Antwerp artist Eugeen Van Mieghem (1875-1930) documents the pulsating life around the port of Antwerp at the turn of the twentieth century. Dockers, sack sewers, passengers, local communities and general labourers are the subjects of his lifelong fascination with Antwerp port. His affinity with his subjects makes his work direct and sincere and is unique in the genre of social realism. The port is one of the great gateways to the city, facilitating the constant movement of goods and people – migrations that are essential for the economy as well as for the evolution of people and society. Ports also are scenes of human tragedy, witnessing the forced emigration of families and communities fleeing persecution and poverty, as immortalised in the paintings and drawings of Eugeen Van Mieghem.
Antwerp has strong associations with Irish artists from the late nineteenth century. Many of these artists – including Roderic O’Conor, Walter Osborne and Norman Garstin – were attracted by the pioneering developments in art practice on the Continent, and travelled to Antwerp to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. The result was light-filled fleeting images painted out of doors, en plein air – a radical departure from the official teachings of the established art academies.
It is not known if Van Mieghem and any of those Irish artists ever came into contact with each other, but this exhibition shows for the first time Van Mieghem’s oeuvre alongside that of his Irish peers, proving yet again how vital are ongoing migrations of culture and people in illuminating and understanding our contemporary society.
Around 1900, both the ports of Antwerp and New York ranked high in the select group of world ports. The United States on the other side of the Atlantic was starting a period of unprecedented economic growth following the civil war. During a period of 60 years (1873 – 1934) the Red Star Line shipping company carried a million migrants to the new world. The assassination of Tsar alexander II of Russia in 1881 and subsequent anti-Jewish economic legislation resulted in a massive Jewish exodus. The worst pogroms took place in Kyiv, Odessa and Warsaw. Jews fled in large numbers. Flemish artist Eugeen van Mieghem (1875-1930) was an important witness to massive migration through the port of Antwerp. Numerous publications and exhibitions both in the United States and in Europe (the Jewish museums of Amsterdam, Prague and Budapest) turned van Mieghem into the internationally best-known interpreter of European migration to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century.
“Van Mieghem was a fine draftsman and colorist, whose long forgotten work evokes that of Van Gogh and Kathe Kollwitz. Now it seems to be slowly returning to art-world memory.” — (New York Times, 2006)
In this book, three famous, late 19th-century artists take centre stage: Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Henri Le Fauconnier (1881-1945). They played a crucial role in the genesis of the Bergen School. The works of these great masters are juxtaposed with the oeuvres of the very first Bergen School artists: Leo Gestel, Gerrit Willem van Blaaderen, Else Berg, Mommie Schwarz, Dirk Filarski, Arnout Colnot and the Wiegman brothers. This book paints a new and more nuanced picture of the rise of Expressionism in the Netherlands. Van Gogh, Cézanne, Le Fauconnier & the Bergen School thus represents a valuable addition to the history of Dutch art.
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, located next door to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam’s Museumpark and designed by MVRDV, is the first art depot in the world to be fully accessible to the public. Visitors can see the result of over 170 years of collecting: more than 151,000 objects of art and design, housed in 14 storage spaces, are arranged by material, size, and sometimes chronology or geography. All the activities involved in the management and conservation of a collection are also on view. This is a fascinating account of a unique new type of museum building and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collection.
This book covers all the phases in its creation, from the first crazy ideas to the last work of art to be rehoused. It takes you on a journey through the building and provides brief glimpses of the storage compartments on each floor. The essays describe the growing collection, its storage conditions over the last 172 years, and the Depot’s design and construction process. And includes details of the designers and artists involved about their contributions to the building.
Charley Toorop’s work has its own originality and power. This is not to say that she did not have an eye to the work of other artists. On the contrary. Toorop admired the painting of Piet Mondrian, but also of foreign contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. Yet there is one artist who she believes stood at the cradle of her artistry and for whom she subsequently had respect throughout her life: Vincent van Gogh. His work was for her ‘the breakthrough to a new world’.
Four essays explain her fascination and place it in a broader context. They include her travels to the Borinage and southern France where she saw the landscape and people through Van Gogh’s eyes, her awe of Van Gogh’s ‘deep barren love of reality‘ placed in the social and political engagement of the interwar period and her interest in man’s state of mind.
Ever since winning a travel grant as a 17-year-old to travel from the Netherlands through Belgium and Paris to Arles in Van Gogh’s footsteps, the contemporary master painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer has been inspired by the Dutchman’s art. Van Gogh has been a profound influence upon the subjects and techniques of Kiefer’s monumental paintings and sculptures, which draw on history, mythology, literature, philosophy and science. Published to coincide with Kiefer’s 80th birthday in 2025, this book celebrates the power and luminous intensity of both artists’ work.
In the form of The Glove Deutsches Ledermuseum is tracing the varied cultural history of an accessory whose importance is often underestimated. The sheer diversity of this article of clothing is demonstrated by means of selected exhibits, from warming Inuit mittens, boxing gloves, disposable rubber or latex gloves, and Pontifical gloves, to models by renowned designers such as Marc Jacobs and Dries Van Noten.
As a love token, a gauntlet in a duel, or as the insignia of royalty, this highly symbolic accessory and firm component of first courtly, then bourgeois etiquette looks back on a longstanding tradition. Gloves, for centuries an indispensable part of any elegant wardrobe, are currently experiencing a comeback.
Text in English and German.
Man Ray and Fashion was published in addition to the exhibition at MoMu (Fashion Museum Antwerp) in 2023. Man Ray was a widely versatile artist who worked with a range of different media and did not like to be pigeonholed. The way he portrayed women and their clothing continues to influence fashion photographers today. Man Ray used new and unexpected angles, employed artistic staging, and applied such innovative processes as solarization and multiple exposure to his fashion photography.
In recent decades, fashion designers continue to find inspiration in his Surrealist imagery. This is most notably true for Belgian designers, with their avant-garde mindset. Completely in line with the concept of Surrealism, these references are often subconscious. Part of Man Ray’s extensive history is brought together in this book alongside contemporary works by the likes of Paul Kooiker, Martin Margiela and Céline (among others).
“Sarajevo to Paris, fashion or reportage, deciding on the title of a book is mind-boggling. I call myself a documentary photographer that accidentally ended up doing fashion. The end of the 80s was an interesting and intense time in world history, and a particularly creative time in the world of fashion. As a young female photographer I was interested in both worlds. Thirty years later, when looking back, those two worlds — documentary and fashion — still define my work. Both are equally represented in my archives. This book, of my fashion work, is the first to be published. I called it Sarajevo to Paris because sometimes I would travel directly from one to the other. These two cities had a big impact on my life.”
Sarajevo to Paris by Marleen Daniëls captures the set before the fashion show. This robust encyclopaedia is an A-Z of designers preparing for the big moment. Over the course of 30 years she photographed backstage in Paris, London, New York and Milan.
“When I am working with colours, I feel like a painter. When I am working with metal, I feel like a constructor. And when I am working with toys, I feel like a child.” (Felieke van der Leest).
The work of Dutch jewellery and object artist Felieke van der Leest (born in 1968) expresses the very special affection that she has for animals. With unbridled fantasy she creates pieces that ostentatiously, colourfully and playfully revolve around her little friends. She combines techniques used in textile work, such as crochet, with valuable metals and plastic toy animals. Within the international art jewellery scene she has developed her own special language with which she narrates intelligent and witty stories with her animal protagonists; her pieces inevitably conjure a smile upon the faces of those who view them. Characteristic for Van der Leest is the joy in her work, which is ever present yet sometimes carried off into childhood. Serious themes in her work are also expressed, including environmental protection and human approaches to animals. The current publication comprises jewellery and objects by the renowned artist from 1996 to the present.
Text in English, Norwegian and Dutch.
In 1947 and 1948, Van Johnson was MGM’s top male box office draw. “On screen he was the Pied Piper; Elizabeth Taylor’s lover, he was a war pilot with Spencer Tracy,” writes his friend and decorator Carleton Varney in the introduction for Van Johnson’s Hollywood: A Family Album. Along the way, his wife, Evie Wynn Johnson, an amateur shutterbug captured behind-the-scenes images of their friends some of Hollywood’s most famous stars, such as Gary Cooper, Judy Garland, and Humphrey Bogart on the road, on the set, around the pool, and at their Hollywood home. She put together these casual and candid images in a family album that has never been published before. Their daughter, Schuyler adds her memories to this unique document of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Dieter van Slooten (1940-2018), a German artist, painted his pictures with almost obsessive consistency, using horizontals as a main picture element, which, like venetian blinds, conceal and reveal part of what is concealed to the viewer at the same time, thus hinting at shapes and surfaces. The change from fore- to background is fluid and the pictures, painted predominantly in acrylic on canvas, have an almost three-dimensional depth. An incredible range of colours makes the works appear intensive and poignant, colour is the soul of van Slooten’s painting. This catalogue, with his pictures from the years 2012-17, presents the quintessence of his oeuvre and is being published on the occasion of the first anniversary of his death. His life was dedicated to art; his art is dedicated to life.
Text in English and German.
A selection of 85 Flemish drawings gives an astonishing and representative overview of the art of drawing in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The publication focusses on the drawings subjects and compositions but also on how and why they were created and why an artist chose specific materials, techniques, formats and even sizes. It provides a framework to allow to see drawings in the functional context for which they were created.
Renowned specialists in Flemish drawing discuss rare artworks by famous draughtsmen as Frans Floris, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyck, Jacques Jordaens, Otto van Veen, Jan Fijt but also hidden treasures such as the 10 metres long Panorama of Zeeland by Antoon van den Wijngaerde, a sketchbook of the 12-year-old Rubens, recently discovered drawings by Hans Vredeman de Vries, the extremely rare Italy-sketchbooks by the sculptor Pieter Verbruggen and a newly discovered book-illustration design by Rubens for the Plantin Press.
LUCKY / Udachny by Hanne Van Assche documents a small mining town in the far East of Russia called Udachny – a remote region captured in the icy grip of winter throughout most of the year. Few people choose to live here, but those who do are proud citizens. Yakutia is known as the treasury of Russia. It is one of the world’s richest regions in natural resources. According to a Siberian legend, God once spilled a bag of earthly treasures over this part of the country. A thick layer of permafrost covers large reserves of coal, gas, gold and diamonds. Despite the barren climate most of the year, the heart of the people remains warm. The hospitality and optimism of the inhabitants soothes the harsh climate. It is they who turn the scenery of a frozen and isolated world, defined by extraordinary contrasts, into a vibrant and colourful community.
This volume presents anew the influential 20th-century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose reputation has unfairly languished. Critics often see him as a chameleon who turned against the vibrant aesthetic culture of Berlin upon emigrating to Chicago and created instead the spare, tectonically obsessed, blank box stylism that looms over so many American downtowns. That prevailing interpretation ignores the aesthetic and conceptual coherence within his oeuvre.
Mies often spoke vaguely of a “great form” emerging within modernity. He spent his career seeking to express this condition in the spaces he designed. Through close analysis of over sixty of his buildings and projects, this study reveals that underlying essence. A formal dialectic of center/periphery threads throughout his production, which gives nascent form to the profound societal tensions he sensed. A peculiar interleafing of the centric and the peripheric dominates his shaping of space.
Rarely is Mies considered formally. Using nearly a hundred new analytical diagrams, this book unlocks fresh interrelations between his compositions and between his career’s phases. Unexpected parallels are struck with nineteenth-century Romantic artists like Caspar David Friedrich and with modernists like Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko. The strands within Mies’s deep readings on philosophy are expanded by comparing him with regional thinkers. The outlines of the “great form” Mies sensed become clearer.
A new and integral Mies emerges, far different from previous interpretations and with enhanced relevance for our contemporary condition.
100 – Munch’tan Sonra | After Munch accompanies Sarkis’ exhibition 85 Screams: After Munch held at Dirimart Dolapdere in 2023. Marking the artist’s 85th birthday, the book features photographic reproductions of 100 oil-on-paper works created between November 2014 and January 2015. Titled 100 Screams: After Munch, this powerful series draws inspiration from the iconic figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, an image that has haunted Sarkis since childhood and echoed throughout his oeuvre. Eschewing brushes, the artist applies white and red oil paints directly from the tube to paper, capturing the raw immediacy and velocity of a scream. Produced shortly after the works were made, the photographic reproduction by the artist emphasise their shifting presence over time and across geographies. Spanning the years from Sarkis’ birth in 1938 to the present and beyond, this autobiographical publication offers a visceral reflection on artistic memory, trauma, and transformation through one of modern art’s most enduring motifs.
Text in English and Turkish.
In the years around 1651, Rembrandts young charges followed him in the turn of his late style, with its concentration, inner emotion, impasto handling, and restrained dynamism.
Around then the young Abraham van Dijck also arrived from Dordrecht to complete his studies. He quickly grasped his master’s new direction, but also developed a gentle and vulnerable alternative to it: exploring the evocation of inner life, with daring experiments in light and handling. Together with fellow pupils Nicolaes Maes, Jacobus Leveck and Cornelis Bisschop, he returned to Dordrecht for a brief and fertile period of painting and drawing. Eventually he succumbed to the siren call of Amsterdam once more.
This is the first comprehensive monograph of his remarkable achievement in drawing and paintings and his distinctive contribution to the art of this period.
Send your best wishes with the beautifully reproduced artwork on these full-colour full size Notecard Boxes, packaged in a large format 2 piece glossy reusable box.
The work of Vincent van Gogh is reproduced in full colour as notecards, including reproductions of 5 joyous, bright expressive paintings.
Our museum quality Notecard Boxes are perfect to keep on hand for any occasion notes and greetings to friends and family.
- 20 notecards and envelopes
- 5 each of 4 images
- Packaged in a large format, glossy 2-piece box
- Cards printed on coated paper stock to bring out their full colour
- Cards and envelopes bundled together with a paper belly band inside each box
- Box measures 190 x 139 x 38 mm.
We choose the best images from well-known classic and contemporary fine artists, plus talented emerging illustrators and designers from around the globe.
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) had an artistic career lasting only ten years. However, in those years he left behind an astounding legacy of painting that has endured to this day. He was a mad genius and he poured that passion into the trembling energy of his paintings. His canvases are celebrations of humanity & earth, colour & texture.
Beuningen in Rotterdam’s Museumpark and designed by MVRDV, is the first art depot in the world to be fully accessible to the public. Visitors can see the results of over 170 years of collecting: more than 151,000 objects of art and design, housed in 14 storage spaces, are arranged by material, size, and sometimes chronology or geography. All the activities involved in the management and conservation of a collection are also on view. This is a fascinating account of a unique new type of museum building and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collection.
This book covers all the phases in its creation, from the first crazy ideas to the last work of art to be rehoused. It takes you on a journey through the building and provides brief glimpses of the storage compartments on each floor. The essays describe the growing collection, its storage conditions over the last 172 years, and the Depot’s design and construction process. We also talked to the designers and artists involved about their contributions to the building.
A unique opportunity to see rare and beautiful drawings by some of the biggest names in European art.
Chatsworth House in Derbyshire holds one of the finest and most significant private collections of drawings in the world, but they are rarely seen and very little has been published on them.
This book showcases 47 drawings from this exceptional collection, including superb watercolours and drawings by famous German Renaissance artists Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein alongside the baroque splendour of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. It will reveal intimate insights into the artists’ practice and their ways of recording the world.
The captivating selection of drawings will be introduced and contextualised by Charles Noble, Curator of Fine Art at Chatsworth House. Each image will be explained and examined based on rigorous new research, offering new insights into the work of some of art’s biggest names.
The moving life of Jan Bontjes van Beek (1899–1969) is closely associated with 20th-century German history. A “strikingly blonde sailor who could dance and play the violin,” he joined the Worpswede artist’s colony in 1919 and later found a home with the Breling family in Fischerhude, who introduced him to ceramics. With the support of his second wife, the architect Rahel Weißbach, he moved to Berlin in 1933, where his studio became a well-known meeting place for artists. Despite having been arrested by the National Socialists and his daughter Cato executed, he could not endure the GDR’s Socialist Unity Party regime either and stepped down from a teaching post at the East Berlin Weißensee art school in 1950. He broke into teaching in West Berlin and, finally, in Hamburg continued his ceramic work, which provided the free thinker with a firm footing. Like no other, he emphasised materiality in form and dynamism in colour. During tumultuous times, he sought out the perfect balance for his vessels, and ultimately for himself.
Text in English and German.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) is undoubtedly one of the most significant and influential architects ever. To the present day, his designs and realised buildings, as well as his thinking and writings, continue to initiate many controversial debates on the achievements and failures of modern architecture. Yet not only architects and urban designers have been inspired or appalled by Mies. This new book demonstrates that his influence reaches far beyond the boundaries of professional architecture. Almost Nothing collects work by 100 painters, sculptors, photographers, film directors, designers, cartoonists, and architects who comment on the buildings, designs, and statements by, or images of, the legendary architect. The works also form a 100-fold re-interpretation of Mies van der Rohe’s life and oeuvre. New York-based architect and writer Christian Bjone in his accompanying text provides rich background information on the individual artists and the depicted art works. The book’s title refers to a statement by Mies himself on one of his celebrated masterpieces, Crown Hall on IIT campus in Chicago, which ingeniously combines simplicity with complexity.