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 Containing previously unpublished research and a wealth of previously hidden material from museums and private collections around the world, and written by a team of international museum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

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.

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.

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.

The New York jewellery firm of Marcus & Co. (1892–1942) created exceptional examples of Art Nouveau and Art Deco jewellery for an art-loving, wealthy elite. Innovative in their collaboration with contemporary artists, and in their captivating window displays and advertisements, the firm captured the imagination of Gilded Age families such as the Rockefellers. This volume chronicles their story, from the founder’s apprenticeship in Dresden to the firm’s grand premises on Fifth Avenue neighbouring Tiffany and Cartier. The triumphs and tragedies of three generations of Marcus jewellers, both artistic and entrepreneurial, are presented here together with exquisite jewellery and archival design drawings spanning 50 years.

This book aims to tell the story of social history through Money. Money and Art have shared a long history. Both words are metaphors derived from Latin terms used over 2,000 years ago. The word Money derives its modern meaning as the general term for all means of payment from its use as the word for coins in the pre-modern period. Particularly since the introduction of paper money, the word was applied to coins because of the name of the place where coins were made in ancient Rome, the temple of Juno Moneta (Juno the Warner), from this name the word moneta came to mean mint in Latin, and later the product of a mint, i.e. coins. The word Art acquired its modern usage, meaning works of art, both singularly and collectively, from the Latin ars meaning a skill, and it has so been used in English to describe any form of skill, but gradually from the nineteenth century, the word came to signify the product rather than the skill, particularly in relation to painting, graphic works and sculpture. This eclectic collection of stories brings together a multitude of perspectives through collections from the Ashmolean and around the world — from Art Nouveau bank notes and global portrayals of prosperity to activist Money Art. Deep dives into compelling stories reveal humour, hidden surprises and a tension between the power of money and the playfulness of art.

“This is the very best of Antwerp and the best from here in Oxford.” — The Oxford Times Weekend
“This entertaining exhibition of the 16th- and 17th-century drawings from the Low Countries has energy to spare.” —  The Telegraph
This catalogue will accompany the Bruegel to Rubens exhibition held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford between 23 March and 23 June 2024.

Through a selection of over 100 world-class drawings created by Flemish artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an insightful and comprehensive overview will be given into how these drawn sheets were used as part of artistic practice, within or beyond the artist’s studio. By revealing the drawings’ function, rather than on their attribution or iconography, these sheets will become more fully understood through the eyes of contemporary readers. Identifying how and why these sheets were created will render these artworks more accessible to a wider audience. The three main essays will each deal with one of the principal functions of drawings at the time: studies (copies and sketches), designs for other artworks (paintings, prints, tapestries, metalwork, stained glass, sculpture and architecture), and finally the independent drawings. Each essay will discuss the relevant works within their functional context and compared with other related objects. Introductory chapters will focus on what precisely can be considered a drawing, including its materials, media and techniques, in addition to an attempt to explain the notion of Flanders and Flemish art. Emphasis will be placed throughout the catalogue on how Flemish artists collaborated in creating the most astonishing artworks of their time, unveiling their networks and friendships, as well as their travels across Europe, revealing their international importance.

The exhibition is a partnership with the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp and will bring together for the first time the most stunning drawings from both the Ashmolean and the Plantin-Moretus collections, in addition to further loans from renowned Antwerp and Oxford institutions like the Rubenshuis and Christ Church Picture Gallery. Many of the sheets coming from Antwerp are registered on the Flemish Government’s Masterpieces List and will not be shown again for the next five to ten years to protect them from fading. Prominent artists featured in this catalogue include Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacques Jordaens, among many others. Highlights will include a sketchbook in which a young Rubens has copied Holbein’s Dance of Death woodcuts, intricate pen and ink drawings by Pieter Bruegel, meticulously drawn miniatures by Joris Hoefnagel, portrait studies by Anthony van Dyck, and a rare survival of a friendship album containing numerous drawings and poems dedicated to its owner. Two recently discovered sheets by Rubens will also be included, a design for a book-illustration on optics and an anatomical study of three legs.

A giftable miniature book celebrating the achievements of women artists throughout history.

This colourful little volume presents more than 250 works from the renowned collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the first museum in the world solely dedicated to championing women in the arts. Now in its third edition, the Women Artists Tiny Folio has been revised and updated from cover to cover to include works by a diverse array of creators from around the world, and from the 16th century to the present. From Lavinia Fontana to Frida Kahlo to Amy Sherald, and from Louise Bourgeois to Niki de Saint Phalle to Faith Ringgold, here are women artists to inspire every reader.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The red-figure vases from the National Museum “Domenico Ridola” in Matera and the Rizzon Collection – rich in precious Apulian and Lucanian pieces – offer a unique opportunity to grasp Magna Graecia antiquity from an unusual perspective through the photographs by Luigi Spina. Significant testimony to vase painting between the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, the museum’s artefacts largely date back to the discoveries of Domenico Ridola (1841-1932) and form part of elaborate funerary assemblages, possessing great aesthetic and historical value through which everyday life is reflected in myths.

In the book, black is the protagonist: it enhances the red figures and brings out the keen eye of photographer Luigi Spina. Anatomical details, drapery, and decorative motifs emerge in all their strength without the filter of museum cases, while touches of white enrich the vases’ bichrome palette.

Photographing a work of art means capturing its deep meaning to communicate it to the world. Far from the idea of a museum catalogue, the volume is rather a figurative atlas of antiquity.

Text in English and Italian.

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.

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.

Basel-born architect Max Alioth (1930–2010) was a prominent figure on the Swiss architecture and culture scene. Alioth was a co-founder of Basels’ Architecture Museum in 1984, which in 2006 became the Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM). Together with his wife Susanna Biedermann, he founded the École Supérieure des Arts Visuels (ÉSAV) in Marrakech, Morocco, for which he also designed the main campus building.

This first monograph on Max Alioth illuminates his achievements from various perspectives. Selected architectural designs from 1961–2007 are featured in detail through photographs, plans, and texts. These include single-family homes, a retirement home, multi-unit housing, Basel’s Museum of Antiquities, as well as the ÉSAV building in Marrakech. Moreover, the book introduces Alioth also as a visual artist through reproductions of sketches, drawings, and watercolours. Essays by architect Roger Diener, the S AM’s director Andreas Ruby, the director of ÉSAV Vincent Melilli, and art historian and publicist Ulrike Jehle-Schulte Strathaus round out this volume.

Text in English and German.

One of the most representative artists in the field of abstract art in Shanghai and even throughout China, Huang Yuanqing has developed a uniquely distinctive visual philosophy of his paintings. This book features 113 representative works. On the surface, they may appear close to Western action painting, but in fact they embody the rhythmic logic of wild cursive script (kuangcao) from traditional Chinese calligraphy. In particular, the seemingly casual brushstrokes on the canvas are actually a tightly controlled form of improvisation. Moreover, each work requires repeated layering—sometimes over several months—achieving a dynamic balance between improvisation and continuous revision. Huang Yuanqing’s practice is rooted in the tradition of calligraphy, integrating seal carving, music, and other artistic forms. His works at times emphasise colour and space, at other moments lean toward writing and graffiti, yet he has never abandoned calligraphic creation independent of his paintings. The result is a new form of abstract art that fuses various script styles as its structural backbone, with colour and space as its flesh—achieving a cross-dimensional integration of two different art forms: painting and calligraphy.

“STRAAT Museum allows a wide audience to discover and understand the DNA of graffiti and street art, through an in-depth and unique contextualization perfectly fulfilled in Quote from the streets, its opening exhibition which is reproduced in this catalogue.” – Christian Omodeo

This catalogue for the new international graffiti and street art museum in Amsterdam, STRAAT, features work created on-site by the greatest artists of today’s street art scene. STRAAT – Quote from the Streets tells the story of street art as a full-fledged art movement and explores the evolution of ‘art in the street’, in addition to the development of the new museum. The catalogue is above all a feast for the eyes, with many full-page images of the best street art talent from around the world.

Markus Raetz is one of the most renowned contemporary artists in Switzerland. Initially educated and working as a primary school teacher, he became an artist in his early twenties. Since the 1970s, his work, including solo exhibitions, has been on the international stage. Raetz works with a variety of materials and media. The phenomenon of perception is his main focus, rather than how something is represented. Prints form a major part of his work. Markus Raetz.The Prints 1951-2013 covers his complete body of work in this genre.; the Catalogue Raisonné is complemented by a separate volume, with essays on his work and artistic development. Exhibitions: Museum of Fine Arts Bern, early 2014 (date TBC). Markus Raetz is represented with works also in the permanent collections of museums such as: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Main); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla CA; Tate Gallery, London; MoMA, New York; Musée national d art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Schaulager, Münchenstein near Basel; Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Text in English, German and French.

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.

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