Andrew Holmes is renowned for his hyper-real coloured pencil drawings. His subject matter is the fixed and mobile service infrastructure that sustains the city of Los Angeles. The gleaming trucks, automobiles, and motorcycles that traverse the highways, and the industrial armature of storage tanks, service stations and truck stops to be found beyond the city’s edge are, for Holmes, the greatest artefacts of a society based on oil. Over the past 50 years, he has captured scenes from this uniquely American landscape in painstaking detail. Together they evoke a lost civilisation. Gas Tank City presents 100 of Holmes’s Los Angeles drawings, along with commentaries by art historian, Thomas E Crow, architects Mark Fisher and Cedric Price, and Holmes himself.

A beautifully illustrated and extensively researched collection of 100 of the most famous houses of Britain’s Arts and Crafts Movement.

The Arts and Crafts Movement, founded in the philosophies of John Ruskin and William Morris, produced some of the world’s most enduring architectural masterpieces. Author and architect David Cole presents the 100 great Arts and Crafts houses, each individually described and analysed with insightful detail and floor plans, and illustrated with stunning photography.

Beginning with Morris’s own iconic Red House, the book traces the fifty-year span of the movement, with a short chapter dedicated to each of these extraordinary houses: from the works of the pioneer Arts and Crafts architects, to the great reformer architects of the next generation, to the craftsman architects who took their lives and their work to the countryside, to the movement’s Scottish architects, and finally to the houses of the Garden Cities and suburbs built through the movement’s last decade before the First World War. The book features the great houses of some forty of the movement’s most renowned architects, including Philip Webb, R. Norman Shaw, E.S. Prior, William Lethaby, C.F.A. Voysey, Edgar Wood, Ernest Gimson, the Barnsley brothers, C.R. Ashbee, M.H. Baillie Scott, Edwin Lutyens, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Robert Lorimer, Parker and Unwin, and many others.

As Morris famously said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

The volume is the first publication dedicated exclusively to the theme of Italian perfumery. A real manual, divided into three parts, offering a summary of the perfumes produced in Italy, reviewing the great brands that have made the olfactory taste known throughout the world, through wonderful essences, cutting-edge marketing and bottles with a refined design.

The author, in reminding us how modern perfumery was born in Italy – reaching the much more famous France only in the 16th century, when Caterina de ‘Medici married the Duke of Orleans – retraces in the first part of the book the events that have marked the development of this art, which has become one of the excellences of Made in Italy.

An anthology of 100 famous perfumes follows – selected for the significance of their features – accompanied by extensive descriptive cards and divided by decades starting from the seventies, allowing you to follow the evolution of contemporary perfumery up until current trends. A chapter is then dedicated to the perfume production chain, told in the words of some excellent protagonists.

Rich apparatuses complete the volume: research that covers the approximately 7,000 fragrances produced in Italy in the last 50 years, with an indication of the manufacturer, the genre and year, and a table that visually illustrates the 100 fragrances divided into olfactory groups, and their chronological placement.

After the international success of the Design History Handbook, Silvana Editoriale presents a new tool intended not only for insiders, but also for anyone that uses and loves perfumes.

The book is sponsored by the Accademia del Profumo.

This first-person account of a legendary necropolis will delight Francophiles, tourists and armchair travelers, while enriching the experience of taphophiles (cemetery lovers) and aficionados of art and architecture, mystery and romance. Carolyn Campbell’s evocative images are complemented by those of renowned landscape photographer Joe Cornish. City of Immortals celebrates the novelty and eccentricity of Père-Lachaise Cemetery through the engrossing story of the history of the site established by Napoleonic decree along with portraits of the last moments of the cultural icons buried within its walls. In addition to several ‘conversations’ with some of the high-profile residents, three guided tours are provided along with an illustrated pull-out map featuring the grave sites of eighty-four architects, artists, writers, musicians, dancers, filmmakers and actors, including Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison of the Doors. Frédéric Chopin, Georges Bizet, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Isadora Duncan, Eugène Delacroix, Gertrude Stein, Amedeo Modigliani, Sarah Bernhardt, Simone Signoret, Colette and Marcel Proust.

Burst! Abstract Painting After 1945 looks at the close, but previously unexplored relationship between Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel. Through texts and close to 100 illustrations, the book describes a vital creative exchange across the Atlantic that would entirely redefine painting. Big, expansive, paint-splattered surfaces; spontaneous actions captured on canvas; new ideas of freedom. A story of post-war recovery and Transatlantic dialogue. On both sides of the ocean, society was reacting to the horrors of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the coming of the atom bomb. The book shows how artists searched for new ways to deal with these shattering events. With works by Jean Dubuffet, Natalia Dumitresco, Helen Frankenthaler, Asger Jorn, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Georges Mathieu, Hedda Sterne and Clyfford Still, and more.

Jasper Krabbe – 100 Selfportraits includes an impressive number of self-portraits made in the period between the Summer of 2004 and the Summer of 2005. The portraits’ formats have been determined by the measurements of an old bookkeeping book in which Krabbe made his self-portraits – one dating from the nineteen-fifties with squared and blank pages. Even the paint he uses for this project is from the same period. This corresponds with the idea that the self-portrait is a typical nineteenth-century activity. The book has been reproduced as a facsimile, which means that the reader has the feeling of looking at the original sketchbook of the artist. Krabbe wanted to explore what the self-portrait can still be in today’s age. He wanted to gauge changing emotions, capture a moment and find the right tone. The selection in the book shows the diversity of solutions and styles he used. The self-portraits reveal there is no such thing as a fixed identity but maybe rather a ‘core’, a soul that is unchangeable. Text in Dutch and English.

This book offers a privileged journey through the geography and history of Italian and international figurative culture kept at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, with works spanning a chronological period from the 13th to the 20th centuries. The Pinacoteca, born within the Enlightenment culture as a testimony to the progress of the human spirit, remains today a dynamic and lively instrument of civilisation. The book reconstructs the patronage and provenance of the paintings and the way in which they were received; it specifies their technical data, as well as introducing comments and in-depth studies.

In addition, the rich illustrative apparatus leads to continuous comparisons and new explorations.

Aenne Biermann (1898–1933) was one of the leading figures of photography in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, she is considered one of the most important avant-garde photographers of the 20th century. In just a few years of practice, the self-taught artist became a well-known representative of German photography, participating in almost all the important exhibitions of her time. She captured plants, objects, people, and everyday situations in pictures that have to this day lost none of their allure and poignancy. By means of clear structures, precise compositions of light and contrast, as well as narrow framing, she drew a special kind of poetry out of the motifs of her personal environment and developed her own, distinctly modern pictorial style.

This is the first substantial new book in English on this exceptional artist since the 1930s, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in fall 2021. The large-format volume features some 100 of Aenne Biermann’s photographs in colour and duotone reproduction, several of them published here for the first time ever. This impressive selection is complemented by essays on Biremann’s photography in art-historical context and on selected aspects of her oeuvre.

Text in English and Hebrew.

An exhibition featuring the work of Aenne Biermann is taking place at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from 5 August 2021.

Rambusch: The First 100 Years, 1898–1998 chronicles the growth of an independent, workshop-based, family business now being run by a fourth generation. This book offers the definitive history of the company started by Danish-born Frode Christian Valdemar Rambusch (1859–1924) in New York. Beginning with his efforts in decorative painting and murals, the story expands into lighting design and continues with a study of subsequent generations building upon – and further expanding – these fields of work into other media. The narrative also provides focus on more than two dozen artisans responsible for making the objects and interiors often requested by well-known architects.

Few American firms have flourished as this company has in the United States. Now in the 21st century, the firm inspires similar collaborative efforts between architects, designers, and craft studios to work together for the decorative arts to regain their place in the finishing of our nation’s buildings.

Notable for its longevity and still going strong, the story of Rambusch needs to be told, especially while generations who have institutional memory can tell it.

It has long been a dream of art director Iris Rombouts to produce an art book that sheds new light on our familiar surroundings and our daily food in particular. And what better way to do that than with the bee, the most important creature to humans on earth? Not only is this small insect indispensible to our food chain – it pollinates over 80% of all flowering plants and 70 of the top human food crops – but it is also a source of inspiration for architects, writers, artists and even whole cities. This book celebrates the bee in all its humble glory, and does so in a completely original way. With a preface by author Jeroen Olyslaegers.

We see the bee represented by old masters and contemporary artists, by insectobsessed Renaissance man Jan Fabre, by Joseph Beuys and his Honey Pump and by Tomás Libertiny with his beeswax sculptures. There is the ceramic piece of art ‘The Wall’ by Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen, with its repetitive structure that reminds of a honeycomb. Fashion, too, is represented: designer Harm Van Zwolle chose the bee as his muse, proving that the beekeeper s outfit can become a covetable piece of clothing.

The book is as multi-faceted as the eye of the bee. It pays homage to Maurice Maeterlinck, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who tells the most inspiring tales about the life and death of the bee. It explores the mythical powers of the Apis Mellifera, and invites passionate beekeepers from all over the world to share their vision and show that there is much more to the bee than honey. The book also explains how the beehive inspired architects Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright to create stunning buildings that will impress many generations to come. As readers, we explore the feather-light steel building ‘The Hive’ by Wolfgang Buttress, and travel to Manchester, the city that chose the bee as its symbol and has shown to be every bit as courageous and resilient as the insect itself. All these weird and wonderful stories are accompanied by the work of talented photographers such as Stephen Mattues, Diego Franssens, studioEAST, Mark Haddon, Stephen Goodenough, Joao Sousa, Filip Van Roe, Wout Hendrickx and Iris herself. With this book, Iris Rombouts has created a joyful, brilliant mix of stories, photography and art, with the bee as the well-deserved star of the show.

This publication combines the works of Belgian artist Philippe Vandenberg (1952-2009) and American artist Bruce Nauman (b. 1941). At first, it may seem startling to see Nauman’s small but dense selection of works alongside those by Vandenberg. The artists never met one another and they could not be more different in their choice of artistic media. And yet there’s something that links the oeuvre of these apparently divergent artists. This publication examines that extraordinary link. The art of both Vandenberg and Nauman is direct, uncompromising and distressing. They share a common attitude towards their artistic practices. Their works are raw and uncouth, finished just to the point where they enter the onlooker’s conscience as a kind of prelude or genesis to something. The work of Vandenberg and Nauman originates form the same source: frustration. They cry out in despair at the dark side of humanity, mourning our propensity for hatred and violence, coldness and vilification. They explore the impossibility of genuine, uncompromised communication between individual people. Both artists succeed in creating images that capture the abyss within ourselves, our failings and our cruelty. Lust and pain, violence and horror are all too close to each other. “It is said that art is about life and death. That may be melodramatic, but it’s also true,” Nauman said. “LIVE OR DIE! Nothing more, nothing less.” The book is edited by Wouter Davidts, with texts by Dr. Brigitte Kölle (Head of Contemporary Art, Hamburger Kunsthalle), John C. Welchman (Professor of Art History, University of California, San Diego) and Anna Dezeuze (Lecturer in Art History, Ecole Supérieure d Art et de Design Marseille Méditerranée). It accompanies an exhibition at Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp: 30.03.2017 – 21.05.2017.

European fashion was profoundly influenced in the early decades of the 20th century by the style, textiles, patterns and colour combinations of Asian clothing. The discovery of the kimono, in particular, with its loose cut, fluid lines and broad range of decorations, captivated the great couturiers of the period. It enabled adventurous women in the Roaring Twenties to cast out their corsets and social straightjackets, while offering a new, daring kind of elegance with exotic overtones. From the meeting of these two sartorial cultures has sprung an exhibition and this catalogue, in which the drawings of Paris fashion designers are compared with examples of contemporary East-Asian textiles from the Baur Foundation in Geneva. The wonderful garments discussed include the collections of kimonos and other Japanese clothes gifted by Sato Mariko (2008) and Sugawara Keiko (2015), as well as Chinese textiles that are the pride of the Foundation.

The demand for agile organisations has never been higher than in today’s fast-moving economy. This book puts forward the framework and techniques that will allow your organisation to withstand turbulence and adapt to such a volatile environment. The Agile Leader’s Scrapbook is an inspiration in finding the logics of management that suit the particular needs of your organisation perfectly. By laying out the basics of what it means to create an ‘agile’ working environment, it provides clues to a better approach to co-creation, and to letting self-sufficient teams make better decisions, among other practical insights. This book is a radical plea to abandon the mantra of hierarchic management and embrace co-creation.

His photographs are of an old-fashioned beauty and at the same time radically contemporary. Flower by flower Bas Meeuws composes his floral still lifes, but digitally: the basis for Meeuws’ monumental works are digital photographs of individual flowers. They allude to the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century with their sense of luxury and their eye for the ephemeral. Meeuws strikes a chord in the art world with his flower still lifes. He is represented by Dutch, American, Taiwanese and Indian galleries and exhibits from Amsterdam to New Delhi.

“Flowers represent the circle of life for me as well as the short time of real beauty – Carpe Diem” – Bas Meeuws.

“Meeuws’ assortment of flowers, seem to emerge yet elapse into their inky black backdrops, reveling in sharpness, flaunting texture, pore and vein.” – Newspaper The Hindu.

Text in English and Chinese.

We are living in an age of accelerated change. The internet has washed away all limitations on time and space. Entrepreneurship has been democratised, and economies have globalised. Innovation has rendered entire sectors irrelevant in the blink of an eye. This is the reality any manager has to take into account in order to keep his company viable. Disruption@WORK taps into the roots of disruptive change, and offers a guide in recognising disruption, defining the ways in which it has already had an effect, and what awaits us in tomorrow’s board rooms. In doing this, Disruption@WORK provides a view on the factors we have to deal with in bridging the gap between the individual, his work and corporate strategy, in order to face the future of our companies.

‘Invisible social security’ is a term coined by Jos Berghman in his early work to draw attention to those aspects of social security that easily tend to be neglected in an instrumental perspective that conceives of social security merely as a particular set of instruments that national welfare states deploy to guarantee basic living standards to their citizens. Among others, Berghman emphasised that social security should rather be conceptualised in a situational sense, that is, as a state of being in which citizens feel confident about themselves and about their future lives. This book, Invisible Social Security Revisited, is a collection of essays published at the occasion of the retirement of Jos Berghman as Professor of Social Policy at KU Leuven – University of Leuven. Taking the notion of ‘invisible social security’ as a point of reference, nearly thirty years after it was coined, the authors address a series of contemporary issues in social security research and policy-making. One can read about social protection in the past and in the future, about prevention and activation, about European and local policies, about poverty and social exclusion, about feelings of insecurity and failing protection of informal workers, about social values in relation to social policies, and so on. The wide range of issues that are thus covered goes to show that over the years the concept of ‘invisible social security’ has retained its academic appeal, as well as its significance for the conceptual and empirical understanding of social security policies and realities. Taken together, the essays provide the reader with up-to-date and innovative ideas and information on important questions regarding the social protection of citizens. This Liber Amicorum for Jos Berghman is published at the occasion of his retirement as Professor of Social Policy at the Centre for Sociological Research of the KU Leuven – University of Leuven, 1 October 2014.

The roots of children’s literature are commonly known to lie in adaptation. The texts most frequently adapted for a child audience are either canonised literary works for adults or children’s books which have acquired a high status of their own. In both cases, the stories are adapted to fit the needs of new readers in other contexts. This volume frames adaptation in children’s literature against a broader socio-cultural background, focusing on the ideological implications of the process. Emphasising both diversity and evolution, it deals with oppositional forces and recent trends informing adaptation. At its core are issues of transmediality and new reader roles, adaptations’ orientation towards the ideology associated with the pre-text, and canonisation of the pre-text and of the adaptation itself. The volume is characterised by a broad international and diachronic spread, with topics ranging from traditional Western fairy tale adaptations to retellings of South African oral stories and Persian myths. The evolution discernible in the cases presented neatly illustrates how the process of adaptation allows canonical texts to develop into never-ending stories.

The digital revolution has made customers more demanding than ever. Speed, transparency and hyper-personalisation are the new norm. More and more brand manufacturers are now selling in their own stores and webshops are selling directly to consumers in increasing quantities. In the meantime, new technologies are heralding the next phase of seismic change. In this book, Gino Van Ossel introduces the concept of optichannel, which will guide retailers, brand manufacturers and service companies through and beyond the current wave of digital hysteria. Using recognisable examples, he offers a realistic view of the retail landscape of the future and sets out a practical framework for a successful strategy that combines profit, competitiveness and customer focus.

Apart from a handful of art historians no one has ever heard of the Brussels painter Hendrick De Clerck (1560-1630). Nevertheless, De Clerck was a contemporary of Peter Paul Rubens, the latter having gone down in history as an artistic trailblazer and painting powerhouse, while Hendrick De Clerck has quietly faded into oblivion. Yet the subtly coded, vibrantly coloured pictures that De Clerck painted for Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella are political propaganda of the highest order. In creating a mode of archducal representation that could help to gain an empire, the sky is quite literally the limit. De Clerck represents Isabella as wise Minerva, chaste Diana, the Virgin Mary. And that’s nothing compared to her husband, for in De Clerck’s paintings Albert is transformed into the sun god Apollo or even into Jesus Christ himself. Hendrick De Clerck’s mastery of ingenious pictorial strategy made him a leading player in one of the most ambitious projects history has ever seen. For those who know how to read them, his paintings tell a story of power, political promises, and grandiose ambition. Most of all, they are supreme examples of image-building; for as the Archdukes were well aware, even as a monarch you’re only as important as you make yourself. Text in English and Dutch.

Every stakeholder has his own objectives, interests and sensitivities. Trying to align all these things with your own agenda is no easy matter. The difference between success and failure is often to be found in your use of diplomatic skills. Searching with respect for solutions that can benefit everyone involved is the key. Stakeholdering shows you how to play this game to maximum effect. Based on the series of practical examples, questionnaires and checklists contained in the book, you can learn how best to understand and influence your relations with stakeholders. In this way, you can allow people’s competence and expertise – including your own – to be used to their full potential.

“It’s a must-have art collection gathering dust on the coffee table, and it’s just that.” – NY Journal of Books on Street Art Today 1
“One of the best books on Street Art” – Amazon.com “It is a beautiful aggregation, and certainly many of these artists have been interviewed and regularly featured on websites and other free cultural outlets like this one providing depth, context, analysis, information, and exposure. Having a hard copy of this collection of fifty in your hand will help freeze this moment for posterity as the scene/s continue to evolve.” – brooklynstreetart.com on Street Art Today 1
Going beyond the cliché of street art as artistically responsible graffiti, this Who’s Who of the international contemporary street art scene features 50 of the top street artists working today, complete with exclusive interviews. More than a revised edition of Street Art Today (2015), this book offers a completely new and updated roster of artists, and highlights the evolution of street art in all its multi-faceted complexity. Street Art Today is beautifully presented and written, in the main, in straightforward language accessible to all.

“Because of her long experience with the East, both in travel and in study, the eastern element is much stronger and more authentic in her work than it is in the works of other artists. The East is not merely a touch of varnish, it is something that defines her art.” – Prof. Dr. Willy Vande Walle. In her first monograph, Nicole Halsberghe provides an extensive overview of her oeuvre of the past 50 years. During her many travels to the East she always had a sketchbook and camera at hand. She captures everything she sees, everything that inspires her, and transforms it into acrylic paintings, drawings and lithographs. Traces on the Way shows how she ‘abstracts’ subjects, interprets them and makes them come to life. She portrays mankind and their surroundings in an impressive and unique way, from intimate rooms and train compartments to the immense, vast Japanese landscape. Text in English and Dutch.