A vibrant, colorful and beautiful book that introduces readers to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. It explains the difference between the two movements and the main artists associated with each. Illustrations are drawn from the renowned and outstanding collection of French art held by the National Galleries of Scotland and they include a number of rarely seen works.
This book tells the fascinating stories of how key paintings and drawings found their way into the collection.
Artists include Monet, Millet, Gauguin, Bastien-Lepage, Charles Jacque, Troyon, Corot, Degas, Seurat, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Vuillard, Bonnard, Derain, Matisse, Legros and Rodin.
The iconic Dome of the Cathedral of Florence, the largest masonry vault in the world, was built by Filippo Brunelleschi between 1420 and 1436. More than 100 years later, between 1572 and 1579, the vault was decorated with frescos by the artists Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari depicting the Last Judgment. Working with advanced imaging technology, total access, and Italy’s leading art photographer, this book presents in never-before-seen detail and completeness the entire pictorial cycle of the Dome. Contributions by noted art historians Marco Bussagli, Mina Gregori, and Timothy Verdon illuminate the art historical significance of this magnificent symbol of Florence and the Renaissance.
Text in English and Italian.
The volume accompanying an exhibition at Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, from 8 December 2023 to 28 April 2024 invites us to reflect on the role a face can play in mediating communication through the gaze. We are all aware of how powerful it can be when eyes meet, as well as their crucial role in giving dignity to people through caring. But the face can also be considered from another, almost conflicting, point of view, as a visible surface masking the invisible aspects of the human being: it can either reveal or conceal feelings and emotions, thoughts and concerns…
The subject of faces deserves to be explored here in all its anthropological depth. In Art Brut, its production marked as it is by a powerful creative urge, this exploration takes on a singular dimension, with the presentation of works whose figurative content facilitates the encounter with this inalienable aspect of humanity, which becomes somehow inevitable, regardless of the marginality of the social and cultural acknowledgement of the artists.
These faces, whether withdrawn or seeking, with their attentive, questioning, communicative, absent, or empty expressions, reflect a manner of relating to the world that interrogates, through a mise en abyme of sorts, our very encounter with humanity.
This monograph edited by Ilaria Bernardi is the first comprehensive examination of the oeuvre of the Italian artist Loris Cecchini, from his debut in the mid-1990s to the present.
The publication coincides with the 30th anniversary of the artist’s first inclusion in an exhibition: in three group shows in 1995. The book reviews Cecchini’s solo and group exhibitions, providing information on awards, residencies and lectures, as well as extensive commentary on his most distinctive works.
Alternating between photography, sculpture, drawing, digital processing and environmental installations, Cecchini’s aim is to shape real space by means of innovative materials, focusing on how matter holds together and the aesthetic, architectural, organic, and structural processes associated with it. He has a particular interest in industrial materials such as rubber, resin and steel. His work explores the sense of the real, in a perspective suspended between the natural and the man-made that challenges the viewer’s perception.
This book reconstructs the trajectory of Cecchini’s personal and creative life by interweaving biographical information, historical background and an ample selection of works, thus providing a unique contribution to the literature devoted to the artist.
Text in English and French
Ellora attempts the first systematic overview of the Ellora cave temples, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, excavated between 600 CE and 1000 CE and the only cave temple site that houses Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain caves.
This volume looks at each of these three groups of rock-cut temples and the stylistic influences they drew from each other and from surrounding regions.
Essays and analyzes by scholars bring a comprehensive understanding of the chronology and stylistic development of the 34 main caves and lesser caves of the site. Ellora also includes extensive photographic documentation, ground plans, and rarely seen early 19th-century etchings of the most significant caves.
With contributions by Stanislaw J. Czuma, Nicolas Morrissey, Lisa N. Owen, Vidya Dehejia, Pia Brancaccio and Arno Klein.
Japanese woodblock prints, exemplified by iconic works such as Hokusai’s Great Wave, Utamaro’s portraits of beauties, Hiroshige’s Heavy Rain on Ohashi Bridge, and Kuniyoshi’s tattooed warriors, rank among the most influential art forms in history. While celebrated artists are widely known, the publishers, carvers, printers, and other collaborators who shaped production and distribution have often remained overlooked. Publishers drove the commercial print industry, assessing demand, commissioning designs, financing production, securing censor approval, and managing carving, printing, and sales. The Japanese Woodblock Prints Companion: Publishers, Carvers, Printers, Censors, Collectors examines this collaborative process and restores attention to these essential contributors. Andreas Marks profiles more than 1,900 publishers and nearly 900 carvers and printers, provides publication lists for almost 1,000 artists, and reproduces thousands of seals dating from the 1640s to the 1990s. Documenting places of operation, active periods, and professional networks, this extensive reference offers scholars and collectors a comprehensive guide.
A Sino-Chinese family find their destiny is inseparably entangled with that of the country they have adopted as a home. Not long before the Communist revolution, Tong, sent by his peasant-parents in impoverished rural China to work with a relative in Siam, has risen to become a rice-trading tycoon in Bangkok’s Chinatown, married a former palace cook and built a large family in the town of Pad Riew. Haunted by the dream of returning to his true home in China, Tong, along with his wife and their five children, are swept along by the torrents of history as World War II breakout and China turns red, while the military strongman in Thailand act out the interminable cycle of power struggle, rebellion and coup d’état.
Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat, the award-winning second novel by Veerapon Nitiprapha, is a generations-spanning family saga that explores the roots of the Chinese diaspora in Siam and how the tragedy of ruined love, maternal betrayal and futile ambition shape the lives of Tong’s clan members, each of them hounded by their own ghosts and burdened by their own sins. All of this is played out against the backdrop of Siam’s mid-century social and political history, the most chaotic period the formation of the nation.
Pierre-Émile Legrain (1888-1929) was a French bookbinder, framer, landscape designer, furniture designer, and interior architect. This is the first full-length monograph about him, exploring his life and his creations in every genre, and highlighting the formal links between his work as an ensemblier, bookbinder, and draftsman. Pierre Legrain is credited with revolutionizing bookbinding in the early 20th century. In 1916 he was commissioned by the French bibliophile, couturier, and collector Jacques Doucet to design bindings for his extensive library. He created nearly 400 unique bindings for him, and numerous frames for Doucet’s exceptional modern art collection – including a steel frame for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – as well as a series of African-inspired furniture. He was a member of the UAM, whose logo he designed, and he associated with André Breton, Paul Éluard, Jean Cocteau, the sculptors Gustave Miklos and Henri Laurens, the painter Francis Picabia, and the milliner Jeanne Tachard for whom he designed a garden. His rare body of work – a hundred or so pieces of furniture and a few interiors – is dispersed today in museums and private collections throughout the world.
Text in French.
The story of Ladurée started in 1862 when Louis Ernest Ladurée opened a bakery in the heart of Paris at 16 rue Royale. In 1872, following a fire, the little bakery became a pastry shop and the decoration was then done by Jules Cheret, a famous painter and poster-designer of the time. Jeanne Souchard, Ernest Ladurée’s wife, then had the idea of combining the Parisian café with a pastry-shop, thereby creating one of Paris’ first tea-rooms.
In 1993 Ladurée was bought by Francis and David Holder and becomes one of the best-known gourmet addresses in Paris, a veritable institution with its famous “macaron” as its emblem. In 1997 Ladurée opened a tea-room/restaurant on the prestigious Champs-Elysées, followed by another in the Printemps department store and on the Left Bank as well as the beginning of their international adventure with branches in London, Geneva, Monaco and Tokyo.
In this book Philippe Andrieu, the Pastry Chef at Ladurée, reveals 100 of the most famous Ladurée recipes, adapted for the general public. From the Strawberry Cake with Rose Choux Pastry to Pistachio Financiers and the world-famous macarons in all their variety, this icon of French “art de vivre” is brought to life in a palette of pastries the color of powder pink, light green, bright purple, and lemon yellow.
John Ruskin wrote this fable for a teenage family friend, Effie, and later he married her. The marriage was famously disastrous, but before it fell apart the Ruskins allowed The King of the Golden River to be published. It became one of the most popular works for children of its time. Richard Doyle contributed over 25 full-page illustrations and vignettes.
The King of the Golden River is the first literary fairy tale in English (as opposed to collected folk tales). Ruskin himself said it was ‘a fairly good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with some true Alpine feeling of my own’. Later he spoke of the capacity of the traditional tales ‘to fortify children against the glacial cold of selfish science’.
It remains a powerful fable about humanity’s dual capacity for destructiveness and redeeming love, with as strange fairy-tale creatures as one could hope to meet.
An essay by Simon Cooke explains the book’s importance.
Caroline Broadhead (b. 1950) is a highly versatile artist who started in jewelry in the late 1970s. Since then she has extended her practice from “wearable objects” and textile works to dance collaborations and installations in historic buildings. Broadhead’s work is concerned with the boundaries of an individual and the interface of inside and outside, public and private, including a sense of territory and personal space, presence and absence and a balance between substance and image. It has explored outer extents of the body as seen through light, shadows, reflections and movement. This comprehensive overview also comprises larger scale and collaborative works that aim to elicit a particular experience or to start a train of thought.
Published to accompany the Exhibition at CODA Museum Apeldoorn (NL), 4 February – 15 April 2018 and the Exhibition at Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins, London, 11 January – 2 February 2019.
A ‘vessel for living’ – such were the words Glenn Adamson used to describe this remarkable residence. Richard Meier designed the Grotta home to house Sandra and Louis Grotta’s collection of contemporary studio jewelry and significant works in wood, ceramic and fibre. The building was conceived around the collection, framing the objects within the open architecture, which comprises an equal blend of glass and concrete. Nature, visible from many vantage points, plays an essential supporting role. The Grotta Home by Richard Meier: A Marriage of Architecture and Craft is rich in photographs of the collection and provides impressive insights into this exceptionally personal project. The accompanying essays afford the reader a greater sense of how the Grottas have not simply acquired art, but have immersed themselves in it.
On the whole, when one thinks of seventeenth-century sculpture in Rome, one has in mind the wonderful and famous works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, such as the Fountain of the Rivers or The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. The very idea of Roman baroque is commonly identified with the century’s great genius. And indeed, the influence of Bernini’s work on the sculpture and art in general of the period was, especially in Rome, decisive. However, this domination spread only during the second half of the seventeenth century, and less unequivocally than one might suppose.Other great sculptors, with personalities that were often very different form Bernini’s, contributed to making the extraordinary proliferation of Roman statuary extremely complex and varied at that time.
This book is aimed especially at students and museum visitors who would like to learn more about the topic and discusses the art in a straightforward and strictly chronological fashion. The narrative begins in the early decades of the seventeenth century with sculpture created by a motley and conspicuously cosmopolitan group of artists. Later, with the growing success of the great masters, commissions began to gravitate around Bernini, Alessandro Algardi, and François Duquesnoy. A new approach to Antiquity went hand in hand with a marked predilection for striking chromatic effects, borrowed from Venetian painting, and a desire to make a strong impact and achieve a particular tone, often with results of surprising originality.
Taking the most up-to-date and best founded historiographic observations on the subject we have tried to highlight the workshop relationships between the great masters and the ‘giovani,’ their pupils or occasional assistants, and in this way put into relief the experimental approach of some of these apprentices, such as Melchirro Caffà or Antonio Raggi, or the ability of certain others, for instance Ercole Ferrata, to fuse the most diverse influences. The book thus aims to show how marble and travertine were used throughout the century to create a whole army of statues that were positioned in the open and in churches, lending modern Rome its truly incomparable new face.
“The most important portraits to me are the ones of people who have enriched my own thinking or awareness. Areas of philosophy, religion, psychological perspectives, poetry, music, art history, women’s roles and the inner life are important issues for me – and all have been nurtured by these people whom I have met through portraiture.” – Victoria Crowe. Victoria Crowe is one of Britain’s most vital and original figurative painters. Here, Duncan Macmillan explores the exceptional skill of this remarkable artist’s portraits and Victoria Crowe, herself, contributes many insightful accounts of her own thoughts and perceptions as each work developed. This book also tells Crowe’s own story – both professional and personal – through her art. She has developed an approach to portraiture that seeks to do more than record the outward appearance of a person: she aims to represent something of the inner life. With 80 illustrations, the portraits include the artist’s family, composer Ronald Stevenson, pioneer medical scientist Dame Janet Vaughan, poet Kathleen Raine, actor Graham Crowden, psychiatrist Professor Sir Peter Higgs and many others.
Jewelry Stories highlights the Museum of Arts and Design’s unique, world-class collection of studio and contemporary art jewelry from the US, Europe, Australia, and Asia, a medium that comprises one-third of its permanent collection. Artists working in this field create jewelry rooted in sculptural experimentation and the concept of art as a wearable medium. The pieces featured represent the history of art jewelry as told from a largely US perspective. Jewelry artists are inspired by such subjects as found objects and materials, as well as by politics and pressing social issues, allowing for the development of unique, personal narratives in each piece. Each of the jewelry stories is written by an expert on the artist or subject, thus the book also celebrates the contributions they have made to the field.
Published to accompany an exhibition at Museum of Arts and Design, New York (US), on permanent display.
This catalog documents an exhibition at the Baur Foundation that brings together work by the French painter Pierre Soulages (b.1919) and the Japanese master bamboo artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV (b. 1973). Soulages, still working at 102 years old, has painted almost exclusively in black since 1979 and is known as the “master of luminous blacks”. Tanabe Chikuunsai IV is a renowned bamboo artist, known for his twisting organic sculptures and room-sized installations made from tiger or black bamboo. The aim of this exhibition is to explore how their work resonates, despite different approaches, in the dark and light effects of their materials.
Text in French and English.
Published to accompany an exhibition at the Baur Foundation in Switzerland, a museum of Far Eastern Art, from November 2021–March 2022.
Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA (b. 1941) is an important figure in British conceptual art, and among the most influential artists and teachers of his generation. Since his rise to prominence in the late 1960s he has moved between sculpture, installation, painting, drawing and print, creating works that fuse elements of pop, minimalism and conceptual art. His work transforms everyday objects – from buckets and ladders to trainers, mobile phones and laptops – with bold colors and simple, uninflected lines. Renowned as an art educator, he has inspired generations of artists, including the YBAs. This handsome book, the catalog of the largest exhibition of Craig-Martin’s work to have been mounted in the UK, contains thought-provoking texts by the critics Michael Bracewell and Richard Cork, and an illuminating conversation between the artist and the writer Carolina Grau.
Distilling a lifetime’s study of English art, Duncan Robinson here looks at the six leading artists of the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries through the lens of their relationship with writing. Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Blake, Constable, Turner all engaged in different ways with literature and the word. From Hogarth, who developed a new kind of narrative from his experience of the theater, to Turner who wrote increasingly elaborate and enigmatic epic poetry to explain his painting, passing by Blake’s naive Songs of Innocence and Experience and his hallucinatory deranged mythological visions, the originality and fascination of these great artists are brought into a new, sharper focus by Robinson’s approach. Written with his characteristic geniality and profound, but lightly worn scholarship, and richly illustrated with familiar and many unfamiliar images, this will be an unmissable book for all interested in this seminal period in English art.
With an introduction by Brian Allen, former Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
This exhibition and accompanying book show how contemporary artists are reinventing craft techniques, exploring identity and cultural history.
Embroidery, a skill passed down through generations, is central to this exploration. Traditionally practiced by women, it’s now embraced by both genders. The exhibition highlights the work of Madhvi and Manu Parekh, who draw inspiration from India’s rich spiritual and artistic traditions. Their works, ranging from paintings to sculptures, reflect the interplay between the real and the imaginary.
The Chanakya School of Craft works with these artists to reinterpret their work through embroidery. This fusion of art and craft challenges traditional boundaries and creates a dialogue between past and present.
Wounded landscapes, crumbling buildings, old dusty wigs still displayed in deserted storefront windows. These plats and parcels represent the history of a built environment and its ongoing discourse with nature. There is a strong sense of passage and decline.
Yet along with the photographs of blighted and neglected landscapes is a glimmer of hope and the possibility of transformation. In one picture, a sliver of light scrapes across a backyard lawn casting tangled shadows that land on the clapboard siding of a neighborhood house. In another, the surfaces of the sun-soaked brick and concrete are rendered so precisely as to elevate their significance by pure photographic description. Of course, there are twists and turns all along the way and a multitude of signs that present our world as more complex than any single feeling or photograph.
Almost Home, the third book that Gary Green has created with L’Artiere, continues the photographer’s exploration of the medium’s possibilities through the poetic landscape of the photobook. The book is printed in tritone on uncoated paper in an edition of 500.
From Louise Bourgeois to Yoko Ono presents around 85 jewelry works by some 45 internationally renowned female visual artists from the 1920s to the present day. Their jewelry pieces open up new, often surprising perspectives on their artistic production. Some pieces captivate with minimalist elegance, others with their expressive, sculptural presence or playful humor, with each unique work consolidating an artistic vision into a small personal statement. With its exhibition of the same name, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln (MAKK; Museum of Applied Arts, Cologne) deliberately focuses on female standpoints, thus breaking with the male-dominated perception of avant-garde art jewelry.
Artists featured include: Lynda Benglis; Pierrette Bloch; Barbara Bloom; Katinka Bock; Louise Bourgeois; Helen Britton; Barbara Chase-Riboud; Claudia Comte; Sheila Concari; Sonia Delaunay; Nathalia Edenmont; Aube Elléouët; Claire von Falkenstein; Ruth Francken; Marcia Grostein; Jenny Holzer; Rebecca Horn; Annabelle d’Huart; Leiko Ikemura; Jacqueline de Jong; Yayoi Kusama; Alicja Kwade; Claude Lalanne; Liliane Lijn; Rita McBride; Blanca Muños; Brigitte Nahon; Eva Renée Nele [E. R. Nele]; Louise Nevelson; Michele Oka Doner; Yoko Ono; Meret Oppenheim; Françoise Pétrovitch; Niki de Saint Phalle; Armelle de Sainte Marie; Elodie Seguin; Maïlys Seydoux-Dumas; Kiki Smith; Sophie Taeuber-Arp; Dorothea Tanning; Sissel Tolaas; Rosemarie Trockel; Paloma Varga Weisz; Sophia Vari; Joana Vasconcelos; Zhou Yiyan.
Text in English and German.
Mmm, Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could Be Sweet is the first institutional solo exhibition of work by Harold Offeh in the UK. This fully illustrated book documents two decades of video, performance and collaborative projects by the artist, as well as a new series of photographs depicting Offeh re-performing works in his archive. Offeh’s work interrogates our acceptance of social, political and racial models in society, often drawing inspiration from mainstream music, film and media. The title of the exhibition is taken from lyric by the British band Portishead and corresponds to three thematic sections of the exhibition: Mmm, a new multi-channel sound installation, Gotta Try a Little Harder considers Offeh’s use of performance as an investigative tool and It Could Be Sweet looks at the artists participatory and collaborative works on themes of desire, utopianism, queer identity and acts of resistance. The book includes a preface by Lubaina Himid and new essays by Sepake Angiama, David. A. Bailey, Anna Khimasia and Harold Offeh.
From 1829 until his death, Constable devoted an increasing amount of time, energy and his own money to the production of prints after his work. Intended as the epitome of his naturalistic art, English Landscape brought together 22 images from the whole span of his career, reimagined with all the drama and delicacy possible with mezzotint.
In David Lucas, Constable found a collaborator capable of responding to his work with an unprecedented range of tonal expression, and an endlessly patient colleague who could cope with Constable’s extreme anxiety and mood swings.
The result, though not a commercial success at the time, is widely acknowledged as one of the summits of English landscape art, and of the art of the mezzotint.
This edition includes Constable’s introduction, his most sustained explanation of his aims as a painter and the revolution he effected in landscape art.
John Russell Pope is one of America’s most famous architects, responsible for many major works, including the Jefferson Memorial, the House of the Temple and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art. This book, The Architecture of John Russell Pope, Selected Works: Houses is the first volume of a two-part monograph, to be followed by a volume on public buildings.
Made in association with the ICAA (the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art), this is a lavishly illustrated study of Pope’s extraordinary house designs, often inspired by classical European architecture, standing proudly among his achievements as the crown jewels in many of the USA’s most vaunted ZIP codes. Originally published during the 1920s, Pope’s exquisite floorplans and sketches accompany period photographs and the original commentary by art historian and traditionalist Royal Cortissoz to create a comprehensive and visually stunning account of a true titan of American design.
Houses include: the residence of Ogden Mills, Woodbury, Long Island; Moses and Edith Taylor’s Glen Manor House, Portsmouth, Rhode Island; Charlcote House, built for James Swan Frick in the suburbs of Baltimore; the now lost Oak Hill mansion, Jericho, Long Island; and Brodhead-Bell-Morton Mansion (aka Morton House) in the exclusive Logan Circle area of Washington DC.