The founder and patron Reinhard Ernst planned a home for his unique collection; the city of Wiesbaden provided a site in the heart of the city and the Japanese star architect Fumihiko Maki delivered the plans. The result is the Museum Reinhard Ernst for abstract art, an architectural gem, but also a building open to the public and a magnet for the international art public alike. 

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?

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.

As one of the leading critical voices on art of the postwar years, polymath Lawrence Gowing (1918–1991) combined a passion for close visual involvement with formidable literary skills. Edited by art historian Sarah Whitfield, four decades of Gowing’s writing are brought together for the first time in this volume, covering subjects from the Old Masters to Francis Bacon and Howard Hodgkin.

Having first gained success as a painter, Gowing’s 1952 monograph on Vermeer brought him early recognition as a writer with the ability to combine aesthetic experience with a meticulous historical perspective.

Gowing’s foremost commitment was to the pioneering painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. The exhibitions he curated at the Tate and Museum of Modern Art famously helped to mould and reshape public perceptions. Characterised by a desire to instruct and encourage, his writing reflects a highly successful career as a curator and teacher.

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.

Did you know that Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen was the first public art institution in the Netherlands to acquire a painting by Vincent Van Gogh for its collection? And that 20,562 litres of water are needed for Olafur Eliasson’s installation Notion motion? Or that Gerard Reve once sent an admiring letter to the museum about Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s small panel The Glorification of the Virgin? These and many more fascinating facts can be found in a lavishly illustrated publication featuring more than 150 highlights from the collection.

For over 170 years, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has been building up a very varied collection of art and design from the Middle Ages to the present day. Best of Boijmans presents the collection as a unity in diversity. Detached from time, place and medium, surprising connections are made between the different areas of the collection. A sculpture of a human figure by the contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan bears an unexpected resemblance to a drawing of John the Baptist by Raphael; a 19th‐century landscape by Barend Cornelis Koekkoek sits extraordinarily comfortably alongside a work by the Rotterdam artist Daan van Golden. This handy little book takes you on a thematic, visual journey through the collection.

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.

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.

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 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.

‘Beauty is the beacon of God,’ said Botticelli. ‘No, it’s not. Love is,’ snapped his sister.

Beauty: Botticelli in Florence imagines what Botticelli was feeling and thinking as he painted. The people he loved and despised, his private struggle between spirituality and sensuality, the tempestuous times he lived through – all come to life in his images…

The novel is a speculation based on the few facts known about Botticelli, informed by his paintings. There are many surprises. The Birth of Venus was a tapestry design. And his famed self-portrait didn’t depict him (as widely believed) but Pierfrancesco de Medici, who sued his powerful cousin Lorenzo for robbing him, abolished Florence’s homophobic witch-hunts, funded Vespucci’s journey to the New World and commissioned Botticelli’s most famous works. There was boiling tension between him and Botticelli.

This is the first in a sequence of illustrated ‘painting novels’ that make sights as telling as words.

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.

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.

India, Jewels that Enchanted the World presents for the first time the remarkable history and unique legacy of 500 years of Indian jewellery, from the 17th century to the present. The essays, all written by leading international scholars, explore the rich, distinctive, and unique heritage of Indian jewellery; the striking boldness of South Indian ornaments; the delicate refinement of the Mughal period; the dazzling jewels of the post-Mughal maharajas; the cross-cultural influences between Europe and India in the 19th and early 20th centuries; and the creations of leading contemporary designers whose jewels display the enduring beauty of Indian design and craftsmanship.

Published to accompany a major exhibition at the State Museums of the Moscow Kremlin organised jointly with the Indo-Russian Jewellery Foundation, this lavishly illustrated catalogue brings together royal, ceremonial, and personal Indian jewels to showcase the entire range and variety of the jeweller’s art in India.

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.

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.

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.

For ten years, Abbie Zabar – artist and bestselling author of The Potted Herb – had unique early-morning access to the Great Hall at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each week, from 1994 to 2004, she drew the magisterial bouquets that adorned the soaring neoclassical entrance to one of the world’s most visited art institutions.

Published for the first time, Abbie’s exquisite colour pencil drawings of these floral masterpieces are presented in a beautifully fashioned gift book. Each drawing showcases her signature flair, her understanding of botanical elements, and her subtle use of colour. Whether a Christmas arrangement with magnolia leaves, red berries and flyaway branches, or a summer fiesta of palm leaves, red hot pokers, and birds of paradise, in the hands of their secret chronicler, these floral arrangements are alive with all the beauty and joy of nature. A timeless treasure for patrons of the museum; anyone drawn to florals and botanical art; gardeners and long-time fans of Abbie’s work. The perfect gift for any occasion.

This publication brings together over 60 works on paper created from 2005 to the present day by London-based artist Neil Gall (born 1967, Aberdeen), whose works balance the profound with the absurd.

In works that buzz with art historical reference, Gall has consistently explored matters of perception and mimesis through the visual language of household detritus. He translates the visceral and psychological interactions between materials and their surfaces – corrugated cardboard and pressed tinfoil, ping-pong balls enshrouded in black tape – to an unsettling, surreal and sometimes erotic effect.

Essays by art historian Lexi Lee Sullivan and artist Alexander Ross are augmented by thoughtful insights from gallerist George Newall and an introduction from Gall’s dealers David Nolan and Aurel Scheibler.

The catalogue Other People Think by MARTa Herford accompanies the first exhibition of works from entrepreneur Heiner Wemhöner’s private collection of contemporary art in his hometown. Curated by museum director Kathleen Rahn, the show presents a selection of around 70 works by 25 artists and highlights the dialogue between the works as well as between the artworks and the architecture of the museum, which was designed by Frank Gehry. Across different media, the show explores political statements, issues relating to the body and identity, and the power of gestural expression. In addition to general contextual explanations of the collection by the curator, an essay by Doris Krystof examines the film installation Once Again … (Statues Never Die) by artist Isaac Julien, using it to address questions around the treatment of African artefacts and colonial heritage, and shedding new light on the very nature of collecting.

Text in English and German.

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.