The works of contemporary and established architecture, collected in five different itineraries within the volume, highlight the presence of a multitude of fragments and elements that make up the stratigraphy of the city. Venice turns out to be a laboratory for reflection on modernity to which it is necessary to turn our gaze in order to understand the complex uniqueness of a lagoon city that develops on an island. This presents itself as the city of the mind and people in that it consists entirely of pedestrian and public spaces but at the same time is traversed by water in which motor vehicles navigate. The unrepeatability of Venice makes its infinite architecture even more unprecedented and unique, giving those who visit it an unprecedented experience.
Sculptor Martin Kargruber (b. 1965), from South Tyrol, Italy, forms each of his distinctive sculptural objects from a single piece of solid wood. He consciously uses the wood’s natural properties and organic materiality in his architectural and landscape motifs, employing traditional techniques and interpreting them anew in extraordinary ways. He transforms the rigidity of the material into a seemingly gentle movement, incorporating the workmanship itself into an explicit part of the design. His representative motifs are characterized — above and beyond the formal concept — by intensive exploration into the reality of the living world and a high level of poetic abstraction.
Text in English, German and Italian.
Architecture Asia, as the official journal of the Architects Regional Council Asia, aims to provide a forum not only for presenting Asian phenomena and their characteristics to the world but also for understanding diversity and multiculturalism within Asia from a global perspective. In the 21st century, Asia has been developed fast in the wave of globalization, and the living and urban environment are changing rapidly along with the economic development. In this process, many Asian cities are carrying out large-scale urban infrastructure construction in the process of rapid urbanization, and building a large number of iconic buildings that represent the characteristics of the country or city. This issue focuses on Living in the 21st Century, through three perspectives: the transformation of spatial functions, the contradiction between urban development and individual dwelling, and architecture in the age of self-media.
The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) has reopened after several years of major renovation. It is home to an especially varied collection of art that runs to more than 9,000 items: paintings, sculptures, assemblages, drawings and prints from the 14th to the 21st century.
Old Flemish masters like Jan van Eyck, Quinten Massys and Peter Paul Rubens feature alongside internationally renowned artists such as Jean Fouquet, Titian, Auguste Rodin and Amedeo Modigliani. The KMSKA also has the world’s largest collections of work by James Ensor and Rik Wouters.
This richly illustrated book highlights seven centuries of art, from the Flemish Primitives to conceptual artists. A hundred masterpieces from the permanent collection are presented in detail and discussed in lucid articles that draw on the very latest research by KMSKA’s own in-house scholars.
What kind of world do we want to bequeath to our children? What planet, what future do we want to pass on to them? In his latest book, Cyril Christo poses the most fundamental of all questions. Together with his wife Marie Wilkinson and their son Lysander, Christo has been seeking out the wonders of this world for more than 40 years and across all continents. During their travels to the Inuit or the first peoples of Africa, they come into contact with communities who seem to have everything that modern, technological society has lost: time, family and an almost inexhaustible kindness towards strangers.
The photographers present the wonder of unspoiled nature in their book, captured in powerful duo-tone images that provide a fascinating glimpse into the beauty of life. With a fighting yet sensitive spirit, they share how their experiences and encounters have guided their son’s development and how nature can serve as a teacher to all children with their irrepressible yearning for wonder. The world’s greatest classroom, nature as the school of life, is threatened as never before by climate change and the continuous loss of habitat. Christo and Wilkinson regard their book as a manifesto and a warning, because “without wonder we are lost.”
John Burgess masterfully brings to life the modern history of Cambodia’s fabled Angkor temples, from their “discovery” by French explorers in the mid-19th century, through to the latter part of the 20th century, when celebrity visitors included a well-publicised one by Jackie Onassis and making Angkor one of the top 3 monuments to visit in the world. An invaluable and riveting book about one of the greatest man-made wonders in the world.
The Art Travel Book takes you on a journey across the globe, past iconic outdoor art installations and sculptures. The book showcases both well-known landmarks and hidden treasures: all extraordinary works that harmonize with their natural surroundings. From the arid plains of Texas to the cliffs of the South of France, from the verdant forests of England to the rugged beauty of Cape Town: many of the locations featured are freely accessible, making The Art Travel Book as much an invitation to travel as a source of inspiration for art and nature enthusiasts. The book provides background information on the artists, the artworks and their settings, while also offering curated recommendations for nearby sites of interest. It’s the perfect travel guide for art enthusiasts with a craving for new discoveries.
Through various thematic perspectives and a range of media, this book will shed new light on the history of Surrealism. With the idea of the unconscious as a turning point, The Savage Eye traces the roots of Surrealism in Symbolism and shows how the two art movements both reflect each other and overlap. Some of the most significant artists in modern art meet here in the murky depths of the human mind, where logic and morality give way to dreams, disturbing impulses, and unbridled desire. In this illuminating book you will become familiar with two radical art movements that both explored the psyche with the aim of establishing a new concept of humanity. Through artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Paul Gauguin, Dora Maar, René Magritte, Lee Miller, Joan Miró, Odilon Redon, and Auguste Rodin we will take you on a journey through the limitless world of the unconscious.
The essays in this lavishly illustrated volume offer a multi-faceted portrait of American financier J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) as a collector of art. A riveting exploration of Morgan’s acquisitions from antiquities to medieval manuscripts to Old Master paintings and European decorative arts, Morgan—The Collector introduces the reader to how and why he amassed his vast collection. The lively essays also serve as a tribute to Linda Roth, curator at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, who dedicated much of her forty-year career to researching Morgan and the over 1,500 works from his collection now in the museum. This much-needed publication focuses on Morgan as a collector and is directed at both a scholarly and more general audience that is interested in the history of collecting, America in the Gilded Age, Pierpont Morgan, and European art.
Nineteenth-Century European Painting: From Barbizon to Belle Époque represents a comprehensive guide to the range of stylistically diverse genres of nineteenth-century European painting. Accessible and insightful, this exquisitely illustrated volume presents the historical context behind the century’s essential artistic movements including Romantic Painting, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Realist Painting, Academic Painting, and Impressionist Painting. Influenced by an overwhelming wave of political, military and social change, nineteenth-century Europe represented an era more diverse in painterly subjects and styles than any before it. Indeed, it was a period that saw many European painters moving away from the strictures of the academy system, choosing instead to use their training to develop new techniques and traditions. A collection of independent stories, this book also outlines the unique progression between the different movements, exciting and enlightening the reader about the most magnificent period of art the world has ever known. Contents: Foreword; Dr. Vern G. Swanson; Introduction; Author’s Note; STYLES: The Barbizon School; Romantic Painting; Orientalist Painting; The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Realist Painting; Academic Painting; Impressionist Painting; The Newlyn School; Post-Impressionist Painting; SUBJECTS: Landscape Painting; Venetian View Painting; Maritime Painting; Sporting Painting; Animal Painting; Genre Painting; Cardinal Painting; Costume Painting; British Neoclassical Revival Painting; Belle Époque Painting; Conclusion; Endnotes; Bibliography. Featured works from museums and collections including: Louvre, Paris, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Wallace Collection, London, Fine Art Museum of San Francisco, The Tate Gallery, London, The Schaeffer Collection, New South Wales, The Royal Collection, The Royal Academy of Arts, England, The Musée D Orsay Paris, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Russia, Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, England, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Stanhope Forbes, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, PA, USA, Paisnel Gallery, London, National Gallery, London, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy, Museo de Arte, Ponte, Puerto Rico, Musée Marmottan, Paris, Musée D Orsay, Paris, Auguste Renoir, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among many others.
Christian Krohg was a key figure in the Norwegian art community of the 1880s and 1890s, and was strongly influenced by the ideology of realism. In his view, art should have meaning for a broad segment of the population, not merely serve as wall decorations for the bourgeoisie. Three types of motifs were recurrent themes for Krohg during this period: the working-class hero, scenes from family life and “the fallen woman”. Many people responded to his literary and visual representations of the poverty-stricken girl Albertine. He depicted members of the working class with great sympathy in paintings such as Errand Boy Drinking Coffee and Woman Cutting Bread. The Gaihede family, fishermen from Skagen in Denmark, are portrayed in many everyday situations, as are members of Krohg’s own family. The catalogue sheds light on the subject matter of the exhibition, Krohg’s period of study in Berlin and its impact on him, his relationship with Georg Brandes, the novel Albertine and Krohg’s own use of photography as a model for his work and a medium.
Text in English and Norwegian.
Carroll Dunham. Grafikk / prints 1985–2022 is published on the occasion of a generous donation to The National Museum from the American artist Carroll Dunham (b. 1949). The entire gift, consisting of 161 prints, is presented in this publication. The book shows the artist’s fondness for series and contains some of his most known and iconic motifs. Dunham’s prints show considerable range in their expressiveness, motifs, and themes. Inspired by art history, pop culture, and his personal experience, he directs his gaze at everything from the infinity of the universe to the physical body and the representation of leaves on a tree.
Text and interview by Wenche Volle and Geir Haraldseth.
Text in English and Norwegian.
In March of 2008, The National Museum – Architecture opened at Bankplassen 3 in Oslo with an exhibition on Sverre Fehn. He is the architect behind the renovation of Grosch’s bank building from the 1800s and the new museum pavilion. Fehn was also active in selecting which projects should be included in the exhibition and this catalogue. In addition to articles, pictures and drawings, this catalogue also includes quotes and project descriptions by Fehn himself.
Vanessa Baird is confrontational, morbidly funny, even infamous, with her sharp, oblique observations of herself and her times. Go Down with Me, the book accompanying MUNCH’s exhibition of the same name, is richly illustrated with works from her whole career. This includes the installation You Must Never Go Down to the End of Town if You Don’t Go Down with Me, created especially for MUNCH, which reflects on the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip.
Also included are thought-provoking essays by Kari Brandtzæg, Jon Refsdal Moe, Trude Schjelderup Iversen and Vegard Vinge, demonstrating Baird’s ceaseless productivity and unique ability to hit where it hurts the most.
“… essential reading for anyone interested in conservation, African history, and the human spirit. It is a moving portrait of a park that continues to inspire global efforts in environmental stewardship, even under the most difficult circumstances.” — Ninu Ninu
“This book is a reminder of the park’s value both in local terms and on a global scale, and why the fight to protect it must continue.” —Outdoor Photography
Virunga National Park, the green lung in the eastern DR Congo, is Africa’s oldest nature reserve. The park is breathtakingly beautiful and offers an unparalleled diversity of ecosystems—from active volcanoes to tropical rain forests, from the glaciers of the Rwenzori peaks to the savannas of Rwindi. It is home to an exceptional array of wildlife, including the world’s last mountain gorillas. Thanks to these unique features, Virunga is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. This publication, written by around 40 experts, explores the complex history of this Congolese gem. It sheds light on those who have dedicated themselves to its preservation since 1925, as well as the current teams fighting to address the countless environmental and social challenges in a region plagued by conflict, poverty, and humanitarian crises. Through their efforts, the park has become a catalyst for development and stabilisation of the entire region. The book invites us on a fascinating journey where resilience and innovation serve the park and surrounding communities, continuing to shape the legend of Virunga.
This volume collects the papers presented at the international study conference Sculpting in the Renaissance: an art to (com)move / Sculpter à la Renaissance. Un art pour (é)mouvoir organized by the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the Castello Sforzesco in Milan to accompany the exhibition Le corps et l’âme. De Donatello à Michel-Ange. Scultures italiennes de la Renaissance (Officina Libraria, 2020), held between 2020 and 2021. With the involvement of some of the most important specialists in Renaissance sculpture, the aim was to investigate the interactions, influences and exchanges between the plastic arts and other Renaissance art forms capable of revealing feelings through expressions of the body, trough the works of Agostino di Duccio, Donatello, Michelangelo and other local sculptors. The aim is also to place within their social, devotional and intellectual context the different manifestations of feeling of which sculpture is one of the privileged media. Sacred art themes in particular were addressed, in an attempt to explain their formal evolution in relation to the socio-cultural transformations of the time, but also to local traditions and their dramatization.
Text in English, French and Italian.
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 watercolors and drawings by famous German Renaissance artists Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein alongside the baroque splendor 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 contextualized 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.
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Switzerland and South Korea, this volume offers a unique point of view on the work of Ji-Young Demol Park and Lee Lee Nam. The evocation of nature unfolds through connections interwoven over the centuries between culture and objects, materials, colors, and motifs. Jade- and pine-colored decorated ceramics, cobalt oxide for the horizon, porcelain white as snow or the moon, all feature in the work of both artists, their gazes meeting and reflecting in the landscapes of a great painter of old, Jeong Seon (1676-1759). Despite all their differences, the mountains rendered in ink by Ji-Young Demol Park and Lee Lee Nam’s virtual landscapes are truly united by the uniqueness of their relationship with this cultural heritage as well as the strength of their individual universes, oriented towards the re-enchantment of nature.
Text in English and French.
“an excellent short book, which focusses in detail on a single work, a newly restored screen by William Bell Scott” — Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, Volume 29, 2024-2025, p.128
William Bell Scott’s screen, The King’s Quair, was commissioned by James Leathart, an important collector of Pre-Raphaelite art. The beautifully decorated folding screen took as its inspiration The Kingis Quair, a 15th-century Scots poem attributed to James I of Scotland. Depicting key scenes from the king’s 18-year imprisonment in Windsor Castle, it is adorned by exquisite botanical details and gold leaf.
Split into three parts, this book reveals the history of the screen’s commission, details the remarkable imagery of the screen itself, and finally situates the screen in its historical context by explaining the fascinating personal relationships that were the backdrop to its creation, including Scott’s relationship with the artist and heiress Alice Boyd.
Drawing together the chivalric medieval tale of an imprisoned, love-struck king with the vibrancy of the Pre-Raphaelite social circles in which Scott moved, the reader is given a vivid picture of how this captivating artwork was created. Illustrated with new photography of the screen, this book is a vital new part of the story of British, as well as Scottish art.
The German silversmith Paula Straus (1894–1943) was a pivotal figure in shaping the “Golden Twenties” and the creative decades of the Bauhaus. Even early on, her jewelry objects and handmade items of silverware were reviewed with praise in the specialist press, and national and international exhibitions followed. In joining the design studio of the silverware factory Peter Bruckmann & Söhne, Heilbronn, in 1925, an unparalleled career began as Germany’s first woman industrial designer. The silverware she designed — coffee and tea services — for handcrafted as well as machine production stands as an example of her own original style, which is defined by a purist idiom.
Her professional success and her renown as a craftswoman and designer have been completely forgotten due to the national-socialist persecution of the Jews from 1933 and her murder in Auschwitz. The time has now come to rediscover her work.
With contributions by Edith Neumann, Monika and Reinhard Sänger, Joachim W. Storck, Michal S. Friedlander, Christoph Engel, and a foreword by Winfried Kretschmann.
Text in German.
Architecture Asia, as the official journal of the Architects Regional Council Asia, aims to provide a forum, not only for presenting Asian phenomena and their characteristics to the world, but also for understanding diversity and multiculturalism within Asia from a global perspective.
This issue reveals how old buildings can be updated to realize innovation through renovation, and features three essays and eleven projects that elaborate this perspective. The three essays discuss regenerative architecture in Pakistan that create contemporary examples of traditional architecture, the revitalization of old buildings in Hong Kong, China for heritage conservation—along the concept of updating the “hardware” and “software” of the building—and the sharing and regeneration of historical heritage spaces in old towns in Xiamen, China. The 11 projects, accompanied with full-color photos and text descriptions, highlight architectural works that showcase the theme of renovation and innovation across projects that include a house, library, chapel, and clinic, to reveal how these buildings embody sustainability and innovation, and re-energize cities.
Architecture Asia, as the official journal of the Architects Regional Council Asia, aims to provide a forum, not only for presenting Asian phenomena and their characteristics to the world, but also for understanding diversity and multiculturalism within Asia from a global perspective.
This issue discusses the topic of globalization and locality through four essays and eleven projects. The essays attempt to observe the tension between the different forces of globalization, which is being widely debated as a distinguishing trend, and also highlight globalization’s impact on local architecture, as well as the various efforts being taken to ensure local identity and distinctive locality in architecture design. The projects, accompanied with full-color photos and text descriptions, demonstrate the many successful attempts in developing design concepts and methods to cope with the globalization trend while maintaining locality. These essays and projects are carefully selected to represent diversity in project locations, and includes locations such as Thailand, India, Japan, and China.
The ARCASIA Awards for Architecture is an annual award established by the Architects Regional Council Asia to recognize the outstanding architectural works of Asian architects. It hopes to encourage the inheritance of the Asian spirit and promote the improvement of the Asian architectural environment as well as the role of architects and architecture in the social, economic and cultural development of Asian countries. This special issue of Architecture Asia gives a comprehensive review of the 26 winning projects of ARCASIA Awards for Architecture 2021, which includes Single Family Residential Projects, Multi-family Residential Complexes, Commercial Buildings, Resort Buildings, Institutional Buildings, Social and Cultural Buildings, Specialized Buildings, Industrial Buildings, Conservation Projects, Integrated Projects, Socially Responsible Architecture, and Sustainable Buildings.
Through brief jury comments, project descriptions and rich images, this book provides a wonderful opportunity for readers all over the world to give a quick glance at what happened in Asian architecture in 2021.
A vivid portrait of much-loved artist, Joan Eardley, and her relationship with the Scottish coastal fishing village, Catterline.
Joan Eardley, one of Scotland’s most loved artists, first visited the coastal fishing village of Catterline in north-east Scotland in 1951. It sparked a fascination that would last the rest of her life.
She made the village her home and found inspiration in the dramatic light and rapidly changing weather. The gentle landscapes and wild rolling seascapes she painted there in wind, snow, rain and sunshine are among her best-loved works.
Focussing on Eardley’s relationship with Catterline, this book includes previously unpublished archival material as well as specially conducted interviews with many of those in the village who knew her, shedding new light on Eardley’s life and artistic practice. A vivid portrait is painted both of Eardley and of the village, showing the vital part Catterline played in her development as an artist.