munich documents the first solo show by Swiss jewellery artist Therese Hilbert, former student of Max Fröhlich in Zurich and Hermann Jünger in Munich. It features 250 works, going back 50 years and beginning with her earliest, unknown pieces through to her newest work created in 2020. One of her life-long passions is volcanoes: she has climbed many of them and has used them as a theme in her jewellery design for many years. The sense of heat below the surface of her minimalist designs underlines her passion for the subject. Her work is in the collections of the Design Museum (Munich), the National Gallery of Victoria, the Dallas Museum of Art, and Museum of Arts and Design (New York).

Features texts by Heike Endter, Otto Künzli, Ellen Maurer-Zilioli, Pravu Mazumdar, Angelika Nollert, Warwick Freeman and Petra Hölscher.

Text in English and German.

For millennia, horses have captivated humans with their beauty, strength and majesty. From Türkiye to Japan, civilisations have elaborately costumed these prized animals. A magnificent selection of saddle blankets, horse covers and other equestrian textiles from the past 1,300 years communicates the significance and status of horses and their riders. 

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Art & Fashion in the Calouste Gulbenkian museum, and highlights the inseparable relationship between art and fashion: art finds a constant source of inspiration in fashion, while fashion finds permanence and memory in art. Both disciplines engage in a dialogue around beauty, both ephemeral and eternal, as an invisible thread between past and present.

The extraordinary Gulbenkian Collection, with pieces from Ancient Egypt to the 20th century, allows for a unique encounter between masterpieces of painting and decorative arts and iconic haute couture creations. It is not a question of comparison, but of establishing visual and symbolic conversations: contemporary silhouettes alongside Renaissance folds, exquisite embroidery juxtaposed with modernist flashes, ancient iconography reinterpreted.

The book captures that moment when the museum is transformed into a living space where art and fashion face each other, reminding us that beauty knows no boundaries, only the passage of time.

Flowers and plants are a staple of British life. Nearly 40% of our population considers themselves to be gardeners, making this and associated activities a national pursuit. And yet, while we hold endless discussions over how to seed, grow, and disseminate our cherished plants, we still known relatively little about how they were collected, exchanged, circulated, identified, and modified, and how much art has shaped our understanding and appreciation of them. This publication, designed to accompany the homonymous exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, explores some of these plant stories through highlights from Oxford’s collections. Bringing together historical and scientific expertise, art and material culture, traditional and contemporary artworks, this book ultimately reflects on the long-lasting impact of flora on our society – and of us on it.  

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.

From the mid-1740s on, imaginative depictions of mining scenes increasingly adorned vessels from the Meissen Royal Porcelain Manufactory. Prior to this, sculptural depictions of mining folk can even be found on Böttger stoneware and Böttger porcelain—with artists George Fritzsche Sr (probably 1697–1756) and Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706–1775) later each dedicating a series to them. The unique combination of mining and porcelain also informed and inspired other manufactories in the German-speaking realm, for example in Berlin, Fürstenberg and Vienna.
Achim and Beate Middelschulte have assembled what is probably the world’s most extensive collection of porcelain featuring the subject of mining. A significant selection of this has been transferred to a foundation and incorporated as a permanent loan into the collection at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum (German Mining Museum in Bochum). An in-depth presentation of these pieces is now available in this publication.

Text in German.

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.

Published on the occasion of an important international loan exhibition at The Azerbaijan National Museum in Baku, this multi-author book is much more than a mere catalogue. Containing previously unpublished research and a wealth of previously hidden material from museums and private collections around the world, and written by a team of international museum professionals and independent scholars, it is the first co-ordinated and detailed study of the West Caspian region’s characteristic silk embroideries. The book traces the history of embroidery in the Caucasus, the multi-cultural sources of domestic embroidery, iconography and designs in which the textile traditions of the Iranian and Turkic worlds meet, materials and needlework techniques, as well as the relationship between embroidery and the pile carpet weaving tradition in the region.

Contents:
1 Silk Treasures of Azerbaijan, Alberto Boralevi & Asli Samadova
2 Historical Azerbaijan, Murray L. Eiland III
3 Caucasian Embroideries in Context, Penny Oakley
4 Safavid-style Domestic Embroideries from Historical Azerbaijan, 1550-1800, Michael Franses
5 Silk Culture in the Caucasus, Irina Koshoridze
6 Azerbaijan Embroidery Techniques, Jennifer Wearden
7 What Went Before to Make It as It Was? Caucasian Embroidered Textiles from The Textile Museum Collection, Sumru Belger Krody
8 Busily Engaged on Embroidery : Collecting and Curatorship for the V&A, Moya Carey
9 An Early Museum Collection: Azerbaijan Embroideries in the V&A, Penny Oakley
10 A Shared Design Lexicon: Azerbaijan Embroideries and Rugs, Brian Morehouse

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.

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.

The completion of David Chipperfield’s distinctive new building for Kunsthaus Zürich in December 2020 has nearly doubled the museum’s overall space. In combination with the preceding refurbishments of the earlier buildings, this has made it fit to meet the demands of an art museum in the 21st century.

A sequel to The Architectural History of the Kunsthaus Zürich 1910-2020, this book comprehensively introduces the new Kunsthaus Zürich, demonstrating how the task of building an art museum in the 21st century can be fulfilled. Concise texts, statements by protagonists and by future users and visitors as well as numerous illustrations trace the project’s evolution and the construction process and look at the completed building from various perspectives. The book also highlights what features contemporary museum infrastructure has to offer and the architectural and urban design qualities it requires, and what financial and organisational challenges the entire undertaking implied. A conversation between experts exploring the expanded museum’s impact on its immediate neighbourhood and Zurich’s urban fabric as a whole rounds out the volume.

Text in French.

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.

In a spectacular move, the Albertina presents Sean Scully from a hitherto unfamiliar side with a series of large figurative paintings of his son Oisín playing on the beach of Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas. Scully’s inimitable pictures used to rely solely on paint – applied with a strong, but above all abstract gesture – the new series however appears like a surprising point of reversal. Yet, the new paintings are a return to his earliest beginnings, as, in the 1950s, Scully embarked along the Fauves and German Expressionism from realism into the realm of pure colour. Even today, abstraction, as he sees it, is still infused with memories of figurative sources. This richly illustrated catalogue brings together all Oisín-Paintings, enriched by graphic works from Albertina’s collection, extensive material from Scully’s private archive, as well as in-depth essays by Werner Spies and Elisabeth Dutz elaborating on this newly obtained painterly freedom.

Superstar Pharaohs was the exhibition presented by the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, in partnership with MUCEM (Marseille), in 2022, the year that marks the centenary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter and the bicentenary of the deciphering of hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion.

The exhibition catalogue includes an introductory text written by the co-curator Frédéric Mougenot, in which he reveals the reflections that led him to create the exhibition.

The introduction is followed by six essays on different themes, ranging from antiquity to the present day: Fayza Haikal writes about the link between modern day Egyptians and the civilisation of the Pharaohs; Bernard Mathieu focuses on the Egyptians’ knowledge of their history; Michael Chaveau looks at the presence of the Pharaohs in Greco-Roman literature; Simon Connor explores the impact of images and their destruction in constructing the history of the Egyptian monarchy; Jean-Marcel Humbert discusses the phenomenon of Egyptomania; and João Carvalho Dias, co-curator of the exhibition and deputy director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, reveals the relationship that Calouste Gulbenkian developed with Howard Carter, which was fundamental in establishing the Egyptian art section of the Gulbenkian collection.

The rest of the publication is, like the exhibition, divided into three sections: the first, ‘Three Thousand Years of History and a Few Memorable Reigns’, seeks to outline the profile of the Pharaohs who were regarded, in their time, as worthy of being remembered for posterity. The second section, ‘What Remains of the Pharaohs? History and Legends’, looks at the way the memory of some of these figures was recovered, and at the same time transformed, by the literature of Greco-Roman antiquity, giving rise to myths that survived for centuries. The final section, ‘Return of the Pharaohs’, reveals how the birth of the discipline of Egyptology led to new scientific knowledge of Ancient Egypt, which also paved the way for the rediscovery of some Pharaohs, who were thus propelled into stardom.

As well as featuring abundant illustrations of the works on display throughout the texts, the publication also includes a section of chronological references related to Ancient Egypt and a list of all the Pharaohs in history.

Image credits: Panorama