This rare text is the first ever biography of Shakespeare, written by one of the liveliest dramatists and poets of the early 18th century.

This landmark in our understanding of the man and his work is introduced by one of the most original biographers of our own time and richly illustrated with contemporary images.

Nicholas Rowe’s Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear was published in 1709 as the preface to his pioneering edition of the plays. Rowe, together with Thomas Betterton, the greatest actor of the period, carried out archival research and interviewed widely to collect as much information about Shakespeare as possible. This is as close as we will ever get to the people who knew and worked with Shakespeare.

Rowe’s edition of the plays was also the first to be illustrated. This edition has 25 pages of these fascinating early images, mostly based on contemporary performance: a unique and charming picture of Shakespeare in performance.

The book begins by the North Sea. It is a late summer’s afternoon, and a bright sun has dispersed the greyness of the day. Two Englishmen are enjoying a swim off the Essex coast when all at once both have the feeling that they are back at the French seaside. They find themselves starting to tell each other of their youthful experiences of living in France. The adventures they narrate follow one after another like waves rolling onto the shore.

Clive, coming from London, had found himself spending a year deep in the French countryside within sight of the western Pyrenees; John, hailing from Devon, had ended up living for a while in the City of Light within sight of the Folies Bergère. Outsiders though they were, they momentarily became part of French society, their adventures fuelled by the culinary delights of their adopted land.

They tell their tales with humor and relish as they recall their initiation into the French way of life of decades ago – and how it shaped their own.

Manhattan Masters shows the most beautiful Dutch Masters from the Golden Age in The Frick Collection, New York. The book elaborates the creation of The Frick Collection, brought together during America’s Gilded Age in the last quarter of the 19th century. This book, published to accompany the exhibition, focuses exclusively on Dutch paintings of the 17th century and features outstanding works by renowned artist of that period, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, and Ruisdael.

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.

One sole truth about Edvard Munch’s art does not exist. The answers depend on the questions we pose. Twenty-two Munch experts have written 150 texts about well-known and lesser-known works from Munchmuseet’s collection. Through these multiple ways of seeing, Munch’s lifework emerges as infinite. And this book, as an exercise in the art of seeing. The book invites the reader to explore the world of Edvard Munch — his ideas, processes, and the profoundly human topics that occupied him and that still affect us today. Through a wide selection from the museum’s collection, you can experience the richness of Munch’s artistic career and his unrelenting drive to experiment and innovate.

“I have an old camera with which I have taken countless photographs of myself. It often produces astonishing effects”, Edvard Munch states in a 1930 interview. “Someday when I am old and have nothing better to do than work on an autobiography, all my photographic self-portraits will see the light of day again.” The autobiography was never realized, but the self-portraits have found their way to the pages of The Experimental Self. The Photography of Edvard Munch, which demonstrates the fundamentally experimental nature of the artist’s photographic practice. As a photographer, Munch embraced the freedom provided by the amateur position, and the unpredictable aspects of analogue photographic technology. By playfully approaching his own image in picture after picture, Munch extends his explorations of selfhood in other media through photography. The resulting photographs provide unique access to Munch’s radical artistic vision, which this book studies through eminent essays by Patricia G. Berman, Tom Gunning and MaryClaire Pappas.

Filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman was one of the most fearless filmmakers of her generation. Her work blurs the boundaries of time and space, of film and art. It can be seen in cinemas and museums worldwide. She may be largely unknown to the general public, but she is revered by cinephiles, visual artists and filmmakers. The impact of her oeuvre on world cinema became abundantly clear when Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was named best film of all time by British magazine Sight and Sound. In 2024, Bozar-Centre for Fine Arts, Jeu de Paume and CINEMATEK will pay tribute to Akerman by organizing the first major exhibition on the Brussels artist. This book accompanying the exhibition features people who were closest to Akerman and can offer unique insights: the people who worked with her or were inspired by her.

Exhibitions:

Bozar-Centre for Fine Arts – March 14 to July 21 2024

Jeu de Paume – September 28, 2024, to January 19, 2025

CINEMATEK – March 15 to July 21 2024

Although the Belgian artist Constant Permeke (1886–1952) is considered to be an expressionist, he explored numerous different styles. In a quintessentially modernist fashion, he sought ways of upending or exploding academicism, and of repeatedly reinventing painting. Right from the start of his career, Permeke achieved wide international recognition with his recurring subjects such as domestic scenes and people going about their everyday activities. He participated in numerous major exhibitions at home and abroad, alongside great names in art history such as Georges Braque, Amadeo Modigliani, Ossip Zadkine and Pablo Picasso.

With text contributions by Anneleen Cassiman, Jan Ceuleers, Inne Gheeraert, Franz W. Kaiser, Felipe Sevilhano Martinez, Daniël Rovers, Inneke Schwickert, Lise Vandewal, Wendy Van Hoorde and David Van Reybrouck.

This publication coincides with the festive reopening of the Permeke Museum at the artist’s former home in Jabbeke on 29 March 2024. Constant Permeke is a new reference work that brings together around 100 works of art and offers an in-depth look at the artist’s life and work.

This book explores the figure of Ghitta Carell (1899–1972), a Hungarian-born photographer who was naturalized Italian. Ghitta was born into a Jewish family of humble origins; at a very young age she moved to Italy, where she quickly became a very sought-after portrait photographer. Intellectuals, actors, generals, and political leaders posed in her studio in Rome, as well as famous women and members of royalty and the middle class.
Her black-and-white pictures were taken with a view camera: Ghitta crafted her photographs with mastery and delicacy, and thus created luminous and soft images, intervening through subtraction by removing the most superficial layers. This is how she achieved a kind of unmasking, thanks to which she restored not only the face but first and foremost the soul of those photographed. Ghitta Carell died in Haifa, Israel, leaving behind more than 50,000 plates now mostly dispersed.
Text in English and Hebrew.

Masquerade, Make-up & Ensor transposes Ensor’s ideas around the masquerade, (false) coquetry, seduction, deception, the artificial and the ephemeral to today. MoMu (Fashion Museum Antwerp) celebrates the painters of fashion: the craftsmanship and inexhaustible creativity of make-up and hair artists in a book where light, color, art, fashion and make-up meet. Make-up and beauty have today become a trillion-dollar industry that confronts man with his physical mortality, imagined imperfections and existential fears. But make-up, like paint, is also a form of personal expression, artistic experimentation, joy and freedom. Masquerade, Make-up & Ensor explores how closely make-up is intertwined with many aspects of our humanity.

Seattle has fueled the hopes, dreams, and imaginations of countless individuals throughout its history. Their energy, ideas, and inventions have influenced the city’s skyline, the evolution of air travel, the music and art worlds, and even the very coffee we drink. They are the reason Seattle is gifted with so many unusual, offbeat, and truly compeling places for explorers to discover and enjoy, from a coin-operated attraction filled with enormous shoes, the world’s greenest commercial building, and urban old growth forests, to a haunted staircase and museums dedicated to pinball, dialysis machines, and rubber chickens.
111 Places in Seattle That You Must Not Miss invites and inspires locals and visitors alike to seek out the Emerald City’s hidden treasures, overlooked gems, and charming curiosities.

Shadows of Boulder Hill presents a group of 50 powerful paintings in oil on linen by artist Tang Shuo (b. 1987 in Guangxi, China) that delve into his childhood experiences in rural southern China. This, Tang’s first book, documents the concurrent exhibitions of these works at Fabienne Levy’s galleries in Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2023.
Shadows of Boulder Hill marks a significant point in Tang’s career; in 2023 he incorporated narrative threads into his paintings for the first time, depicting young lovers, recluses, and wanderers lost in imagined and remembered landscapes of lush vegetation and wildflowers. A selection of the fascinating true stories from Boulder Hill that inform Tang’s practice, personal and collective, are detailed in the gallery notes.
Shadows of Boulder Hill includes a foreword by gallerist Fabienne Levy and an essay by multidisciplinary scholar Dr Matthew Holman. Here, Tang appears as an artist who has found his voice as he eloquently explores scenes of family, friendship, suffering, solitude, and survival.

Volker Hermes: Hidden Portraits gathers the essential works by one of the most beguiling artists of the present era, in a very modern reinterpretation of historical privilege.

Using only elements of the original paintings, Volker Hermes masterfully alters photos of historical portraits to mask the faces of their subjects. With each figure concealed under their own ceremonial attire, these one-time elites quickly lose their individuality in a plume of decorations and accessories.

In this official collection, Hermes delivers his wry commentary on wealth, fame and social status with taut imagery, intense focus and a suitably shrewd sense of humor. His immaculately reproduced artworks are accompanied by the thoughts of German art historian Till-Holger Borchert and Professor Francesca Raimondi of Berlin’s Institute for Philosophy, as well as the artist himself.

A must-have revision of classical portraiture from a celebrated digital creator.

“Hermes’s meticulously described collages pay homage to their sources while gently ribbing the social pretensions and ambitions of the courtly classes.” – Christopher Alessandrini, metmuseum.org

The very first retrospective book showcasing the renowned high jewelry Maison Chaumet features a collection of iconic editorials and campaigns captured by major photographers such as Guy Bourdin, Peter Lindberg, Mario Testino, Mario Sorrenti, Richard Burbridge, and Paolo Roversi. Additionally, it presents previously unreleased autochromes from the early 20th century, offering a captivating glimpse into the Maison’s historical archives.

A photographic reference title authored by Carol Woolton, a leading authority on high jewelry at British Vogue, Sylvie Lécallier, director of the photographic collection at Palais Galliera Musée de la Mode in Paris, and Flora Triebel, a curator specialist in 19th-century photography at Bibliothèque Nationale de France, delves into the close ties Chaumet has woven with photography since its inception, revealing its innovative collaborations over the years. From the 1930s to the present day, the book offers a portrait of high jewelry and women, making it an essential read for photography and high jewelry enthusiasts worldwide.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the great visionaries of European art, spent all his life in Northern Germany, apart from four years studying in Copenhagen, and his output appears to consist almost entirely of German landscapes. But far from being parochial, he was, in the words of the French sculptor David d’Angers, the artist who ‘discovered the tragic in landscape’. His paintings assemble minutely observed elements of nature into compo­sitions that celebrate the riches and the melancholy of a cosmos fully imbued with the divine, while never losing an almost hallucinatory engagement with reality. For all their clarity, they are the quintessence of Romanticism.

Almost too familiar today, to Friedrich’s contemporaries these extraordinary paint­ings were astonishing and challenging. This volume records the reactions of some of the most prominent figures of German Romanticism: Kleist, Brentano and Arnim (in a witty series of dialogues between gallery visitors alternately bewitched and bewildered by Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea), the painter and physiologist Carus, the psychologist Schubert, the Russian poet and translator Zhukovsky. A piece by Goethe and his colleague Heinrich Meyer records the somewhat baffled admiration of the earlier generation; and Friedrich’s own Commandments of Art breathes the almost overwhelming passion with which he approached his vocation. An introduction by the leading scholar Johannes Grave situates Friedrich’s art and its reception in the context of the Romantic movement both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

Jet black hair, porcelain skin, bright red lips and fingernails; figures gazing intensely into the camera; young men and women posing acrobatically with bizarre props; animals and plants in the glaring light of the camera’s flash, situated in urban landscapes, private spaces, or in nature, among rice fields, lotus ponds, and cacti — Ren Hang’s photographs are painfully provocative, but also inward looking and dreamily surreal. Ren Hang depicts the human body as an abstract form, often in idiosyncratic arrangements and perspectives, combining iconic images of William Shakespeare’s dying Ophelia in a river; of Leda, daughter of a Greek king, and the Swan; and of female nudes seen from behind using a distinctive visual vocabulary that draws on abstraction, Surrealism, Dada, and both historic and contemporary photography. Ren Hang’s analog photographs use a playful, humorous visual language to relate the feelings, desires, fears, and loneliness of a young generation in China. 

“… It’s as elegant and considered as Bowie himself, a mixture of gallery-level quality and personal scrapbook charm.” — Louder Than War

“…one of the most stunning and possibly heaviest books in the Bowie canon.” — God Is In The TV

“His images are not just records, they are living archives, fragments of history with a capital H…He doesn’t just show; he frames, builds, lights without trickery, but with a sense of rhythm that feels almost musical.” — Eye of Photography

“The result is a rare, career-spanning portrait of the chameleonic rock star, featuring never-before-seen images and candid recollections from a man who knew Bowie as both icon and friend. It’s also a record of proximity: of what it means to move through life alongside an artist who refused to repeat himself.” — Interview magazine

Official photographer to music legend David Bowie, Denis O’Regan presents a personal edit from his unrivalled collection of photographs. Accompanying Bowie on two world tours and enjoying a decades-long relationship with the star, no one photographed Bowie more than Denis O’Regan. As Bowie himself once remarked, ‘Denis, Rock ‘n’ Roll is in your blood’.

From the door of Olympic Studios, where Bowie recorded Diamond Dogs in 1974, to live stadium shows in the 1990s, Denis’s full archive is at last opened and many unseen images revealed for the first time. David Bowie by Denis O’Regan tells Bowie’s musical story in pictures, with O’Regan’s own words relaying his experience of documenting that incredible journey.

Author of the hugely successful Ricochet: David Bowie 1983 (Particular Books, 2018), O’Regan has toured with the biggest stars from The Rolling Stones and Queen to Pink Floyd and Duran Duran, to name a few. But it is his photographs of David Bowie, taken over two decades at over 200 concerts worldwide, that he is best known for. David Bowie the showman and David behind-the scenes, O’Regan has captured it all in this showcase of one of the world’s most talented performers.

The Dialogues by Portuguese painter and writer Francisco de Holanda give unprecedented insight into the opinions, preoccupations and character of Michelangelo, already in his lifetime the most celebrated and influential artist in Europe. These Dialogues record his participation in the discussions about art hosted by Vittoria Colonna, his closest friend. Michelangelo’s opinions and ambitions during the period when he was painting The Last Judgement come vividly to life, as does the world in which he moved. No other text brings us so close to Michelangelo the artist, poet and thinker. The Dialogues are presented here in the classic translation by Charles Holroyd, painter, engraver, art historian and director of the National Gallery. The introduction by David Hemsoll situates the Dialogues in the context of Michelangelo’s career and the artistic world in Rome. Sixteen pages of illustrations include some of Michelangelo’s finest drawings, and views of the Rome he knew.

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 civilization. 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. 

Twice by Jacques Sonck brings together duo-toned portraits of people in twos and threes that Jacques Sonck photographed on the street over the course of thirty years. Jacques Sonck shoots classical analogue black-and-white portraits with an eye for the extraordinary. His oeuvre is a celebration of the diversity of humankind. Sonck is attracted by people who stand out from the crowd, either by an anomaly in their appearance or by their extrovert attitude and Twice demonstrates diversity and his anthropological taste within photography. His eccentric models are unique individuals who walk the border of ‘normality’. Although his work is often compared with that of Diane Arbus, who photographed humans on the margins of society, Sonck is more interested in the physical appearance than in the social position of his subjects.

In English and French.

a+u’s March issue presents Irish architecture through 20 houses by six architecture firms. These houses, nestled in the landscape of Ireland, paint a portrait of the physical conditions of the island. Architects Tom de Paor and Andrew Clancy serve as guest editors and begin the feature in conversation. They describe Ireland as being gently exhausted and without past glories, but not yet melancholic. The 20 houses responding to the island are practically designed yet with sensitive qualities of “dry and wet,” “soft lighting and fleeting shadows,” and “modeling and its staining.” These houses are individual attempts by their architects to find something that was already “constructed, abandoned, found” and to discover their own architectural language in Ireland. Their images, drawings, and give form to a notably new Irish architecture.

Text in English and Japanese.

The Archetypal Artist, a collection of essays on the life and art of F.N. Souza, invites readers to the collective unconscious party; a high voltage zone consisting of stark art images and commentary. Be prepared to be shocked, bewildered, and amazed. Beware — since most of Souza’s art images overlap with your personal unconscious, you will be triggered. Everything you have repressed and rejected will stare back at you in full glory. As the shadows and multivalent archetypes come alive and begin dancing, be strong to hold aloft the light of your own consciousness. This is what Souza did when confronted by the collective unconscious. He began mining images from it, giving them form on his canvas, culminating in a journey towards individuation and wholesomeness.

This collection of 21 essays combining research in art history, Eastern – Western philosophy, classical literature, Jungian analysis, psychology, anthropology, religion and theater began as a personal quest by the author to seek answers to cultural constructs of life, body and sexuality. The conditioned and structured lives of men and women in society troubled her. Authoritarian narratives from religion and state thwarted attempts to attain autonomy at every step. The path to spiritual enlightenment was strewn with doubts and finding a synthesis of East and West was challenging. The tryst with Souza’s art began with questions, but the very first interlude was cathartic. Embark on a subjective journey into the world of F.N. Souza.

“He’s been behind the camera forever. A friend of the light. Does he have a pact with the heavens? Do they tell him secrets? The language of light? He somehow travels on the same frequency. Respectfully engaging with the source.” — Samantha Morton

“Most portraitists kill their subjects. He keeps them alive. He doesn’t want to freeze you in time. He’s made portraiture sexy again, but not stupid. Vulnerable but never weak.” — Marlene Dumas

The ultimate showcase of photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn’s iconic work, spanning from the 1970s to today.

Anton Corbijn (b. 1955) is one of the most important photographers and directors working today, renowned for his iconic portraits of musicians, actors, and artists, as well as his distinctive visual work in music videos and album covers. 

This gloriously illustrated, oversized book pays homage to Corbijn’s love for the arts – an interest that has led to lifelong friendships with Bono, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Michael Stipe, Dave Gahan, and other iconic musicians. Looking back over five decades, it features hundreds of creative, offbeat images that Corbijn was able to capture largely as a result of his close relationships with his subjects.

Corbijn, Anton highlights and rediscovers iconic images, celebrating his legacy and lasting influence on visual art and pop culture to this day.

With text contributions by Adam Clayton (U2), Anton Corbijn, Marlene Dumas, Johan Faes, Samantha Morton and Tom Waits.

This publication accompanies a grand retrospective exhibition at Fotografiska Stockholm, from 13 June until 12 October 2025. The exhibition will be traveling to Fotografiska Berlin, Tallinn and Shanghai.

The Family of Migrants is inspired by the legendary exhibition The Family of Man, an ode to humanity created by photographer and curator Edward Steichen, that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. This book features around 200 photographs and will show the most striking photography that tells universal, timeless stories of human existence, such as departure, journey and arrival, and themes like family, loss and love.
Among the hundreds of images are iconic as well as unknown photos by, among many others, Lewis Hine, Chien-Chi Chang, Abbas Attar, Robert de Hartogh, Wang Fuchun, Dorothea Lange, Stephan Vanfleteren, Ara Güler, Leonard Freed, Ata Kandó and Ishiuchi Miyako.

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