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.
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.
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.
This is the first time a Dutch museum has devoted an exhibition exclusively to the three-dimensional work of Joan Miró. Thanks to close cooperation with renowned museum partners and public collections, including the Fundació Joan Miró and the Fondation Maeght, 55 sculptures by the Catalan grandmaster of surrealism will be shown to the public. The selection includes some plaster models never before exhibited in a museum. The exhibition is accompanied by this richly illustrated publication, which, among other things, details the artist’s working methods and the symbolism of his sculpture.
Text in English and Dutch.
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.
The first monograph on American artist Morton Kaish, whose light-filled paintings bridge the traditional and the experimental.
Morton Kaish (b. 1927) has long been known as a “painter’s painter.” His work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and numerous other leading institutions, and he has served as a teacher and mentor to generations of American artists. His work, which bridges the abstract and the representational, the traditional and the experimental, is marked by a ceaseless exploration of light and colour that has led one critic to liken him to “a latter-day Bonnard.” Throughout his eight-decade career, Kaish has worked in series, returning to the same theme again and again and always finding something new; his series range from The Irish Chair, depicting wildflowers heaped on a wooden chair, to America, showing weathered doorways bearing a palimpsest of patriotic imagery.
This oversize monograph presents exceptional reproductions of a generous selection of Kaish’s works, arranged by series and including his formally innovative prints and drawings as well as his paintings. A text by the noted critic David Ebony, an interview with the artist, and an illustrated chronology lend new insight into Kaish’s life and work. A foreword by Annette Blaugrund, former director of the National Academy of Design, explores how the artist’s studios—including the one he shared for some fifty years with his wife, the celebrated sculptor Luise Kaish—have influenced his work.
Rietveld Schröder House: A Biography of the House tells the story of the iconic house and its creators, Truus Schröder (1889–1985) and Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964). The construction of the house, the designs by ‘Schröder & Rietveld Architects’, the war years, the renovations and the many family parties: this richly illustrated publication builds up a picture of the colourful life of the idiosyncratic Rietveld Schröder House.
In addition to many previously unpublished photographs, drawings, designs and letters, the book provides in-depth insight into Rietveld and Schröder’s collaboration and their shared ambition to radically change traditional (interior) architecture. The research by authors Natalie Dubois and Jessica van Geel also convincingly shows that Truus Schröder’s role was far greater than previously assumed. As a gifted designer, Schröder was much more than Gerrit Rietveld’s ‘muse’. Her creative vision proved crucial to their joint projects.
With its bespoke design by Irma Boom, this publication is a tribute to the world-famous house built in 1924 that continues to inspire today. Rietveld Schröder House: A Biography of the House is an accessible and essential reference work for lovers of modern architecture, art history and revolutionary daring.
This publication coincides with the centenary of the Rietveld Schröder House, and is issued in collaboration with Centraal Museum Utrecht.
Text in English and Dutch.
Image © Rietveld Schröder House
Fotoalbum met portretfoto’s van Gerrit Rietveld – Collectie Centraal Museum Utrecht / Rietveld Schröderarchief
Afbeelding van Rietveld Schröderhuis – aanzicht tussen bomen door, 1925 uit het zuiden, met kale boompjes – Collectie Centraal Museum Utrecht / Rietveld Schröderarchief
Interieur verdieping, ingeschoven schuifwand woonhoek 1925 afdruk – Collectie Centraal Museum Utrecht / Rietveld Schröderarchief © Pictoright
After Tour Paris 13, a spectacular new project has come into being in Paris. The elevated section of metro line 6 now passes through an “open-air museum” all along the Boulevard Vincent Auriol: Boulevard Paris 13 with its immense murals, executed by the greatest international artists, and which can be viewed as if in a gallery of a gigantic museum.
You can enjoy or repeat this unparalleled experience through a richly illustrated book that relates the genesis and making of the project!
Text in English and French.
The Ashmolean’s collection of European stringed instruments is not large but it is very famous. Several of the instruments in the Ashmolean are among the rarest and most beautiful of their kind and most are, in some way, exceptional. The collection was founded on a group of instruments which was given to the museum by the firm of W.E. Hill & Sons in 1939 and has since been increased by two bequests and by an important group of bows and instruments given by Albert Cooper in 1999. The firm of W.E. Hill & Sons was founded in 1880 and by the early 20th century the firm had achieved an unrivalled reputation in making, restoring, and selling stringed instruments.In the course of handling and repairing instruments, the Hills became increasingly aware of the damage that was being inflicted on early viols and violins by constant playing and repeated restoration. This concern gave rise to the idea of donating a select group of rare instruments to a museum where they would be preserved from further harm, and the first instruments were handed over in 1939. The present handbook discusses and illustrates every stringed instrument in the collection and is chiefly intended for the many visitors to the Hill Collection and for the wider public who might wish for more information about the instruments and some background history.
Beth Moon’s fourteen-year quest to photograph ancient trees has taken her across the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Some of her subjects grow in isolation, on remote mountainsides, private estates, or nature preserves; others maintain a proud, though often precarious, existence in the midst of civilization. All, however, share a mysterious beauty perfected by age and the power to connect us to a sense of time and nature much greater than ourselves. It is this beauty, and this power, that Moon captures in her remarkable photographs.
This handsome volume presents nearly seventy of Moon’s finest tree portraits as full-page duotone plates. The pictured trees include the tangled, hollow-trunked yews – some more than a thousand years old – that grow in English churchyards; the baobabs of Madagascar, called ‘upside-down trees’ because of the curious disproportion of their giant trunks and modest branches; and the fantastical dragon’s-blood trees, red-sapped and umbrella-shaped, that grow only on the island of Socotra, off the Horn of Africa.
Moon’s narrative captions describe the natural and cultural history of each individual tree, while Todd Forrest, vice president for horticulture and living collections at The New York Botanical Garden, provides a concise introduction to the biology and preservation of ancient trees. An essay by the critic Steven Brown defines Moon’s unique place in a tradition of tree photography extending from William Henry Fox Talbot to Sally Mann, and explores the challenges and potential of the tree as a subject for art.
A portrait of an eminent jewellery artist and her unique creations!
Inspired by the Arte Povera movement, the Italian jewellery artist Annamaria Zanella (b. 1966) uses base materials, which only gain meaning through their context. Corroded metal or found objects convey statements that can be both political and personal in nature. Zanella wants to bring the soul of the material to light through the work of her own hands.
The colour used is intended to evoke feelings and reactions. To this end Zanella studied the history of colours and their production, especially that of her unmistakable blue. She produced a blue pigment according to a recipe from the fourteenth century, invoking in its modern use pioneering artists such as Giotto, Wassily Kandinsky and Yves Klein.
Annamaria Zanella is represented in numerous museums, including Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (FR); Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin (DE); Die Neue Sammlung The Design Museum, Munich (DE); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (US); Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim (DE); Museo degli Argenti, Florence (IT); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (GB); Palazzo Fortuny, Venice (IT); Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (US); Swiss National Museum, Zurich (CH).
Text in English and Italian.
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.
For centuries ceramics have been a central feature of Chinese art and culture. They were employed in everyday life and served as both ritualistic and funerary objects. Dr Heribert Meurer’s pre-eminent collection of 174 high-quality pieces dating from 1050 BCE to AD 1280 – which up until now has remained unpublished – offers an impressive panorama of the artefacts’ roles, as well as the vessel forms and techniques of early Chinese ceramic art, complemented by over 30 objects from the GRASSI Museum Leipzig, where the collection was endowed in 2017. The focal points of the collection are the ceramics of the Tang and Song dynasties. Examples of the popular Sancai (tricolour) lead glaze, Celadon porcelain from Yueyao, Yaozhou and Longquan and Changsha ware, so-called Jian black porcelain from Jianyang Prefecture and Quingbai ware from the southern kiln sites of the Song era illustrate the wealth, diversity, high quality and exceptional appeal of early Chinese ceramics.
Text in German.
This monograph presents a thorough overview of the work of the Danish artist Thomas Bang (b. 1938). Essays by four Danish art historians trace his years as a painter in the early 1960s, his subsequent development as a sculptor in the late 1960s, and his activity on the New York art scene through the 1980s. The primary emphasis of the book is on Bang’s three-dimensional work and the analysis of the range of issues on which his object- and installation-oriented work has been focused for several decades.
Thomas Bang has throughout his career focused on various issues of fragility and vulnerability as physical as well as psychological states. The emphasis of his sculpture is on creating a broad field of operations, where alterations of apparent initial intentions and meaning are gradually established in the development of the work.
Swiss artist Zimoun enjoys significant international renown for an oeuvre that he has been creating over a period of some 20 years. Zimoun uses kinetic principles of rotation and oscillation to set things in motion and generate sounds. He uses mundane, unspectacular materials and conventional industrial products. For his works, he develops small, minimalist apparatus that generate tonal and visual complexity when activated, despite their fundamental simplicity. These mechanical contraptions are often used hundreds of times in the installations, creating visual and acoustic spaces with fascinating power and poetry.
This book presents 65 of these location-specific installations that Zimoun realised between 2009 and 2021 in various art galleries and museums around the world. The full-page images are supplemented with brief texts by international authors, who outline a variety of perspectives on Zimoun’s work. Two concise essays consider and position his oeuvre in the wider international and art historical context. QR codes provided with all the images extend the book by enabling the direct playback of video documentations available online on smartphones or tablets, thus offering the reader the additional dimension of sound and movement — the essential elements of Zimoun’s art.
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.
This book grants unexpected, beautiful and provoking insights into the diversity of the collection of treasures held in Leipzig’s GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts. Focusing on the joy of contemplating the works, its hope is to awaken the desire for a personal encounter with them. The sequence of illustrations highlights exciting connections, diversions and views between the objects. Chronological records or even the stringent arrangement of the collections and materials play no role here, allowing surprisingly novel, latent qualities that are frequently otherwise hidden, to be revealed.
In this publication the works meet face to face and present a wonderful survey of the diverse forms of applied art and design.
ECHTZEIT is made in collaboration with Dirk Braeckman (BE, °1958) and FOMU Antwerp in line with his impacting solo show with the Collections department of the photo museum. Echtzeit offers a unique glimpse into Dirk Braeckman’s most recent photographs, accompanied with the museum’s collection and texts written by Clément Chéroux, director of the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson and Tamara Berghmans, curator of the exhibition.
Braeckman has chosen from the FOMU collection functional photographs, made without artistic ambition. He recognised certain qualities and commonalities with his own work in these atypical images.
Re-photography and experimentation have always formed part of Braeckman’s artistic practice, though the trajectory to the final image is always different. For the FOMU exhibition, he worked for the first time with an existing collection of photos. Braeckman took photos of the chosen images and printed them. He then over-painted, smeared or cut holes in the prints. He photographed the results and processed them further in his analogue and digital darkroom.
The original meaning of the photographs has been altered through the removal of context, the change in format and the addition of titles. A functional document is transformed into a piece of art, a timeless visual poem that raises more questions than it answers.
‘Echtzeit’ refers to Braeckman’s bridging of the past and present.
Text in English, French and Dutch.
The Alice and Louis Koch Collection of finger rings was originally collated by a jeweller from Frankfurt am Main, once described as the German ‘Cartier and Fabergé’. By 1909 the collection comprised 1,722 rings from Antiquity to 1900. Rene Lalique, a contemporary of the time, was included, undoubtedly as a moderniser of the ring form. In the past twenty-five years the fourth generation of the family continued where Louis Koch and his wife Alice left off and expanded the collection to include rings from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This publication will present the complete collection of contemporary rings, now kept in the Swiss National Museum, Zurich. Nearly 600 rings by artist jewellers from around the world document how these miniature works of art have become modern sculptures showcasing new materials and techniques, daring designs and current themes.
Text in English and German.
In 2022, Princeton University inaugurated Yeh College and New College West and introduced a new addition to its extensive collection of site-responsive campus art installations. The Home We Share is a series of three colourful, joyous and playful space settings, nestled into the landscape surrounding these new residential colleges, and offers spaces for gathering, relaxation, and play to generations of students who call this place home. Designed by R&R Studios — a multidisciplinary Miami-based firm weaving together visual arts, exhibition design, architecture, and urban design — they offer a unique artistic impulse for social interaction among the students, teachers and other people visiting Princeton University.
This book features The Home We Share through some 100 conceptual diagrams, hand drawings, architectural plans, construction photos, and a photographic documentation of the realised installations on the Princeton campus. The images are framed by an essay by distinguished architecture historian Michelangelo Sabatini, an interview with R&R Studio’s founders Robert Behar and Rosario Marquardt by curator Mitra Abbaspour, and a foreword by James Christen Steward, director of Princeton University Art Museum.
The colonisation of the world by European powers led to the production of a wealth of images of the colonised cultures and peoples. Images of North American Indians play an important role in our visual culture. This publication illuminates how they are represented, as well as their political and historico-cultural background, based on the so-called ‘Indian Museum’ of the Dresden sculptor Ferdinand Pettrich (1798-1872).
In the 1830s, Pettrich travelled to Washington and portrayed representatives of Indian tribes in 33 reliefs, statues, busts and bozzetti made of terracotta-coloured plaster. These tribes were negotiating treaties with the US government about the future usage of the land. Pettrich’s oeuvre is an early example of the recurring motif of North American Indians in European and Euro-American art. The classically-influenced forms of these representations, the influence of the simultaneously emerging ‘Indian painting’, as well as the lasting fascination of the subject of ‘Indians’ are presented here, along with the political context of the era the works were created in.
Text in English and German.
In the decade before his death in 2011, John Hoyland began to reckon with mortality. Confronting his own demise, he painted elegies to departed artist friends and tributes to illustrious artistic forebears. Imagery of the void looms large, but it is a void faced with defiance and vitality, less a rumination on the end than a celebration of life. This publication explores the paintings Hoyland made in this decade, including his final series, the Mysteries.
Essays by Natalie Adamson, David Anfam, Matthew Collings and Mel Gooding offer a rich and multifaceted account of a complex body of work. Hoyland’s veneration of Vincent van Gogh, his connections to J.M.W. Turner, the use of black as a colour, his deployment of risk and attempts to subvert his own taste, and his development of the cosmic visual language of the Abstract Expressionists are all discussed. Richly illustrated, the book extends our understanding of Hoyland’s late work within the story of modern painting as a whole.
The skilful works of Yasuhisa Kohyama are inspired by ancient Japanese Shigaraki, Jomon and Yayoi ceramics. Using special Shigaraki clay and the fire of an anagama wood kiln, in the fusion of traditional technique and a modern language of form he creates vessels and sculptures that are not only powerful and innovative but also timelessly beautiful. Characteristic for Kohyama’s asymmetric objects is their rough surface – a haptic quality rarely found in contemporary ceramics – as well as an exciting interplay of colour, which is created without glaze and solely by the movement of the ash and the position of the object within the kiln.
Contents:
Foreword – Jack Lenor Larsen
Tradition and Innovation in the Work of Yasuhisa Kohyama – Susan Jefferies
Kohyama-san and Japanese Ceramic History: Notes on “Suemono” – Michael R. Cunningham
Yasuhisa Kohyama: The Art of Ceramics – Yoshiaki Inui
Catalog of works
Appendix
In her research-intensive practice, Rohini Devasher (b. 1978) explores the intersections between science, art, and philosophy. Astronomy, in which working with light plays a central role, is of particular importance to the Indian artist. “Borrowed” or reflected light allows phenomena to be captured and understood that otherwise remain in the dark—and, therefore, far removed from the realms of human perception. Devasher reveals the complexity of the processes of seeing and shows how thin the line is between knowledge and mystery. Rohini Devasher was named Deutsche Bank’s ‘Artist of the Year’ for 2024. This publication accompanies her first solo exhibition at a major institution in Germany—Borrowed Light at the PalaisPopulaire in Berlin.
Text in English and German.