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2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first international symposium of silver jewellery Jablonec ’68. Thanks to the liberalisation endeavours as part of the ‘Prague Spring’, European jewellery artists from East and West came together for a ‘summit’ at the invitation of the Czech artists’ association in Jablonec, northern Bohemia. On the guest list were such renowned names as Anton Cepka, Hermann Junger and Bruno Martinazzi – artists celebrated today as the founders of studio jewellery. The jewellery pieces that developed at that time have remained in the Muzeum skla a bizuterie in Jablonec nad Nisou and to this day have lost nothing of their exceptional and pioneering aura. This publication – which contains a reprint of the original catalogue from 1968 – makes these pieces accessible to a wider audience for the very first time. A document that in a wholly authentic way allows the reader to experience this unique historical moment in the history of the international studio jewellery scene.

Text in English and German.

Accompanies the exhibition at Die Neue Sammlung The Design Museum, Munich (DE), 10 March-3 June 2018.

Photographs taken in Japan between the late Edo period and early Meiji periods found their way overseas, and played a major role in forming Westerners’ image of Japan. Among these collections, the pictures gathered by the Swiss diplomat Aimé Humbert (1819-1900) in the 1860s were crucial in building lasting representations of the island nation: many of these, mainly collected in 1863/64 during a sojourn in Yokohama and Edo, were used as sources for the well-known and largely distributed engravings of his famous book Le Japon illustré, published in Paris in 1870. Belonging to the collection of the MEN, these beautiful and well-preserved photographs are published here for the first time. Presented by Japanese and Swiss scholars before the narrative backdrop of their acquisition and application by foreigners, they offer a striking view of a lost world.

By radically turning his back on the crystal cutting technique that was prevalent worldwide at the time, Bernd Munsteiner started to revolutionise the shaping of gemstones in the 1970s. For him, the aesthetic quality of the gemstones represented a rediscovery and it formed the basis of his worldwide success. Since 1997, his son Tom and daughter-in-law Jutta have taken over the atelier in Stipshausen near Idar-Oberstein. Over the past 15 years, ‘The Young Generation’ have developed their own very characteristic form language, based on Bernd Munsteiner’s work, which makes the virtual interior space of the cut gemstone the focus of aesthetic contemplations. Tom Munsteiner is a gemstone designer, Jutta Munsteiner is a jewellery and gemstone designer and goldsmith. This richly illustrated book presents a comprehensive overview of Tom and Jutta Munsteiner’s artistic creations. It provides not only a deep insight into the crystalline world of gemstones, but also shows that crystals have lost nothing of their centuries-old fascination as an artistic material. Text in English and German. Contents: Wilhelm Lindemann – Introduction; Artworks – Tom Munsteiner: Magic Eye; Ritmo; Prisma; Spirit of Nature; Imagination; Mantis; Kaskaden; Hexagonal; Sculptures and Objects; Special unique Stone Objects; Art Objects; Jutta Munsteiner: Onda; Personalities; Tom + Jutta Munsteiner: Twins; Ikarus; Extensions; Unique Pieces; Biography of the Artists.

From the latter half of the nineteenth century, Idar-Oberstein developed into an important centre of costume jewellery production. Numerous factories, large and small, produced costume jewellery for the world into the 1980s although today this trade has virtually lost its former significance. During that long time span, Idar-Oberstein was one of the four major German jewellery centres along with Pforzheim, Schwäbisch Gmünd and Hanau.
Idar-Oberstein costume jewellery reflects each of the prevailing fashions in turn: Historicism, Jugendstil/Art Nouveau, Art Déco – to 1960s and 1970s Informel and Zero. Innovative handling of simple (inexpensive) materials soon led to an aesthetic that stood on its own merits, independently of “real” jewellery. Here the Bengel company – with its sophisticated Art Déco jewellery – exemplifies innovative models and business policy.
The author was able to study many early documents and photographs in Idar-Oberstein archives as well as pieces of jewellery that, taken together, are highly instructive on the history of costume jewellery. A vivid image of twelve jewellery manufacturers is evoked; proprietors and employees, production conditions, models policy, pieces of jewellery in each period style and worldwide marketing and distribution. Costume jewellery from Idar-Oberstein was not usually marked (stamped) because it was sold through wholesalers; this is what makes attribution to specific makers quite difficult today.
Text in English & German.

Also available:
Bengel Art Deco Jewellery 9783897902718
Interviewing nearly 30 of the Aldermaston potters, many of whom have written some fascinating submissions about this incredible workshop. The book features a wonderful, previously unpublished, account from Geoffrey Eastop’s memoirs, about how he came to Aldermaston and helped to establish the pottery with Alan Caiger-Smith in the mid 1950s. The book tells the story of the 51 years of the Aldermaston Pottery, through the words and experiences of as many of the potters as possible, whilst also chronicling Alan’s own achievements over the decades. The images also play an important part in telling the story. The book also follows the subsequent careers of the potters, and tell how they went on to make a difference, and to sustain the maiolica tradition, all over the world.
As there has never been a book published that has traced the career of this important figure or the life of the pottery, or the 60 people who worked and trained there, and there are very few photographic records of this lost way of working, this book will fill that gap in the history of 20th century studio pottery.

“‘Globalization’, a commonly used word these days, is the reason of changing global landscapes. Larger firms buy small, authentic companies, the small companies that want to keep doing what they do, and don’t want to be bought by larger firms, struggle to compete, eventually they disappear. My view on this phenomenon is displayed in my first book Bus Stop. For decades, sons and daughters kept alive the bus company started by their mothers and fathers. These past 2 years I travelled through Belgium to document their activities, to feel the atmosphere on board and to show who they are. What’s evolving and what could be lost in a few years.” – Nick Claeskens. Text in English and Dutch.

In this book of poignant and expressive images, Stockholm-based photographer Christer Löfgren captures the fundamental humanity of people from around the world. He addresses the credibility of documentary photography, which many believe was lost with the advent of Photoshop. The widespread practice of manipulating photos makes it difficult to judge their authenticity. In these images, the artist asserts that documentary photography has not drowned in the world of Photoshop, and addresses the importance of the ‘uncensored’ image.

On July 21, 1969, the first man set foot on The Moon. When Neil Armstrong was asked if this made him feel big, he answered: “No, it made me feel really, really small.” 50 years later, this publication celebrates that special moment that put life on earth into a totally different perspective. It collects pictures of the world’s best photographers from the 1840s until today. Next to historical photographs and imagery printed in media, the publication features many artists that each in their own way reflect on this mystical celestial body, we call ‘moon’. The book shows the diversity of meanings of The Moon, it’s relation to mankind and to nature. The Moon has always both attracted and scared people around the world. It is our everyday connection to the unfathomable universe. Since time immemorial it is revered for its beauty, its stillness and mysterious appearance and yet also feared for its supernatural-seeming qualities. In mythology The Moon has always been given a central place. With its magnetic forces it changes the tides and has a direct and uncontrollable impact on mankind from above. In 1840, barely three years after the invention of photography, J.W. Draper makes the first picture ever made of The Moon and since that day photographers have never stopped following his example. The paradoxical aspects of the moon continue to fascinate and inspire. Like a photograph The Moon depends on sunlight to be visible. It has no light of its own and no apparent strength to resist our nightly city lights either. Photographers feel this close connection to The Moon’s characteristics and find the perfect object in its aesthetics. The landing on The Moon was a culmination point of the1960’s Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which quickly became a symbol of the Cold War. The images of the landing became the bearer of values and symbols of the United States and were widely spread through various media. In 1973 NASA abolished its moon program. The Moon had been conquered and the public seemed to have had lost interest. However, today people still find The Moon fascinating, and humanity continues to dream about setting foot on the sun’s shadow.

Steve McQueen: actor, filmmaker, racing driver – and friend. Siegfried Rauch, who plays McQueen’s unyielding rival in the film classic Le Mans, was a close friend of the actor in real life. Rauch takes us through this book and, for the first time, tells us how it was: what McQueen was like, the time he ate sauerkraut at the Rauch’s, or played with their children – and how he became their godfather. Rauch shows a different, private side to the ‘king of cool’. The other stars of Le Mans have their say as well: the real racing drivers. Herbert Linge reminisces about the Porsche 908 – which belonged to McQueen – that Linge drove as a dolly during the race. Hans Herrmann and Richard Attwood tell about their victory in the Porsche 917 – the first Porsche overall victory at the Sarthe. Stuntman Dr. Erich Glavitza, who also prepared the cars, explains what happened in 1970 during the shooting in ‘Solar Village’, and David Piper, who lost a leg during the production. This unique book offers completely new insights into the filming of what has become a cult classic.

An aristocratic and blue-collar town, a technological and esoteric site, it’s easy to get lost in Turin’s well-ordered boulevards that gently follow the Po river. You will find warm and sweet shelter in its Art Nouveau cafés or be astonished by the sudden sight of the white mountain peaks that crown it. Turin, in the heart of Piedmonte, has always been a capital: of the Savoy family, of Italy, of the Alps, of publishing, of industry. A very elegant city that gave birth to the first marketable hard chocolate and Italy’s most iconic car, the Fiat 500 – and also gave hospitality to the most important figures in European culture. Visionary architects and enlightened entrepreneurs made it great and beautiful and the city is now booming with contemporary art, live music, museums, and innovative food and wine culture. This guide will reveal 111 different faces of Turin: places, flavours, shades, and people.

Calum Colvin is one of Scotland’s most innovative and exciting contemporary photographers. In his work he creates a kaleidoscope of figures, symbols and ideas, which are blended into the most vibrant and stimulating images. With this project, Colvin has explored the mysterious world of Ossian. Ossian, a third century Celtic bard, was first discovered by James MacPherson, himself a poet but also a cultural entrepreneur and an adventurer. MacPherson published the ballads of Ossian in the years after 1760. These mournful elegies to the lost world of the Gael became a cause celebre in Enlightenment society. On the one hand, MacPherson was hailed as the discoverer and translator of a “Celtic Homer”, while on the other, he was accused by Samuel Johnson, of having perpetrated a cruel fraud on the public. While this dispute rumbled on, the poems of Ossian became feted throughout Europe and America and touched the art of poets, writers and composers such as Burns, Goethe, Longfellow and Mendelssohn. Colvin has taken these events as the basis for his surreal meditation on contemporary culture. Through the ideas and associations inspired by MacPherson’s Ossian, he has produced a discourse on national identity, “authenticity” and the human psyche. It is characteristic of Colvin that he has successfully explored these difficult themes while simultaneously creating accessible, provocative photographs.

The Friedman House is a modernist icon, designed by Frederic Lasserre, founder of the UBC School of Architecture, and landscaped by Cornelia Oberlander. Faced with demolition, it was saved by purchasers who understood its architectural value and historical significance. This book reflects on the possibility of its destruction, remarking on what has been salvaged by its continued existence, and what could have potentially been lost.

Once the third largest lake in California, and among the world’s greatest air pollution offenders, the deadened Owens Lake was for decades merely a catastrophic footnote to the most notorious water grab in modern history. Now, the lake has been re-assembled to exceed the value of what was lost – without refilling its shores and depriving Los Angeles of its water supply. In The Spoils of Dust the lake’s peculiar redemption is the backdrop for investigating contemporary relationships between landscape design, control, and perception. The lake-like terrain is the most intimate display of modern technocratic vision and exposes the limits of invention and control of infrastructural ecologies. Whether by observations of dust or scenery, it is as much the product of how we perceive and value landscape today. Answering its analysis, the book concludes with a visual atlas and proposal to induce more imaginative outcomes and perceptions.

Today, Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino (1905-73) is known chiefly for his furniture designs. He is famous also for his erotic polaroid photography of the 1960s, which has been subject of many exhibitions and has lost nothing of its great appeal to the fashion world today. Much less attention has so far been given to Mollino’s architecture, and a comprehensive critical study of his work in this field has been lacking. Yet his built work, although relatively small, constitutes a seminal contribution to modernism that is uniquely marked by a strong relationship with Surrealism.

Based on years of research and drawing on rich archival material as well as on Mollino’s own writings, this new book is the overdue tribute to an extraordinary personality in 20th-century architecture. It features an exemplary selection of his key designs, both built and unrealised, lavishly illustrated with images and reproductions of previously unpublished plans, drawings, and documents. Rounded out with scholarly essays by expert authors, this is a long-awaited addition to the library of architecture lovers, professionals, and scholars.

Two lives, fatefully interlinked; two sets of memories, in danger of being lost. Clare Stone’s past has suddenly caught up with her. When a long-suppressed memory comes vividly alive, she finds herself being pulled back to the place of its origin: Bangkok. There she meets Tarrin Wandee, the writer whose book unsettled her. But have they met before, all those years ago, when she was young, idealistic and dangerously naïve? And so their stories unfold in a steady rhythm between the past and the present, fiction and reality, in relief against the pulsating backdrop of Bangkok itself. All our lives are linked; it’s just a question of how. Moody and atmospheric, Curtain of Rain is a story of politics, power and greed, and the search for meaning, and redemption.

Mural Art – Studies in Paintings in Asia is a collection of 10 articles by the best scholars on murals in Afghanistan, China, Tibet, Burma, Thailand and Mongolia – from the 5th to the 18th century. Covering diverse issues including preservation and digital reconstruction of lost murals, this important new book provides information with challenging perspectives based on the latest findings and research. It also reveals murals never before published, recently rediscovered and endangered. This unique publication on murals in Asia counts as a precious testimony of a fragile and inspiring heritage.

This catalogue assembles sumptuous photographs of the world’s leading collection of Cham sculpture, along with the most recent insights of Vietnamese and international scholars. The Champa culture thrived in magnificent temples, sculpture, dance and music along the central and southern coast of today’s Vietnam from the 5th to the 18th century. A focused exploration here uncovers this brilliant yet almost lost culture to newcomers and experts alike. The Danang Museum has been recently expanded and refurbished to house what is generally considered the world’s greatest collection of Cham Art.

“Pure and beautiful, she glows like the moon behind clouds.”

The time is the 12th Century, the place Cambodia, birthplace of the lost Angkor civilisation. In a village behind a towering stone temple lives a young woman named Sray, whom neighbours liken to the heroine of a Hindu epic. Hiding a dangerous secret, she is content with quiet obscurity, but one rainy season afternoon is called to a life of prominence in the royal court. There her faith and loyalties are tested by attentions from the great king Suryavarman II. Struggling to keep her devotion is her husband Nol, palace confidante and master of the silk parasols that were symbols of the monarch’s rank.

This lovingly crafted first novel by former Washington Post correspondent John Burgess revives the rites and rhythms of the ancient culture that built the temples of Angkor, then abandoned them to the jungle.

In telling her tale, Sray takes the reader to a hilltop monastery, a concubine pavilion and across the seas to the throne room of imperial China. She witnesses the construction of the largest of the temples, Angkor Wat, and offers an explanation for its greatest mystery – why it broke with centuries of tradition to face west instead of east.

On 5 February 1916, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, together with Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and Jean Arp, inaugurated the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. The evening marked the birth of Dada as an artistic movement, and Cabaret Voltaire with its legendary performances became a place of historic significance. It was soon to be followed by the short-lived, while no less significant, Gallery Dada in Zürich, where the Dadaists staged four exhibitions over the course of half a year. Dada’s further evolution was significantly shaped by these two spaces, each with its own particular atmosphere, constituting the differing poles of the Dada movement. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Spring 2016 to celebrate the Dada centenary, this new book for the first time tells the full story of Dada’s genesis. It sheds light on the early years of 1916 17 in Zürich in historical context and, from today’s point of view, and also explores the intellectual and social background that informed Dada, considering aspects such as the Great War, psychoanalysis, or the art scene of the time. Genesis Dada illustrates how Dada turned into a worldwide phenomenon with which artists and intellectuals such as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, or Man Ray were associated, and which has lost nothing of its momentum and topicality over time. Also available: Dadglobe ISBN 9783858817754

Sigfried Giedion (1888-1968) and Carola Giedion-Welcker (1893-1979) were among the most distinguished and influential scholars of art and architectural history during the 20th century’s earlier dacades. Of particular impact was their role in connecting leading protagonists of modernism in architecture, art, and literature, such as Alvar Aalto, Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Breuer, Max Ernst, Walter Gropius, Barbara Hepworth, Le Corbusier, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, or Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The discourses they initiated, for example on the New Vision in photography or a ‘Synthesis of Arts’, have lost nothing of their relevance and provide new starting points through to the present day.

The estate of Sigfried and Carola Giedion-Welcker is today kept in Zurich at ETH Zurich’s Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, the Swiss Institute for Art Research, the University of Zurich’s Institute of Romance Studies, and the James Joyce Foundation. It comprises some 16,000 letters, 10,000 photographic prints and negatives, a wealth of other papers, and a vast library.

This new book offers a re-evaluation of Sigfried and Carola Giedion-Welcker’s work, impact, and lasting significance. The editor and contributors were the first to draw fully on the estate, which has been opened entirely to researchers only recently. Featuring a vast number of previously unpublished documents and other images alongside excerpts from the extensive correspondence the two maintained with their artist friends and colleagues in academia, it provides a unique and manifold insight into the ‘Giedion universe’.

As an effect of the recent economic and financial crisis in the USA, a vast number of people have suddenly lost their jobs and income and often also their home. Many of them still live in their cars or even just in the streets. In spring 2007, the young Swiss photographer Eberhard began talking to some of these homeless people and invited them to his studio to take a portrait of them. He paid them a fee and built a relationship with these individual personalities that can be traced in his photographs. Eberhard’s In Good Light series shows a sensitive and respectful approach to difficult situations of life in which these people find themselves, in most cases through no fault of their own, sometimes by their own choice. They are impressive personalities who have kept their dignity and show great power despite the struggle of living on the edge of society. Eberhard’s images are complemented in the new book by an introduction by curator Karen Sinsheimer and a literary essay by the celebrated German novelist Bernhard Schlink. Text in English & German.

Lawrence Weiner, born 1942 in the Bronx, New York City, is a key protagonist of early conceptual art. His work is characterised by his use of language as an artistic medium. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive and does not instruct the viewer to perform a particular action or interpret a piece in any unequivocal sense. Rather, it presents the viewer with an infinite number of meanings and equally infinite possibilities for realisation. ATTACHED BY EBB & FLOW is an installation Weiner created for Museo Nivola in Orani, Sardina. The title refers to the tides and relates to Sardinia-born artist Costantino Nivola’s experience of exile and relocation, as well the current migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea. Sentences are translated from English to Italian to local Sardu, using different words and verbal constructs and presented simultaneously to open manifold possibilities to read and interpret: something may be lost in translation, yet much more can be found. Text in English and Italian.

Aerial photography had a special place in the business of the legendary former Swiss airline Swissair. Walter Mittelholzer (1894-1937), aviation pioneer and one of Swissair’s founders, trained as a photographer before turning to aviation. The airline had a specialised subsidiary, Swissair Photo AG, producing well over 100,000 pictures between 1931-2001, when Swissair ceased operations, and still exists as an independent enterprise, BSF Swissphoto. The photographs show landscapes, towns and villages, and mountains, but also industrial plants, infrastructures, and individual buildings in Switzerland and abroad. Swissair – Aerial Photography features around 300 striking, beautiful and informative images, revealing changes in landscape and settlements over nearly a century. It is also an inventory of lost elements making a landscape, untamed rivers, orchards, receding glaciers or vanished historical buildings that shows how an idyllic agricultural country turned into one of the most densely inhabited places over a few decades. With an introductory essay that explores the content of the collection now held at ETH Bibliothek and what can be read from these images today, Swissair – Aerial Photography provides an illuminating look at the history of aerial photography in Switzerland. Text in English and German.

The complex oeuvre of the American artist Cy Twombly (1928-2011) comprises a time period of around six decades, during which it never lost any of its expressive power. Twombly was one of the most productive artists in the history of more recent art. Acclaimed as one of the most important painters of the second half of the 20th century, he fused the legacy of American Abstract Expressionism with European and Mediterranean culture. The book focuses to a degree never before seen on his major cycles: Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963), Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), and Coronation of Sesostris (2000). The artist’s development as a whole is traced based on nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs. This thus provides unique insights into the overall intellectual and sensual richness of the oeuvre. From his early works at the beginning of the 1950s, which are characterised by the use of text, to his compositions of the 1960s, his reaction to the minimal art and conceptual art of the 1970s to his final paintings, the overview of the oeuvre underscores the significance of the series and cycles in which Cy Twombly invented history painting anew. With its polyphonic conception, the monograph offers numerous approaches with essays that shed light on the various aspects and phases of Twombly’s path as an artist. It comprises et al. the reflections and personal impressions of other artists as well as the memories of his assistant Nicola Del Roscio. These diverse testimonies make it possible to discover Cy Twombly not only as an artist, but also as an individual.