International photography stars, Americans BJ and Richeille Formento form an artistic duo blending photography, cinema, and fashion aesthetics into emotionally charged, narrative-driven works. Their visual universe — glamorous, melancholic, and cinematic — transforms every image into a suspended moment between dream and reality. Richeille oversees artistic direction and styling, while BJ creates the lighting and photography, producing sophisticated images reminiscent of major motion pictures. Their visual explorations span the United States, Japan, Cuba, Mexico, India, Thailand, and France, where they examine identity, desire, nostalgia, sexuality, and social tensions.
Text in English and French.
A richly illustrated guide to understanding what makes art meaningful, powerful, and enduring.
For as long as people have made images, they have argued about which ones matter most. Why are some works of art celebrated as timeless masterpieces, while others fade from view? Who decides what counts as “great,” and on what grounds—beauty, skill, emotion, originality, cultural power, or something else entirely? In What Makes Great Art?, art historian Janetta Rebold Benton guides readers through this enduring debate. Throughout the book, one hundred carefully paired illustrations invite readers to compare works side by side. Drawing on examples from Western art while acknowledging parallel ideas in other cultures, Benton examines how artists, critics, collectors, museums, markets, and viewers themselves shape the idea of artistic greatness. Moving from classical philosophy and Renaissance ideals to modern neuroscience and contemporary practice, Benton explores whether greatness transcends time and place, whether technical mastery alone is enough, and how emotion, intellect, and personal response factor into our judgments. Rather than offering a single definition of greatness, Benton assists readers in developing their own criteria for artistic excellence. Published in an attractive, giftable format, with full-colour illustrations throughout, What Makes Great Art? is for anyone who has ever stood in front of a work of art and wondered why it deserves a spot in a major museum such as the Louvre in Paris, British Museum in London, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
As some American artists began to eliminate people and remove extraneous details from their compositions, they often employed neat, orderly brushwork or close-up, unemotional photography. Artists as diverse as Patrick Henry Bruce, John Covert, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand and Arthur Dove navigated European and American avant-garde circles, picking and choosing new ideas and methods.
Inspiration ranged from cubism and machine parts to new technologies, and they found ways to bring order to the modern world through extreme simplification. For them, abstraction involved absence and presence – the evacuation of human beings but also the desire to depict something that would not otherwise be visible or to render visible unseen natural processes like the passage of time, sound waves, or weather patterns. Their artworks provide a new context for the precisionist works in the subsequent sections and point to modern ideas about what art could be. How does a crisp painting technique relate to an aesthetic of absence?
In October 2015, metal detectorist James Mather discovered an important Viking hoard near Watlington in South Oxfordshire. The hoard dates from the end of the 870s, a key moment in the struggle between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings for control of southern England. The Watlington hoard is a significant new source of information on that struggle, throwing new light not only on the conflict between Anglo-Saxon and Viking, but also on the changing relationship between the two great Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex. This was to lead to the formation of a single united kingdom of England only a few years later.
The hoard contains a mixture of Anglo-Saxon coins and Viking silver, and is in many ways a typical Viking hoard. However, its significance comes from the fact that it contains so many examples of previously rare coins belonging to Alfred the Great, king of Wessex (871-99) and his less well-known contemporary Ceolwulf II of Mercia (874-c.879). These coins provide a clearer understanding of the relationship between Alfred and Ceolwulf, and perhaps also of how the once great kingdom of Mercia came to be absorbed into the emerging kingdom of England by Alfred and his successors. A major fundraising campaign is being planned by the Ashmolean to secure this collection for the museum.
The Ashmolean Museum and the Albertina are collaborating on a two-part exhibition project that will examine anew the role and the significance of drawing in Raphael’s career. The Ashmolean holds the greatest collection of Raphael drawings in the world, and the Albertina is the custodian of a major collection including some of the most beautiful and important of the artist’s sketches. Taken together, the two collections provide extraordinary resources that, amplified by carefully-selected international loans, will allow us to transform our understanding of the art of Raphael.
The Oxford exhibition is based on new research by Dr Catherine Whistler of the Ashmolean Museum and Dr Ben Thomas from the University of Kent, in collaboration with Dr Achim Gnann of the Albertina. It will take Raphael’s art of drawing as its focus, with the concept of eloquence as its underlying structure. Oratory runs as a linking thread in Raphael’s drawings, which stand out for the importance given to the study of gestures, facial expressions, and drapery. Moreover, Raphael treated the expressive figure of the orator – poet, philosopher, muse, apostle, saint or sibyl – in fascinating and significant ways throughout his life.
This selection of drawings demonstrates how Raphael created a specific mode of visual invention and persuasive communication through drawing. He used drawing both as conceptual art (including brainstorming sheets) and as a practice based on attentive observation (such as drawing from the posed model). Yet Raphael’s drawings also reveal how the process of drawing in itself, with its gestural rhythms and spontaneity, can be a form of thought, generating new ideas. The Oxford exhibition will present drawings that span Raphael’s entire career, encompassing many of his major projects and exploring his visual language from inventive ideas to full compositions. The extraordinary range of drawings by Raphael in the Ashmolean and the Albertina, enhanced by appropriate loans, will enable this exhibition to cast new light on this familiar artist, transforming our understanding of Raphael’s art.
This book preluded a major exhibition, which ran from 1 June to 3 October 2017, with a range of events happening throughout this time.
In keeping with an editorial strategy that aims to bring to public attention all of the various groups of works belonging to the Calouste Gulbenkian Collection, a book devoted to its drawings and watercolours has been published. Featuring texts by Manuela Fidalgo, who worked as a curator at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum until her retirement, this edition is the product of several years of thorough research underpinned by technical and scientific rigour and the involvement of several international experts in the art of drawing.
This publication therefore plays an essential part in raising awareness of one of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum’s least-well known collections, which includes works produced in the main centres of European art (France, Holland, Flanders, England and Italy) between the 16th and early 20th centuries by great masters such as Dürer, Watteau, Boucher, Turner and Sargent, among others. This book also gives us a clearer picture of Calouste Gulbenkian’s artistic sensibility as a collector: despite claiming not to be attracted to drawing, the beauty and quality of the works brought together here were such that he could not resist purchasing them.
Bricks, one of the earliest materials associated with both housing and the body, are the subject and object of this publication. In terms of human agency, bricks are the basic unit through which the artist introduces his designs in the landscape. Kaufmann uses this simple, yet tough, material to build up an imaginative world that is not linked solely to the bricks as such, but also to the symbolic charge they possess (the concept of transparency, physical and metaphorical walls, and their associated imaginative world). A total of ten works will be exhibited and Kaufmann himself presents each in the book. The introduction is edited by Anne-Claire Schumacher, who discusses Kaufmann’s development and his place in the history of ceramic art and in contemporary art as a whole. This is followed by a contribution by Luca Pattaroni, who views the topic from a socio-political perspective. The five main works set in the park of the Ariana Museum and the continuation into the museum’s basement are described and commented by the artist.
Text in English and French.
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum houses an extraordinary collection of ‘prisoners’ objects’. These were made by prison inmates and presented to the ICRC delegates who visited them, as provided for by the Geneva Conventions. For over a century, these objects have borne mute witness to the numerous violent episodes that continue to ravage our planet, from Chile, Vietnam, Algeria and Yugoslavia, to Rwanda and Afghanistan. Made from simple materials – whatever comes to hand in a prison – these objects express the need to escape the world of the jailbird. As a Lebanese inmate puts it, ‘Creating is a way of acquiring freedom of expression, it gives us a means to say what we think while everything we see around urges us to keep quiet and to forget who we are.’ While some of these works touch us through their simplicity, others astonish us with their beauty or ingeniousness. Each bears the imprint of a personal story loaded with emotion, inviting us on a journey through time and collective history.
Eclectic, eccentric and tirelessly innovative, art crafted from cut paper has experienced an exciting renaissance in recent years. Published to accompany a travelling exhibit organised by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Slash: Paper Under the Knife examines the resurgence of traditional handicraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design. Highlighting the work of forty-five international artists, among them Olafur Eliasson, Tom Friedman, William Kentridge, and Kara Walker, the book features not only cut but also burned, torn, laser-cut, shredded and sculpted paper art. In addition, the book includes cut-paper animation, as well as cut paper incorporated in photography and fashion. Works range from small-scale intricate cuttings to large-scale architectural inventions and sculptures. With an essay by well-known decorative arts expert David Revere McFadden, this singular book reveals that, with ingenuity and craftsmanship, one of our most familiar implements can be transformed into unforgettable works of art.
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.
From her early depictions of individual objects to her later works featuring complex interiors, American artist Lynn Shaler’s works are distinctive, characterised by a colourful aquatint technique combined with carefully etched lines. Over a forty-year career, she has created more than two hundred aquatint etchings and has been included in major museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Lynn Shaler: Fine Prints, 1972-2017 is the first catalogue to spotlight this important American artist’s entire body of work. Many of the etchings have been inspired by locations in Paris, where Shaler has lived for three decades. The book reproduces nearly all of her works, alongside accompanying essays which examine recurring themes and motifs in Shaler’s work, such as architectural details or intimate interior views opening onto an exterior scene.
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 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 beautifully designed book is a celebration of one of the world’s most creative, dynamic and fascinating cities: Tokyo. It spans 400 years, with highlights including Kano school paintings; the iconic woodblock prints of Hiroshige; Tokyo Pop Art posters; the photography of Moriyama Daido and Ninagawa Mika; manga; film; and contemporary art by Murakami Takashi and Aida Makoto. Visually bold and richly detailed, this publication looks at a city which has undergone constant destruction and renewal and it tells the stories of the people who have made Tokyo so famous with their insatiable appetite for the new and innovative – from the samurai to avantgarde artists today. Co-edited by Japanese art specialists and curators Lena Fritsch and Clare Pollard from Oxford University, this accessible volume features 28 texts by international experts of Japanese culture, as well as original statements by influential artists.
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.
Embroideries from the Greek islands dazzle with their bright colours and charming motifs. This publication reveals little-known pieces from the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, newly photographed and published here for the first time. The embroideries include fragments of pillowcases, bed valances, tents and curtains, as well as items of dress. As with all collections of textiles, the story of the Ashmolean holdings is chiefly about their makers and their ingenuity. Once forming the bulk of bridal trousseaux, Greek embroidered textiles were produced and maintained by young and old women for themselves and the house using locally produced materials. A mark of their worth and a platform for self-expression, embroidered textiles also helped Greek women to negotiate their place in the community, signalling status and affiliation.
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 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.