The Meaning of the Earth offers a retrospective on the lives and work of the relentlessly controversial artists, placing them within the context of twentieth century British culture. Wolf Jahn tells the story of how Gilbert & George found their identity in opposition to pervasive ideas around social conformity and religion after meeting in 1967.
The artists staged an internal revolution, mining their psyches to create visionary and unwaveringly modern art. The ‘two people but one artist’ ask the questions that gnaw at us all: ‘Where do we come from?’, ‘Who are we?’ and ‘Where are we going?’ The book meditates on the artists’ role in this century, connecting their beginnings as Living Sculptures to their pictorial work of today.
The Meaning of the Earth is a continuation of Jahn’s 1989 work, The Art of Gilbert & George. The author writes a playful philosophical interrogation of Gilbert & George’s work that truly grasps its cosmic scale.

Written by Antony Penrose, son of American feminist icon Lee Miller and British artist Roland Penrose this delightful narrative introduces the fascinating lives of Lee Miller; War Correspondent and Surrealist photographer and her husband Roland Penrose; Surrealist artist and co-founder of the ICA, whilst taking a tour of their extraordinary home in the Sussex countryside. Farleys’s exterior has no hint of visual excitements to be discovered. Bright walls & corridors filled with remarkable & eclectic art. The book gives a glimpse into amazing lives of Lee Miller & Roland Penrose. This special anniversary edition, 75 years at Farleys, has new photography and never seen before insights to the house.

‘This is me, Hee-haw. I’m going to tell you a story. Not just any old story – a Christmas story. You’re going to see the most beautiful paintings and drawings in the world too. You’ll probably be surprised to see how many pictures I’m in. Hundreds – no, thousands! And that’s because I, Hee-haw, play a very important part in this story. As you will see.’ Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis museum, tells the Christmas story through the eyes of Hee-haw the donkey, drawn by Thé Tjong-Khing. ‘How come? Because I was always there!’

The Story of the America’s Cup 1851-2021 tells the chronological history of 150 years of the most exciting and exhilarating yacht race, open the pages and you can almost feel the wind in the sails and the salt spray.

Full page color illustrations bring the yachts alive, set as they are in their natural element, at sea, on the waves; detailed descriptions give an amazing insider’s view of the construction of individual boats, the routes sailed, the crews, the highs and lows of what was undoubtedly, extremely tough and competitive sailing, the victories and the defeats.

Paintings by Tim Thompson, a leading marine artist are an integral part of the book’s appeal; he has captured the pure essence, the spirit of the race and its place in history.

Darwishi Ur-atum Msamaki Minkabh Ishaq Eboni, the son of an Egyptian pharaoh, is only nine years old when he dies. He is mummified and laid to rest in a tomb, with the powerful Golden Scarab of Mukatagara hanging around his neck. Thousands of years later, during a transport of three precious sarcophaguses, there is a terrible storm. Lightning strikes, the lorry plunges from a flyover and the sarcophaguses are hurled through the air. During all this, a little white shape escapes the wreckage unnoticed…

Angus Gust is ten and has a perfectly normal life. Then one night a little mummy appears in his room! Life changes completely. Angus and Dummie (short for his real name) become best friends. One dreadful day, Dummie’s scarab goes missing. Without the scarab Dummie falls terribly ill. Angus must now do everything he can to find the scarab, so Dummie doesn’t have to face death again. Can Dummie be saved in time?

In this second book in the Dummie the Mummy series, Dummie, Angus and Nick travel to Egypt. It’s Dummie’s great wish to return to his country to visit the grave of his father, Pharaoh Akhnetut. Unfortunately, Egypt has completely changed in four thousand years and Akhnetut’s grave seems untraceable. To make matters even worse, Nick falls ill and Angus and Dummie set off without him. Then something terrible happens – Dummie has to give everything he’s got to save his best friend. Yet he is also determined to find his father’s grave. Fortunately, he remembers more and more about his life long ago and this proves to be very handy!

Maria Lai always had a special relationship with fairy tales. She considered them a metaphor for art and a way of communicating with the public in a simple, straightforward way. Starting in the 1980s, fairy tales became central to her art. Tenendo per mano il sole, Tenendo per mano l’ombra, Curiosape and Maria Pietra, are her most famous “sewn fairy tales” – books created by the artist using castoff textiles.

Maria Lai’s fairy tales are not merely children’s stories, but profound reflections on life and what it means to be a human being. They are often inspired by Sardinian myths and legends, to which the artist gives a personal twist, adding autobiographical details and philosophical reflections.
This edition of Tenendo per mano l’ombra is a printed version of Maria Lai’s 1987 tale. The original consists of fabric pages sewn together and collages of dyed textiles, on which the artist has embroidered geometric figures, yarn and other materials. The fairy tale tells the story of a human being (and his double) who must learn to accept shadows, the dark part of the world and of himself. The figure’s shadow, in Maria Lai’s fairy tale, is not a negative element to be rejected, but an integral part of his personality. To live an untroubled and complete life, one must learn to accept and live with it.

Elena Pontiggia’s concluding essay accompanies the reader in a fascinating page by page interpretation of the fable, and discusses Lai’s artistic and stylistic approach in the context of an extensive network of philosophical, literary and artistic references: from Kant and Manzoni to Klee and Malevič.

Text in English and Italian.

In a series of color-saturated, dream-like, hallucinatory images taken at night, this second book in a trilogy by Kolkata-based photographer Arko Datto explores the shifting world of nature, society, and politics in Malaysia and Indonesia. Over the course of 4 years, he has captured both people and animals in confrontation with the changing urban environments they live in, with the subtext of the politics that made this change possible. In a place that used to be considered a tropical paradise, over- development and property speculation have forced residents out and have created deserts of empty real estate where neither locals nor animal life can thrive. SNAKEFIRE is dedicated to this paradise that has been lost to unmediated human greed and ponders the costs of untrammeled consumption. 

The Ashcan School and The Eight are now recognized as America’s first modern art movement: rejecting their academic training and the practices of the National Academy of Design, they forged a new art that represented America’s shifting values. By focusing on urban streets scenes, the lives of immigrants, popular entertainments, and the working poor, this loosely affiliated group of artists became synonymous with ordinary, everyday subjects — in the words of one critic, “pictures of ashcans.” Yet this is only part of their story: they also experimented with complex color theory and embraced scientific studies about movement and perception, while also creating scenes of bourgeois leisure and society portraits in attempts to reconcile their high-art practices with their populist reputations.

This catalog features nearly 130 works across media, including paintings, drawings, pastels, and prints — rarely seen objects and popular favorites. Collectively these works emphasize the Ashcan School’s and The Eight’s valuable contributions to the formation of American modernism at the beginning of the 20th century.

From the 2nd century CE to the 19th century, the people of the fertile estuary of the great Mekong River created treasures of sacred art, architecture and accomplished feats of water engineering that are coming to light in Vietnam’s vigorous new archaeological research programmes. The large stilted wooden houses of Oc Eo, the early Venice of the maritime routes of the East in the earliest centuries of the first millennium, drew in ships with precious cargoes from Rome, India and China to trade while waiting for the change of the monsoon wind to continue their voyages.

Chinese annals record that the early polity they called ‘Funan’ ruled 1,000 km of coastline along the shipping route. Among the earliest Mekong Delta Buddhist icons are a breathtakingly elegant 2.7m tall Buddha carved in hardwood that has survived more than 1000 years in the delta mud and a 29cm bronze Buddha that arrived on a trading ship from the 6th century Chinese Northern Qi dynasty. Very early Vishnu statues wear high, floral mitres and clasp war conch-trumpets on their left hip, and Shiva’s face stares out from stone lingas.

The Ho Chi Minh Museum collection conserves diverse masterpieces of the art from Vietnam, from the prehistoric Dong Son drums of the Red River Delta in the north to the vibrant Hindu and Buddhist statuary of the former kingdoms of Champa in Central Vietnam. In addition, there is an immense array of art and imperial furnishings of the last Vietnamese dynasty, the Nguyen, which was founded in the Mekong Delta at the beginning of the 19th century. There are refined inlaid wooden cabinets, sets of the finest blue and white ceramics and embroidered silken court costumes worn by the royal family, as well as huge wooden and ceramic Buddha statues which played crucial social and political roles in establishing the dynasty and quelling its foes.

History Today carried a feature in 2015, describing The Origin of Museums as “a cult book [that] spawned a new discipline in the history of collecting”. Indeed, the first publication of this book in 1985 undoubtedly marked a propitious moment in the development of interest, in what has since grown to be a dynamic subject-area in its own right. That an appetite for such matters was already there is confirmed by the fact that the first impression sold out within a few months, a second impression a year or two later, and the third in 1989. There was to be no further printing by the original publishers, Oxford University Press. However in 2001 a new edition appeared with a new publisher. Demand again proved buoyant, but within a few months the company failed; having operated on a print-on-demand basis, it left behind it no unsold stock. The Origins of Museums reverted to a scarce (though much sought-after) volume. With original copies now selling for hundreds, if not thousands of pounds, the Ashmolean is proud to make this important volume readily available again.

Margaret Mercer Elphinstone (1788-1867), with her powerful mind and independent spirit, was never daunted by adversity as she sought to realize her ambitions for her family against the background of intellectual upheaval and social and political change which followed the French Revolution and the end of the ancien régime. The turning-point in her life was her controversial marriage in 1817 with the general Charles de Flahaut (1785-1870), which, contrary to all expectations, resulted in one of the most successful partnerships in the ‘auld alliance’ between France and Scotland.

Whereas the life of her husband, the dashing Napoleonic general and diplomat Charles de Flahaut, is well known, Margaret has remained in the shadows. Yet this biographical study, based on unpublished correspondence in the Archives Nationales, Paris, reveals her to have been the more interesting of the two. It shows how much he depended on her brains, political judgment and artistic taste as well as her fortune to guide him in his career. Her lively, observant but wicked pen takes us with her on visits to Talleyrand, to the marquis de Lafayette, to the duchesse de Praslin, to house parties in stately homes of England and Scotland. Acknowledged a superb hostess, her descriptions of the menus, and entertainments organized in her homes in Scotland, London and Paris, and at the Flahaut embassies in Vienna and in London capture the flavor of those cosmopolitan gatherings. A lifelong liberal in politics and an upholder of Whig principles, her politicomanie inspires sharp comments on the opponents of Reform in England and on the self-seeking ministers of Louis-Philippe in France.

This scholarly catalogue provides a rich survey of the outstanding English drawings and watercolors in the National Gallery of Scotland’s collection. It ranges from the art of the Stuart court to the late Victorian period – from Isaac Oliver to Lord Leighton. Highlights include important works by artists such as William Blake, John Sell Cotman, John Robert Cozens, John Flaxman, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Girtin, Edward Lear, John Frederick Lewis, Paul Sandby and J.M.W. Turner. Key works are illustrated in colour and the text provides an authoritative commentary on issues such as their function, history, date and technique. The catalogue will be a valuable resource for students, art historians, collectors, dealers, picture researchers and all serious enthusiasts for British art.

J.M.W. Turner 1775-1851 was perhaps the most prolific and innovative of all British artists. His outstanding watercolors in the Scottish National Gallery are one of the most popular features of its collection. Bequeathed to the Gallery in 1899 by the distinguished collector Henry Vaughan, they have been exhibited, as he requested, every January for over 100 years. Renowned for their excellent state of preservation, they provide a remarkable overview of many of the most important aspects of Turner’s career.

This richly illustrated book provides a commentary on the watercolors, addressing questions of technique and function, as well as considering some of the numerous contacts Turner had with other artists, collectors and dealers. The introduction concentrates on Henry Vaughan, one of the greatest enthusiasts for British art in the late nineteenth century, whose diverse collections have not previously been fully appreciated.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, part of the National Galleries of Scotland, provides a unique visual history of Scotland, told through portraits of the figures who shaped it: royals and rebels, poets and philosophers, heroes and villains. The Gallery is home to Scotland’s collection of portrait miniatures which date from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day.
This book illustrates a selection of works by key miniaturists and features portraits of many important Scottish historical figures such as James Hepburn 4th Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, James VI and I and Robert Burns who was depicted in the last year of his life. A complete list of all the works in the collection is also included.

The book has a selection of 186 of the most interesting arms in the Jaipur royal palace and discusses them as weapons in their social and historical context. The book breaks new ground in Indian arms scholarship and is also a very readable account that takes in Rajput, Mughal and British Indian history, anthropology and art history. The objects are stunning: swords belonging to the Mughal Emperors Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb; wonderful court daggers with hilts of carved rock crystal, jade, ivory and gilt steel; ferocious tribal arms; some remarkable historic firearms and beautiful painted shields, some of which were decorated in Japan for the Mughal court. There is even a device for extracting arrows from wounds with toe-curling ancient medical remedies. Most of these arms are from the reserve collections and published for the first time. Contents: Foreword by Princess Diya Kumari of Jaipur; Acknowledgements; Cataloguing terms; Introduction; Daggers; Katars; Swords; Children’s Arms; Lances, Spears and Shields; Armour; Axes, Ankus, Chhadi and Maces; Bows and Arrows; Accoutrements; Guns and Pistols; Map; The Rulers of Amber – Jaipur; Endnotes; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.

A fascinating account of British reporter Willem Marx’s travels in Balochistan; a forbidding, forbidden and largely forgotten province of Pakistan that is currently immersed in civil conflict. French photojournalist Marc Wattrelot has captured some spectacular images during his weeks spent in this little-known corner of the world. This book presents many aspects of Balochistan – its past and present, its people and landscape.

An amazing insight into this formidable region that is rarely seen by the outside world; a remote territory, this account gives a new perspective on a harsh and unforgiving landscape and the people who call it home.

The publication explores a spectrum of contemporary Indian creativity classical inspired, tribal, folk and popular arts, reflective of the rootedness and innovation within traditions, as well as new media work in varied manifestations and genres. It features several especially commissioned works and seminal essays by experts framed within the context of the history, philosophy and ideology of the culture, the art stems from. It examines the connection between art and spiritual ideologies and living traditions as they continue to be practiced and celebrated or questioned by hundreds of artists, in a multi faith context. The artists’ biographical sketches and their photographs, the bibliography and other reference material, make it a collectors’ delight and a useful stand-alone resource book, first of its kind, on spiritual and devotional Indian art with its multilayered philosophical, mystical and cultural resonance. Contents: Volume I: Foreword – Karan Sing; Spirituality and Culture: India’s Gifts to the World Martin Gurvich; Acknowledgements – Martin Gurvich and Sushma K. Bahl. Essays: Adi Anadi Anant: Continuum Sushma K. Bahl; Abodes of Devotion George Michell; Imaging Devotional Theologies Kenneth R. Valpey; Devotion in Art, Craft and Textiles Jaya Jaitly; Popular Expressions of Devotion Devdutt Pattanaik; Collection A to M; Artists; Glossary; Bibliography; Index. Volume II: Foreword – Prof. Lokesh Chandra; Essays: Dashavatara:The Ten Incarnations of Vishnu Steven J. Rosen; Archetypal Imagery in Neo-Tantric Painting Madhu Khanna; Syncretic Culture and Islam Mushirul Hasan; Vernacular Art: Work, Leisure and Devotion in Rurban India Annapurna Garimella; Methods and Materials of Traditional Painting Desmond Lazaro; Iti-iti: Multiple Contemporaries in Sacred Indian Art Sushma K. Bahl; Collection N to Z; Artists; Cartographic Overview: Select Devotional Art and Cultural Centres in India; Credits; Index.

The Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the most important protected areas in the Himalayas, one of the World’s great biological realms. The book is intended both as a history and an ecological overview of the Park and as a plea for continuing conservation of the rich legacy of Himalayan plants and animals. In addition to descriptions of the ecology, the book includes local history and culture and a review of current development in the region. The inscription of the Park into the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014 confirmed the Outstanding Universal Values of the area, which contains the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of Western Himalayan biological diversity. The pictures, taken by the authors and their collaborators, vividly illustrate the grandeur and diversity of the area. The book has universal appeal: to naturalists, scholars, resource managers, trekkers, arm-chair travelers. Success and failure along the road to creating today’s Park are discussed frankly to inform future management efforts and there are numerous examples of conservation in action that will motivate a new generation of naturalists and ecologists to continue the fight to protect the ecology of the greatest mountains on earth.

Bipasha Choudhury, writer and poet in the English language, living in London for some years, is in Czechoslovakia, as part of a writer’s group – a visit that is set to change her in more ways than one.

This is a time when Czechoslovakia is still a socialist state under Soviet dominion, poised for a major upheaval and change. In this milieu of brewing internal struggle for identity, a life-churning experience awaits Bipasha. Looking for answers outside, Bipasha is about to discover a valuable part of herself to pave a new destiny – in a foreign land, by chance.

The novel is about language and identity that came before the tide of Indian Writing in English that touched India’s shores.

The culmination of five years’ travel with Indian pilgrims, Nostalgia for Eternity takes the reader into the depths of millennia-old spiritual and mystic traditions. It is a stunning visual poem about the timeless human search for transcendence and ultimate truth. Translated literally from the Greek, ‘nostalgia’ means homesickness; spiritually, it is the universal longing for existential peace and completeness – for a final resolution of all life’s conflicts and contradictions. ‘The truth is one,’ taught India’s ancient gurus, ‘the sages call it by many names.’ With breadth and insight unmatched by any other publication, Nostalgia for Eternity illustrates the worlds of pilgrims seeking that transcendent truth and illuminates the different paths that they travel. Through evocative, complex images we enter the secretive realm of Tantric worshippers of the Mother Goddess; and we walk with Sufi pilgrims across the deserts of Rajasthan. Meditative, richly layered photographs reveal the inner world of Bengali Bauls – mystics who worship the human being; and of Sidis – descendants of African saints whose religion merges African ancestor worship with Sufism. Richly annotated text reveals to the reader the deeper symbolic and mythological significance of the Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and syncretic practices explored in the book.

Some years ago the study of arms and armor of the subcontinent reached a plateau where enough was known to allow curators and collectors a veneer of authority when writing and speaking about the topic. This book shows how very thin that veneer was. For political and more recently commercial reasons the cultural history of the subcontinent has been largely expressed through the Mughal experience of India. Whilst it is true that the Muslim Mughals dominated India the empire they ruled was predominantly Hindu. This book reclaims the Hindu contribution to the military culture of the Mughal period. The Rajputs were very closely aligned to the Mughals from the reign of Akbar in the sixteenth century but they retained their own distinctive values. The armory at Mehrangarh helps us to enter an unfamiliar world. A tradition of courage and self-sacrifice was conserved in music and poetry, an ideology so extreme that scholars have struggled to concede its existence. This radical book challenges arms and armor orthodoxy and is essential reading for scholars, collectors and dealers interested in India and its wider culture.

The world changed after the First World War. Its aftermath saw the collapse of the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, and the world map never seemed the same again. Though the Great War is widely considered to be a European war, it had enormous effects halfway across the world in India. At the advent of the war, the number of Indian soldiers fighting exceeded the number of British soldiers. Because of funds reallocated to Britain’s advantage, India’s economy took a toll as well.

The Indian National Congress believed that supporting Britain’s war efforts would benefit India’s move towards independence. As a result, over a million Indian men were deployed to fight for the British. Post the war, Britain’s refusal to grant India home rule created hostility among the Indians towards them. This dissent eventually paved way for the Indian independence movement, which was to emerge later.

For the first time India’s contribution to the First World War is carefully documented with details of the different theaters in which Indian soldiers took part. In addition, the authors also examine the unsettling encounters the Indian soldiers had with Europe and European culture. What did the war mean for the political climate in India? What was it like for the Indian soldiers to fight a war they were unprepared for? Using first hand accounts such as letters home, documents from the various army archives and incredible photographs, the authors reconstruct the story of a war which was as much India’s as it was Britain’s.