White Cross Mills, Hightown, LANCASTER LA1 4XS, United Kingdom.
Telephone: +44(0)1524 68765
Fax: +44(0)1524 63232
Email: sales@gazellebooks.co.uk
Web: www.gazellebooks.co.uk
 |
ALFRED JEWEL
: & Other Late Anglo-Saxon Decorated Metalwork
[David Hinton]
The Alfred Jewel is probably the single most famous archaeological object in England. From the Anglo-Saxon period, the great treasure found in the seventh-century ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, is as well-known, but as a collection rather than for any individual object in it. But the distinctive nature of the Jewel with its tantalizing inscription that may refer to King Alfred (871-99), the only English king to be called 'the Great' has a fascination that nothing else can rival. The Jewel has received much attention from scholars since its discovery in 1693, and continues to be discussed in work on the Anglo-Saxon period. In this handbook, recent ideas are reviewed and the significance of new discoveries evaluated, along with pictures and descriptions of other objects relevant to the study of the Jewel. The Handbook focuses on the collections in the Ashmolean that date to the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries AD, but also illustrates objects in other museums.
{
96pp,
145x210mm,
January 2008;
HB,
£11.95,
1854442295:9781854442291
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
BORN OF FIRE
: The Life & Pottery of Margaret Tafoya
[Charles S King]
Regarded as one of the great masters of Pueblo ceramics, Margaret Tafoya (1904-2001) is known for her trademark large black polished ceramics, decoraded with traditional imagery of rain clouds, water serpents, bear paws, and other symbols. An award-winning artist, she was recipient of the Lifetime Acheivement Award from the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, and a National Heritage Fellowship.
{
160pp,
245x285mm,
June 2008;
HB,
£29.99,
0890135096:9780890135099
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
BRONZE INSIDE & OUT
: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver
[Mary Strachan Scriver]
This is a literary biography of sculptor Bob Scriver, written by his wife, Mary Strachan Scriver. Bob Scriver is best known for his work in bronze & for his pivotal role in the rise of "cowboy art". Living & working on the Montana Blackfoot Reservation, Scriver created a bronze foundry, a museum, & a studio -- an atelier based on classical methods, but with local Blackfoot artisans. His importance in the still-developing genre of "western art" cannot be overstated. Mary Strachan Scriver lived & worked with Bob Scriver for over a decade & was instrumental in his rise to international acclaim. Working alongside her husband, she became intimately familiar with the man, his work, & his process. Her frank & uncensored narration includes details that give the reader a unique picture of Scriver both as man & as artist. Mary Strachan Scriver also provides a fascinating look into the practice of bronze casting, cleverly structuring the story of Bob Scriver's life according to the steps in this complicated & temperamental process.
{
372pp,
150x230mm,
December 2007;
PB,
£26.50,
1552382273:9781552382271
, University of Calgary Press
} |
 |
EARLY HIMALAYAN ART
[Amy Heller]
This book presents the Ashmolean Museum’s collection of some sixty important early sculptures and other objects from Tibet and Nepal dating from c500-1400 AD. They include a number of secular objects as well as images of deities in the Hindu and Buddhist pantheons. In order to trace their aesthetic and historical development, and their materials and techniques of manufacture Dr Amy Heller, an eminent authority on Himalayan art, examines the geography of trade within the Himalayan and neighbouring regions, the antecedents of these objects in India and the surrounding regions, and developments in the arts from the seventh to the fourteenth century in her introductory essay. The objects themselves are reproduced in colour throughout, with detailed descriptions to accompany them.
{
175pp,
195x265mm,
January 2008;
PB,
£14.95,
1854442090:9781854442093
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
LANDSCAPE AS WORLD PICTURE
: Tracing Cultural Evolution in Images
[Jacob Wamberg]
This book presents a new and comprehensive bid concerning the manner in which landscapes in Western pictorial art may be interpreted in relation to the cultures that created them. Its point of departure is a hitherto unexplored development pattern that characterises landscape representation from Paleolithic cave paintings through to 19th century modernity. Through a structuralist comparison between this pattern and three additional fields of analysis -- self consciousness, socially determined perception of nature, and world picture -- a fascinating insight into culture's macro-historic organisation is extrapolated. Not least it is argued controversially that culture at a certain level of observation is marked by a directional evolution. The gradual accentuation of a viewpoint found in landscape images can, in this way, be read as a sign of how self consciousness -- the notion of an 'I' detached from nature -- develops. And, in the raw rocky terrain and vividly coloured skies that are introduced in ancient and medieval landscape images, there is testimony of how cosmos splits into a chaotic Mother Earth and an indestructible masculine sky. Finally, the book demonstrates that the landscape images' incorporation or exclusion of traces of cultivation (e.g. fields, roads, hedges), is dependent on what the powers-that-be think about physical work.
{
ca900pp,
August 2008;
HB,
£45.95,
8779342329:9788779342323
, Aarhus University Press
} |
 |
LENS OF TIME
: A Repeat Photography of Landscape Change in the Canadian Rockies
[Cliff White & E J (Ted) Hart]
This is a unique collaboration between two observers who have, for more than twenty-five years, been examining landscape change in the Canadian Rockies -- national park biologist Cliff White & Canadian Rockies historian Ted Hart. Working with historical photographs, White has retraced the steps of the original photographers & taken new shots in the same locales, a technique known as "repeat photography". Comparing these images side-by-side, the authors show the dramatic changes to the Rockies landscape that have occurred over the years. The sets of photographs generally follow ecological regions moving west from Calgary & the foothills, ascending through the low elevation montane zone of Banff National Park, upwards into the lower & upper subalpine. The authors then follow the historic photographers’ routes for brief forays onto the west slopes of the Rockies in the Columbia River watershed of British Columbia, & east into the Front Ranges along the Red Deer & North Saskatchewan rivers. Moving north, the photographs depict the high windswept alpine zone & glacial ice of the Columbia Icefield, before passing through Jasper National Park & turning eastward to descend to the parkland region at Edmonton, Alberta. Useful captions describe the landscape changes visible in each "then & now" view, & five essays more fully explore the historical, political, & ecological processes at work. Illustrated throughout with striking images, this book is at once a showcase for the beauty of the Rocky Mountain landscape & a valuable source of information about ecological change in this world-famous region.
{
312pp,
230x300mm,
November 2007;
PB,
£41.50,
1552382370:9781552382370
, University of Calgary Press
} |
 |
NEW PUBLICS WITH/OUT DEMOCRACY
[Henrik Bang & Anders Esmark (eds)]
The public sphere is normally considered to be a forum for democratic deliberation. It can serve many other uses, however, such as an arena for strategic communication, a space for identity formation or a 'showcase' for celebrities. By bringing together researchers from political science, public administration, sociology and media studies, this book presents a comprehensive perspective on the transformation of the public sphere in the emerging network society. The book presents a series of theoretical and empirical contributions concerning current changes in political communication, participation, identity and the role of the media and journalists. Within a common framework of analysis, the individual chapters in the book cover a wide range of issues concerning the way political institutions, citizens, NGOs, firms and not least the media and journalists engage the public sphere, such as post-ideological politics, governance by performance and evaluation, transnationalisation, branding, Internet use and journalistic praxis. Although the book clearly suggests that the public sphere is an increasingly important medium of politically active and informed agents, it also insists that it proceeds far beyond the democratic publics of parliament and citizens in civil society.
{
380pp,
155x235mm,
December 2007;
PB,
£40.00,
8759311495:9788759311493
, Samfundslitteratur Press
} |
 |
POTTERY OF ZUNI PUEBLO
[Dwight P Lanmon & Francis H Harlow]
The authors examine fine and rare exmaples of pots -- many of which are from private collections -- in terms of forms and esigns from the ancient antecedents of Zuni pottery to the contemporary work being produced today. The definitive treatment of the extraordinarily popular Zuni Pueblo's long and complex ceramic tradition, this book sets the gold standard and will be an indispensable reference for researchers, collectors, native arts enthusiasts, archaeologists, and visitors to the Southwest.
{
604pp,
235x285mm,
June 2008;
HB,
£99.99,
0890135088:9780890135082
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
SEED QUEEN
: The Story of Crop Art & the Amazing Lillian Colton
[Colleen Sheehy]
At the same time Andy Warhol was changing American art in New York City, Lillian Colton, owner of the Cinderella Clip 'n' Curl in Owatonna, Minnesota, launched her own version of pop art. From her patient hands, practiced at embroidering linens and crocheting lace, came captivating portraits of Jesus, Elvis, Oprah, Lady Diana, Clinton, and Prince, intricately rendered in timothy, bromegrass, canola, poppy seeds, salsify, alsike, bird's-foot trefoil, grits, and wild rice. Seed Queen brings to light the story of this crop artist extraordinaire -- how she developed her matchless aesthetic by merging rural traditions from her childhood on a farm with a love of Hollywood movies, training as a hairstylist, and skills in drawing and painting -- and the larger story of crop art as it has evolved over time. This lively illustrated volume features dozens of colour images of Colton's crop art and of the work of those she has continued to inspire since she took home the blue ribbon for her portrait of Nixon at the 1969 Minnesota State Fair. Countless artists have taken the genre in new directions in recent years, opening up the pantheon of the famous, taking on political issues, and satirising those in power -- all through the meticulous positioning of thousands of individual seeds.
{
118pp,
225x255mm,
October 2007;
HB,
£16.99,
0873515927:9780873515924
, Minnesota Historical Society Press
} |
 |
SOUTHERN ARCHITECTURE
: The Work of Ted McCoy
[Ted McCoy; Introduction by Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins]
The forms of Ted McCoy's houses can recall the early stone and mud brick buildings of the colonial era in Otago, New Zealand as this region has been both his locus and his inspiration. Amongst New Zealand architects, McCoy is outstanding in that he has a detailed colour photographic record covering fifty years of work. He was awarded a national medal for his first commission, a students' hall of residence, at the age of twenty-five. His work ranges from Central Otago holiday houses, through schools and churches to multi-storey university and commercial buildings, shopping malls, and a cathedral. In 1980, he was selected from all New Zealand practices to design a new National Art Gallery in Molesworth Street, Wellington. He designed the New Zealand High Commissioner's Residence in Canberra, Australia, and the Chancery for the High Commission in Papua New Guinea. He was called from retirement in 2000 to lead the fine redevelopment of the Otago Museum. In this book, McCoy presents his work chronologically with an accompanying text. As Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins comments in his introduction, "In trying to pigeon-hole McCoy exclusively as one thing on a list that might include -- a post-war innovator, one of the master big building modernists of the 1960s and 1970s, a house architect of proven ability, a sophisticated maker of church architecture or a superb interpreter of the post-modern moment -- is to lose understanding. Ted McCoy is not one, but all of those things".
{
176pp,
270x250mm,
November 2007;
HB,
£37.50,
187737248X:9781877372483
, University of Otago Press
} |
 |
SUBURBAN WORLD
: The Norling Photos
[Brad Zellar. Foreword By Alec Soth]
Men wearing suits jousting with sailfish. Head-on bridge collision. Men with linoleum. Kitchen murder-suicide. Firemen playing donkey baseball. Ideal woman in apron. Through over 10,000 images, Irwin Denison Norling, the unofficial town photographer for Bloomington, Minnesota, captured the strange juxtapositions, incongruities, and dark corners of the developing suburban America of the 1950s and '60s, A competitive amateur glued to his police radio, Norling spent years examining the light and darkness, tragedies and desolation, rituals of community and celebration through the lens of his camera, deftly capturing the uneasy dichotomy between the familiar and subversive -- the familiarly subversive. "That was the way it was. And the way it was, that's what I was after". In 2002 veteran journalist Brad Zeller unearthed Norling's negatives from the archive of the Bloomington Historical Society. Compelled by the work of this mar, who had all but drifted into obscurity, Zeller collects the best of these images in Suburban World, a fascinating window into the uneasy contradictions in Nothing's unforgettable and unselfconscious, funny and gritty, not-too-distant past.
{
134pp,
255x255mm,
April 2008;
HB,
£18.99,
0873516095:9780873516099
, Minnesota Historical Society Press
} |
 |
URBAN FICTION
: Strolling through Ideal Cities from Antiquity to the Present Day
[Gunther Feuerstein]
Dissatisfied with the world we live in, we have been longing since time immemorial for two opposing topoi: the peaceful garden -- a carefree paradise -- the New City -- a harmonious community. Utopia has long been sought after by urban architects since the time of Thomas More. Other fictional cities followed, some of which were brought to fruition such as Brasilia and Palmanova. Yet these cities too have turned out to be imperfect, deeply rooted in their own period. For the author, all these places, though only fictitious, have long since been built and he strolls through them in company with the architects, planners, writers and philosophers, just as Thomas More and many others once led us through their cities.
{
416pp,
235x285mm,
June 2008;
HB,
£69.00,
3930698269:9783930698264
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
WE ARE AT HOME
: Pictures of the Ojibwa People
[Bruce White. Foreword by Gerald Vizenor]
In this collection of over 200 stunning and storied photographs, ranging from daguerreotypes to studio portraits to snapshots, historian Bruce White explores historical images taken of 0jifeve people through 1950 and considers the negotiation that went on between the photographers and the photographed -- and what power the latter wielded. Ultimately, this book tells more about the people in the pictures -- what they were doing on a particular day, how they came to be photographed, how they made use of costumes and props -- than about the photographers who documented, and in some cases doctored, views of Ojibwa life.
{
260pp,
210x250mm,
February 2008;
PB,
£16.99,
0873516222:9780873516228
, Minnesota Historical Society Press
} |
 |
ANCIENT EGYPT & NUBIA
[Helen Whitehouse]
The treasures from Ancient Egypt to be found inside the Ashmolean Museum are second only, outside Egypt, to those in the British Museum. From vases to weapons, and ‘serpent game’ boards to decorated ostrich eggs, this book showcases the richness and diversity of the Museum’s Egyptian collection in beautiful full-colour images with informative captions. The introduction looks at the formation of the Museum’s collection within the context of Egyptology as an emerging discipline full of colourful characters. The Egyptians are one of the most fascinating among the peoples of the ancient world and the Ashmolean’s collection depicts their distinctive culture, its history, religion and art as well as everyday routines and traditions.
{
96pp,
194x267mm,
November 2008;
PB,
£14.95,
1854442023:9781854442024
/
HB,
£19.95,
1854442015:9781854442017
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN TERRACOTTAS
: with a Catalogue of the Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
[P R S Moorey]
P R S Moorey FBA FSA (1937-2004) was one of the finest scholars of his generation. Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University from 1983 to 2002, Roger Moorey laid the groundwork for much of our understanding of the bronzes, terracottas and faience of the Ancient Near East. This study and accompanying catalogue of the Ancient Near Eastern terracottas in the Ashmolean's collection, completed in 2004, is the last of Roger Moorey's many publications. This limited printed edition is published to make the first Roger Moorey Memorial Lecture, held in Oxford on his birthday, 30 May 2005.
{
281pp,
210x295mm,
May 2005;
PB,
£15.00,
1854442139:9781854442130
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
ART & ALCHEMY
[Jacob Wamberg (ed)]
This collection of articles covering the time span from the Late Middle Ages to the twentieth century intends to challenge the current neglect of the interplay between esoteric knowledge and the visual arts. 'Art and Alchemy' indicates that alchemy indeed has several connections with art by examining some of the pictorial and literary books that disseminated alchemical symbols and ideas, delving into images, which in one way or another can be shown to appropriate and interpret alchemical ideas or environments, and expanding the scope of alchemical imagery by indicating structural affinities between alchemical processes and artistic creation.
{
297pp,
150x230mm,
March 2006;
PB,
£30.00,
8763502674:9788763502672
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
ART OF NEW MEXICO
: How The West is One -- The Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts
[Joseph Traugott]
This lavishly illustrated book explores the aesthetic and cultural impact of New Mexico art from the 1880s to the present, and highlights a refreshing range of works representing European, native, ethnic, tourist, regional and commercial art. For the past 125 years, art in New Mexico has told a complex story of aesthetic interaction and cultural fusion. Southwest art began with 19th-century documentarians confronting a disappearing Native America and an exotic landscape. Artists who arrived in New Mexico beginning in the 1880s wrestled with the commercialisation of the region and the clash of cultural identities. Native peoples and expedition photographers, tourism and the railroad, artist colonies, the arrival of modernism, Trinity and the end of romanticism, a new generation of native artists challenging ethnic identity -- all have played a part in what we now call New Mexican art. "The Art of New Mexico" provides new perspectives on the evolution of art in the state, and highlights the outstanding collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, which is the repository for some of the finest works by renowned artists such as Adam Clark Vroman, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, John Sloan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Luis Elijo Tapia. Curator and author Joseph Traugott discusses how Native American and Hispanic artists of the Southwest not only influenced the non-native artists who came to call New Mexico home, but how in turn their work was influenced by these newcomers. By organising key objects from the museum's collection with an intercultural history of New Mexico art, the book makes cogent connections between specific works, aesthetic movements, and cultural traditions. As a result, this book will engage readers who are well versed in the artistic traditions of New Mexico, as well as those new to its aesthetic heritage. The book is published to coincide with a reinstallation of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe.
{
276pp,
250x300mm,
April 2007;
HB,
£36.99,
0890134979:9780890134979
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
ART OR MEMORIAL
: The Forgotten History of Canada's War Art
[Laura Brandon]
The Canadian War Museum’s art collection is one of the finest in the world & the single largest repository of official war art in Canada. With striking full-colour images from notable artists such as Alex Colville & AY Jackson, this book will transport readers into a unique time & place, enabling a deeper understanding of the artists & their compelling, often disturbing, but always profound images.
{
168pp,
205x255mm,
February 2006;
PB,
£38.50,
1552381781:9781552381786
, University of Calgary Press
} |
 |
ARUNDEL & POMFRET MARBLES IN OXFORD
[Michael Vickers]
The largest surviving portion of the first major collection of Classical antiquities in Britain -- the sculptures and inscriptions collected in the early 17th century by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel for his London house and garden -- is in the Antiquities Department of the Ashmolean Museum. This handbook tracks their eventful history before they came to rest in Oxford.
{
96pp,
155x215mm,
January 2007;
PB,
£7.95,
1854442074:9781854442079
/
HB,
£11.95,
1854442082:9781854442086
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM
: Complete Illustrated Catalogue of Paintings
[Catherine Casley et al (eds)]
For the first time ever, all paintings in the Department of Western Art in the Ashmolean Museum have been brought together in one volume. Every picture is illustrated and almost all are represented in colour. Biographies of all known artists in the collection are also included, making this catalogue an invaluable reference work for specialist libraries, collectors and general readers alike.
{
336pp,
250x340mm,
October 2004;
PB,
£35.00,
1854441884:9781854441881
/
HB,
£60.00,
1854441876:9781854441874
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
ASPECTS OF SECULARIZATION
: Science & the Arts
[Soren Baggesen (ed)]
The essays in this collection follow the various phases of the history of secularisation, from the crucial turning point between the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement up to the present situation. Of course they cannot cover the field. But by focusing on specific moments of the process, in the works of individual artists or in key periods in the modern history of the arts, they deeply illuminate the multifaceted character of the problem.
{
150pp,
175x250mm,
January 1997;
PB,
£21.00,
8778381533:9788778381538
, University Press of Southern Denmark (Odense University Press)
} |
 |
BEAUTIES FOR THE FOUR SEASONS
[Mitsuko Watanbe]
Japanese beautiful women, decorative kimono and flowers of the seasons -- 'Beauties for the Four Seasons' comprises Japanese woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e) from the Ashmolean Museum. Works by classical artists including Harunobu, Utamaro, Toyokuni and Eishi show beauties related to the seasons, over more than a hundred years.
{
81pp,
175x245mm,
September 2005;
PB,
£12.95,
1854442112:9781854442116
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
BEYOND BERING
: The Russian Colonies of the North Pacific
[Galleria Gottardo]
Works from the collection of the History Museum, Tallinn, Estonia (Ajaloomuuseum) in collaboration with the State Museum of Ethnology, Munich, Germany, 7 July-23 December 2004. The Galleria Gottardo, continuing its collaboration with museums of ethnography, presents more than 150 original ethnographic pieces from the Russian possessions in the North Pacific which were administered by the Russian-American Company until 1867. These works from the History Museum in Tallinn are being shown for the first time in Western Europe and retrace a long forgotten passage in Russian history and of European colonial expansion. Until now these exhibition pieces were carefully stored in the repository of the Tallinn Museum, one of the most breathtaking Gothic buildings in Estonia's capital city. Before the exhibition could be organised, the works were carefully cleaned and restored by the experts from the State Museum of Ethnology in Munich. The necessary works were completely financed by the Galleria Gottardo, a non-for-profit foundation of Banca del Gottardo for the promotion of cultural activities.
{
266pp,
170x240mm,
October 2004;
PB,
£33.00,
888746927X:9788887469271
, Gabriele Capelli Editore Sagl
} |
 |
BRITISH & CONTINENTAL GOLD & SILVER IN THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM
: 3-Volume Set
[Tim Schroder]
The collection of British silver at the Ashmolean Museum has all, with one notable exception (a tankard of 1574 given in 1790) been acquired since shortly after World War 2. In relation to other major museum collections, therefore, it is young. Yet amounting to over 450 objects, many of which are of spectacular quality and rarity, it is one of the most important collections of its kind in the world, equalled only for the 'golden age' of English silver by the V&A in London and the museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The collection has never been fully catalogued and this will be the first time a complete catalogue has been published.
{
220x280mm,
January 2009;
PB,
£350.00,
1854442201:9781854442208
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
CELTIC CROSS
[Nigel Pennick]
Explores the origins, development and artistic flowering of that most well known and widely recognised symbol of Celtic Christianity -- along with fascinating insights into the rich diversity of form, locations and use of traditional Celtic art in cross design and construction.
{
128pp,
135x210mm,
April 2007;
PB,
£7.99,
1902719182:9781902719184
, St David's Press
} |
 |
CHACHAPOYA TEXTILES
: The Laguna de los Cóndores Textiles in the Museo Leymebamba, Chachapoyas, Peru
[Lena Bjerregaard]
This book analyses 45 selected textiles -- burial offerings and mummy bundle wrappings -- discovered in 1997 at a cliffside burial site overlooking Laguna de los Cóndores in the cloud forest of the northern Peruvian Andes. The find includes the best preserved and largest cache of Chachapoya textiles known to date, providing researchers with a unique opportunity to learn about little-known Chachapoya weaving techniques and style. Most of the textiles date to the Chachapoya-Inka period, ca1470-1532, although some may have been produced earlier or may date to Spanish Colonial times. The styles include local Chachapoya, Chachapoya-Inka, provincial Inka, Inka and imports from the coast or the tropical lowlands. In 2001 Lena Bjerregaard spent some months at the museum in Leymebamba analysing the textiles from Laguna de los Condores, and the book is the result of this research.
{
119pp,
210x260mm,
August 2007;
HB,
£30.00,
8763504995:9788763504997
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
CHANGING DREAMS
: A Generation of Oaxaca's Woodcarvers
[Shepard Barbash; Photographs by Vicki Ragan]
Takes a generational look at the fast-changing world of the woodcarvers of Oaxaca, Mexico. These artisans became famous in the 1980s for their colourful novelty figures, a contemporary folk art that Shephard Barbash and Vicki Ragan documented in the book "Oaxacan Woodcarvers". Fourteen years later, beginning in 2004, Barbash and Ragan returned to Oaxaca and discovered many changes in the lives of the woodcarvers they had known. Barbash effectively presents their personal stories in narratives drawn from interviews accompanied by Ragan's arresting black-and-white photographs of the carvers and their lives today. A series of diptychs of the same people taken in 1989-90 and again fifteen years later are accompanied by extended essay-captions on the changing circumstances shaping their lives. Faced with a glut of carvings on the market, declining sales abroad, and an unsteady supply of tourists at home, a number of Oaxacan artisans put aside their craft to become mojados, or foreign workers, drawn by the economic opportunities north of the border. With eloquence and insight, the book puts a human face on bilateralism, a fancy term to denote divided souls. From the dusty villages of Oaxaca to the orchards of Oregon and the kitchens of Chicago, the carvers have joined millions of Mexicans who, unable to find good work or sustain their recent prosperity in their own country, have fled across the border: artisans and aliens. "Changing Dreams" is a moving story of change and survival, conveying the growing aspirations and changing dreams of a people struggling to catch up without leaving too much behind, whose creations we enjoy but whose lives we barely understand.
{
154pp,
230x150mm,
November 2007;
HB,
£26.99,
0890135053:9780890135051
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
DECORATING THE LORD'S TABLE
: On the Dynamics Between Image & Altar in the Middle Ages
[Søren Kaspersen & Erik Thunø (eds)]
As the centre of Christian worship within churches, the altar has always remained a key subject to pictorial decorations. This book is concerned with the Early and High Middle Ages which saw a profusion of sumptuous altar decorations all over Medieval Europe focusing on the rich Scandinavian material of 'golden altars'. Dealing with the investigation of the interrelationships between image and altar in the light of recent years' methodological developments the chapters are also treating themes like the human body, materiality, pictorial narrative, and liturgy. In this context, it focuses on the attempt to activate the image before the ritual, its audience and the visual and spatial context.
{
170pp,
160x240mm,
August 2006;
HB,
£25.00,
8763501333:9788763501330
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
DUTCH & FLEMISH STILL LIFE PAINTINGS
: The Collection of Dutch & Flemish Still-Life Paintings Bequeathed by Daisy Linda Ward
[Fred G Meijer]
The Daisy Linda Ward collection represents 94 seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish still life paintings presented to the Ashmolean in 1940. The original catalogue by JG van Gelder, published in 1950, has long been out of print. This catalogue serves as an important up to date work of reference.
{
336pp,
235x290mm,
July 2007;
HB,
£35.00,
9040088020:9789040088025
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
|
EARLY HIMALAYAN ART
[Amy Heller]
This book presents the Ashmolean Museum’s collection of some sixty important early sculptures and other objects from Tibet and Nepal dating from c500-1400 AD. They include a number of secular objects as well as images of deities in the Hindu and Buddhist pantheons. In order to trace their aesthetic and historical development, and their materials and techniques of manufacture Dr Amy Heller, an eminent authority on Himalayan art, examines the geography of trade within the Himalayan and neighbouring regions, the antecedents of these objects in India and the surrounding regions, and developments in the arts from the seventh to the fourteenth century in her introductory essay. The objects themselves are reproduced in colour throughout, with detailed descriptions to accompany them.
{
175pp,
195x265mm,
January 2008;
PB,
£14.95,
1854442090:9781854442093
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
FAITH & TRANSFORMATION
: Votive Offerings & Amulets from the Alexander Girard Collection
[Doris Francis (ed)]
Amulets are objects of supranormal potency that safeguard the wearer during critical periods of life passage and transformation. Ex-votos, small metal objects often in the shapes of human figures or specific parts of the body, are presented as gifts to supernatural beings in thankful reciprocation for favours received. Drawing on examples from the Alexander Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, this book describes the actual uses and ritual of the objects by people around the world who embrace different systems of faith and follow distinct cultural and ritual practices. The contributors, comprising an international group of historians, curators, folklorists, and anthropologists, focus on select pieces collected from Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia; Spain and Italy; Byzantium, Greece, and Poland; Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia; Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, Turkey, Iran; Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Japan.
{
158pp,
205x255mm,
November 2007;
PB,
£19.99,
0890135045:9780890135044
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
FINE INDIAN JEWELRY OF THE SOUTH WEST
: The Millicent Rogers Museum Collection
[Shelby Tisdale PhD]
New Mexico art patron Millicent Rogers (1902-1953) was a passionate collector who assembled a stellar collection of Navajo and Zuni silver and turquoise, Hopi silverwork, and Pueblo stone and shell jewellery during the late 1940s and early 1950s when fine late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century work could still be found. Her collection provided the foundation for what has become one of America's most important repositories for the aesthetic achievements of Native American artists oft he Southwest: The Millicent Rogers Museum.
{
216pp,
245x255mm,
April 2006;
HB,
£33.50,
0890134820:9780890134825
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
GENRE & RITUAL
: The Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals
[Nils Holger Petersen, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Jens Fleischer & Eyolf Østrem (eds)]
The concepts of genre and ritual are central for the overall occupation with the relationship between the History of the Arts and the History of Christianity in Western Culture. The present volume was planned on the basis of the first annual international conferences at the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, University of Copenhagen: a collection of 15 essays with a wide range of topics both in terms of chronology and subject matter written. The book is a special issue of the journal TRANSfiguration.
{
336pp,
155x230mm,
September 2005;
PB,
£30.00,
8763502410:9788763502412
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
GERMAN ARTISTS & HITLER'S MIND
: Avant-garde Art in a Turbulent Era
[Wayne Andersen]
Written in clear prose, Wayne Andersen's expansive text accounts for all of modern Germany's major artists -- the Impressionists Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth, the Expressionists Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Max Pechstein, the post-World War I George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, and the less classifiable Max Beckmann, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollwitz, Oskar Kokoschka, and Frans Marc. Theatre and cabaret life are treated in equal measure to the visual arts, with rich coverage of Ibsen's Ghosts, Brecht's The Jungle of Cities, and the prototype of modern filmmaking, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Andersen assigns his challenging lines of attack to radical issues that established in Germany the essential first wave of twentieth-century avant-garde art and culture. Insisting that German art is masculine and prone to violence, he formulates a compelling explanation for how artists and defensive art critics convert violence into art as a pretence to mirroring society. He associates Lustmord (sex-murder) imagery in German art, theatre, and cabaret entertainment with the sexuality of war. He sees Germania's primal barbarism in German painting infused with the rise of Germany's Nacktkultur (nudist cults). A desensitising nakedness replaces sublimated nudity. The innocent nakedness of youth offers an opportunity for cultural renewal and a symbol of physical power.
{
443pp,
190x265mm,
March 2007;
HB,
£25.99,
0972557326:9780972557320
, AtlasBooks (Editions Fabriart Ltd)
} |
 |
GIVEN -- 1° ART 2° CRIME
: Modernity, Murder & Mass Culture
[Jean-Michel Rabaté; John Schad, Series Editor]
Investigates links between avant-garde art and the aesthetics of crime in order to bridge the gap between high modernism and mass culture, as emblematised by tabloid reports of unsolved crimes. Throughout Jean-Michel Rabate is concerned with two key questions: what is it that we enjoy when we read murder stories? and what has modern art to say about murder? Indeed, Rabate compels us to consider whether art itself is a form of murder. The book begins with Marcel Duchamp’s fascination for trivia and found objects conjoined with his iconoclasm as an anti-artist. The visual parallels between the naked woman at the centre of his final work, ‘Etant Donnés’, and a young woman who had been murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947, provides the specific point of departure. The text moves onward to Steven Hodel, the 'Black Dahlia' murder; Walter Benjamin’s description of Eugene Atget’s famous photographs of deserted Paris streets as presenting ‘the scene of the crime’; and Ralph Roff’s 1997 exhibition, which implied that modern art is indissociable from forensic gaze and a detective’s outlook, a view first advanced by Edgar Allan Poe.
{
228pp,
152x229mm,
September 2006;
PB,
£16.95,
1845191129:9781845191122
/
HB,
£47.50,
1845191110:9781845191115
, Sussex Academic Press
} |
 |
IMAGES OF CULTURE
: Art History as Cultural History
[Mikkel Bogh, Hans Dam Christensen, Peter Nørgaard Larsen & Anne Ring Petersen (eds)]
Exchanges between practices of art and visual culture, contemporary notions of his-tory and subjectivity, and the writing of a cultural history of art and images have grown increasingly complex. The same is true of the interconnections between art history and cultural history as academic disciplines. Since the emergence within the last 25 years of new perspectives and paradigms in the methodology and theory of art and cultural history, a set of overlooked issues and potentials in 19th and early 20th century art historical writing has come to the fore. The first exponents of The Vienna School of Art History, the cultural theoreticians of the early Frankfurt School and the Warburg Library cultural historians, with all their problematic heritage from Hegel and Kant, still offer highly useful and timely interdis-ciplinary insights into the interrelations between on the one side art works and picture making and on the other cultural institutions and practices. The essays collected in "Images of Culture" address important questions regarding the prospects and pitfalls of an art historical discipline of the 21st century concerned with a cultural historical contextualisation of the production and reception of art. This involves not only a re-opening of the question of historical development - beyond traditional philosophies of history - it involves as well a re-examination of a range of post-hermeneutical issues: How can art history writing be informed by contemporary artistic and cultural practices? In what way do subjectivity formations and academic approaches to history relate to each other?
{
256pp,
150x230mm,
November 2008;
PB,
£26.00,
8763504782:9788763504782
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
IMPRESSIONISM
: Historical Overview & Bibliography
[John I Clancy (ed)]
Defining an artistic era or movement is often a difficult task, as one tries to group individualistic expressions and artwork under one broad brush. Such is the case with impressionism, which culls together the art of a multitude of painters in the mid-19th century, including Monet, Cézanne, Renoir, Degas, and van Gogh. Basically, impressionism involved the shedding of traditional painting methods. The subjects of art were taken from everyday life, as opposed to the pages of mythology and history. In addition, each artist painted to express feelings of the moment instead of hewing to time-honoured standards. This description of impressionism, obviously, is quite broad and can apply to a wide array of styles. Nonetheless, it remains a very important school in the annals of art. Any current or budding art aficionado should become familiar with the impressionist movement and its impact on the art world. This book presents a sweeping study of this artistic period, from its origins to its manifestations in the works of some of art history’s most revered painters. Following this overview is a substantial and selective bibliography, featuring access through author, title, and subject indexes.
{
215pp,
180x260mm,
August 2004;
PB,
£43.50,
1590335457:9781590335451
, Nova Science Publishers
} |
 |
IN PURSUIT OF PERFECTION
: The Art of Agnes Martin, Maria Martinez, & Florence Pierce
[Essays by Tim Rogers, Marsha Bol, & Lucy Lippard]
Agnes Martin, Maria Martinez and Florence Pierce are noted for producing simple, elegant and refined art that displays their quest for perfection. In Pursuit of Perfection brings these three New Mexico artists together for the first time, and demonstrates the remarkable quality of their art, and the incredible patience, skill and perseverance required for its creation. In Pursuit of Perfection is the catalogue from the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, which features over eighty pieces of pottery and paintings.
{
102pp,
255x255mm,
January 2005;
PB,
£13.50,
0967510686:9780967510682
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
JAPANESE DECORATIVE ARTS OF THE MEIJI PERIOD 1868-1912
[Oliver Impey]
It is not easy to overstate the cataclysmic effects of the run-up to the implementation of the Meiji ‘Restoration' in Japan in 1868. The changes affected every aspect of Japanese life; a new sense of a single nation, as opposed to a series of regional loyalties, was created. The word Meiji means ‘enlightened government' and the new government had as a primary aim the bringing of Japan into the group of modern western industrial powers. One of the ways the government decided to do this was to demonstrate to the world the brilliance of Japanese craftsmanship. New techniques, such as cloisonné enamel began to be developed for the first time in Japan. Active purchasing has meant the Ashmolean now has a well- represented collection of the highest quality.
{
112pp,
210x145mm,
September 2005;
PB,
£7.95,
1854441981:9781854441980
/
HB,
£11.95,
1854441973:9781854441973
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
|
LANDSCAPE AS WORLD PICTURE
: Tracing Cultural Evolution in Images
[Jacob Wamberg]
This book presents a new and comprehensive bid concerning the manner in which landscapes in Western pictorial art may be interpreted in relation to the cultures that created them. Its point of departure is a hitherto unexplored development pattern that characterises landscape representation from Paleolithic cave paintings through to 19th century modernity. Through a structuralist comparison between this pattern and three additional fields of analysis -- self consciousness, socially determined perception of nature, and world picture -- a fascinating insight into culture's macro-historic organisation is extrapolated. Not least it is argued controversially that culture at a certain level of observation is marked by a directional evolution. The gradual accentuation of a viewpoint found in landscape images can, in this way, be read as a sign of how self consciousness -- the notion of an 'I' detached from nature -- develops. And, in the raw rocky terrain and vividly coloured skies that are introduced in ancient and medieval landscape images, there is testimony of how cosmos splits into a chaotic Mother Earth and an indestructible masculine sky. Finally, the book demonstrates that the landscape images' incorporation or exclusion of traces of cultivation (e.g. fields, roads, hedges), is dependent on what the powers-that-be think about physical work.
{
ca900pp,
August 2008;
HB,
£45.95,
8779342329:9788779342323
, Aarhus University Press
} |
 |
LE SPECTACLE DANS LA RUE
: 100 posters from 10 countries designed between 1958 & 1968. A selection from the celebrated exhibition curated by Antonio Boggeri for Olivetti in the late sixties
[Anna Boggeri & Bruno Monguzzi (eds)]
Antonio Boggeri (1900-1989), Italy's premier and greatest art director, always called on his designers to produce "Le spectacle dans la rue". He said it in French, deliberately quoting Cassandre, the leading affichiste of the first half of the twentieth century. In the late 1960s, Boggeri collected posters from all over the world. One hundred fifty of these, mainly of a cultural nature, lent substance to the historic exhibition staged by Renzo Zorzi and Giorgio Soavi for Olivetti in 1968 in Milan. From this body of work, Anna Boggeri and Bruno Monguzzi have selected and arranged 100 posters from ten countries (Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Japan, the UK, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the US and Switzerland) for the exhibition at Galleria Gottardo in Lugano. It is important to remember that the point of Boggeri’s exhibition was to contrast posters from different sources which, unlike the decorative posters that proliferated in the 1960s, in the midst of the liberty revival linked to pop and rock music in particular, responded to a precise need: to carry a message in a well-defined period of time. These posters, exhibited in Milan in 1968 and in the Galleria Gottardo today, have become artefacts in the history of visual communication. To give some idea of the variety of the works and the artists who produced them, the following extract is taken from the piece written by Antonio Boggeri himself for the brochure of the original exhibition and republished in the catalogue that accompanies today’s show. "The oriental preciousness of the Japanese, modern interpreters of ancient symbology, fruitive of exquisite alphabets, is flanked by the variations on well-known abstract motifs of the American group from Chicago, Milton Glaser’s typical designs, and Lou LoMonaco’s dazzling black and white images; the vibrant colours of refined and incisively original British compositions; the modernity of the Dutch; the hugely inventive and fascinating designs of famous Polish and Czech artists, who for years have tirelessly continued the classic tradition while remaining atuned to the distant currents in the stimulating themes in theatre and exhibitions; the great, varied and unexpected contribution of the Swiss group, and finally the dramatic and expressive language, the mature artistry of the leading German figures Edelmann, Kieser and Hillmann".
{
224pp,
170x240mm,
June 2005;
HB,
£27.50,
8887469423:9788887469424
, Gabriele Capelli Editore Sagl
} |
 |
MANET
: The Picnic & the Prostitute
[Wayne Andersen]
Manet's two paintings Le Bain and Olympe opened up a new phase of modern art. Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon closed that phase while opening yet another onto the twentieth century. Having dealt at length with Picasso's seminal picture in his book, Picasso's brothel, in this book Andersen takes up Manet's two most original paintings: one depicting a picnic, the other a prostitute, finding links between them beyond the fact that a single model, Victorine Meurent, posed for both pictures.
{
279pp,
195x280mm,
January 2005;
HB,
£39.99,
0972557377:9780972557375
, AtlasBooks (Editions Fabriart)
} |
 |
MY OWN PLACES
: Poems on John Constable
[Don Kerr]
Incorporating colour photographs, Constable's own letters, & descriptions of the painter from other historical material, Kerr constructs a close reading of landscape painting that engages literary imagination with visual art, for a unique portrait of this world-famous artist.
{
118pp,
180x180mm,
September 2005;
PB,
£14.99,
1552381706:9781552381700
, University of Calgary Press
} |
 |
NATIVE AMERICAN PICTURE BOOKS OF CHANGE
: The Art of Historic Children's Editions
[Rebecca C Benes]
Illustrated with 150 enchanting paintings and historical photographs, some from as early as 1922, the author describes the history and motivation behind some of the most exceptional children's books published in the U.S. These picture book readers, originally developed for use in Indian schools during the New Deal, represent the first Native-centred texts used in Bureau of Indian Affairs curriculum. They were written by lauded writers, ethnologists and linguists, and illustrated with the stunning work of emerging and prominent Native American artists.
{
168pp,
280x230mm,
April 2004;
HB,
£29.99,
0890134715:9780890134719
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
NEW MEXICO ARTISTS AT WORK
[Photographs by Jack Parsons; Text by Dana Newmann; Foreword by Joseph Traugott]
Through photos and interviews, this book is an extraordinarily intimate glimpse into the creative spaces and minds of fifty-two New Mexico artists whose work environments are as varied as the artwork produced in them. Among those represented are contemporary painters, sculptors, printmakers, ceramic and textile artists, video and conceptual artists living in the art capitals of Taos and New Mexico and in many remote locales throughout the state. These artist studios defy generalisation, and the interview-based portraits and photos document a range of creative approaches, both practical and aesthetic, that these artists bring to the task of organising and inhabiting their creative spaces.
{
168pp,
240x270mm,
April 2005;
HB,
£26.99,
0890134391:9780890134399
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
NEW MEXICO TREASURES 2008
: Engagement Calendar
Whether you are planning a trip to New Mexico, simply love the Land of Enchantment or live in the state, this engagement calendar is packed full of practical information for cultural happenings in New Mexico's urban centres, small towns and Pueblos alike -- from ceremonial dances, music festivals and rodeos to Indian Market, Spanish Market and the Hatch Chile Festival.
{
120pp,
200x200mm,
June 2007;
CA,
£9.50,
0890134995:9780890134993
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
NORDIC ORIENTALISM
[Elisabeth Oxfeldt]
This book explores the appropriation of Oriental imagery within Danish and Norwegian 19th century nation-building. The project queries Edward Said's binary notion of Orientalism and posits a more complex model describing how European counties on the periphery -- Denmark and Norway -- imported oriental imagery from France to position themselves, not against their colonial Other, but in relation to central European nations. Examining Nordic Orientalism across a century in the context of modernisation, urbanisation and democratisation the study furthermore shows how the Romanticists' naive treatment of the Orient was challenged by increased contact with the 'real' Orient.
{
256pp,
September 2005;
HB,
£30.00,
8763501341:9788763501347
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
OLD TRADITIONS IN NEW POTS
: Silver Seed Pots from the Norman L Sandfield Collection
[Tricia Loscher; Foreword by Martha Streuver]
The work of over seventy Native artists who create miniature silver seed pots is presented in this publication featuring over 240 examples from the Norman L Sandfield Collection at the Heard Museum. As an art form, these miniatures draw on the ancient tradition of ceramic containers that protected the seeds of agricultural plants on which people’s lives depended. Following in the more recent tradition of miniaturisation, these silver vessels represent the work of some of the finest silversmiths working today, including White Buffalo (Mike Perez), Ric Charlie, Bernard Dawahoya, Anthony Lovato, and Darrell Jumbo. Over seventy silver pots are the creation of award-winning Navajo silversmith Norbert Peshlakai. Curator Tricia Loscher interviewed the artists, discussing their approaches to this new art form and the inspiration for their designs. In a foreword by noted Southwestern scholar Martha Struever, she describes her involvement with the art form and her introduction of collector Norman L. Sandfield to the beauty in silver miniatures.
{
134pp,
205x260mm,
August 2007;
PB,
£16.99,
0934351791:9780934351799
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
PAINTED VALLEY
: Artists Along Alberta's Bow River, 1845-2000
[Christopher Armstrong & H V Nelles]
With its dramatic landscape & rugged beauty, Alberta’s Bow Valley region has inspired generations of artists. The Painted Valley brings together a collection of works by local & visiting artists from 1845 to 2000 that depict the region from a wide range of viewpoints & in a captivating variety of styles & moods. Authors Christopher Armstrong & H V Nelles were inspired by the art of the Bow Valley region while working on an environmental history of the area. Their research in various museums around Alberta uncovered a large & varied collection of images of the Bow River & surrounding valley, representing a broad array of artistic styles & executed at different times throughout history. From European topographers & military artists to painters commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, from the Group of Seven to modernism & abstraction, these views of the Bow Valley say a great deal about changing attitudes toward nature & the environment as well as the evolution of the artistic community in western Canada.
{
200pp,
215x280mm,
November 2007;
PB,
£32.50,
1552382079:9781552382073
, University of Calgary Press
} |
 |
PERIPHERAL INSIDER
: Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism in Visual Culture
[Khaled D Ramadan, Ph.D. (ed)]
In Denmark there has been a tendency to view expatriate art not as part of current global developments, but as expressions of ethnic cultures of little importance to contemporary art practice. In contrast "Peripheral Insider" argues that expatriate art or internationalism in visual art is not only part of the global art discourse. It is a phenomenon with a specific history, closely related to colonial and post-colonial experiences. Stine Høxbroe, Stine Høholt, Staffan Schmidt, Bülent Diken, Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Anders Michelsen, and Khaled D. Ramadan elucidate the book’s main theme on various theoretical levels and set forth their analyses of a number of issues relevant to new interpretations of "the postcolonial agenda". The authors pose questions about the problem of identity, curators’ responsibility with respect to the "others' art", Orientalism and fundamentalism. Naseem Khan, Gavin Jantjes, Ria Lavrijsen, Y. Raj Isar and Tabish Khair are primarily absorbed in the analyses of the many impediments that expatriate artists have run up against in different countries, especially Scandinavia.
{
240pp,
160x240mm,
February 2007;
PB,
£20.00,
8772899670:9788772899671
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
PLINY ON ART & SOCIETY
: The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art
[Jacob Isager]
The first complete examination of all those sections of Pliny's Natural History that deal with art, artistic techniques, works of art and with Pliny's reasons for discussing art. It covers the extraction of gold, silver and marble, the discovery of bronze and painting.
{
255pp,
155x230mm,
January 1998;
PB,
£28.00,
8774927949:9788774927945
, University Press of Southern Denmark (Odense University Press)
} |
 |
POETRY OF TRUTH
: Alfred William Hunt & the Art of Landscape
[Christopher Newall, Scott Wilcox & Colin Harrison]
Alfred William Hunt (1830 - 1896) was one of a group of progressive English painters who introduced a new intensity and meticulousness to landscape painting in the 1850s and early 1860s, adapting the Ruskinian principle of 'truth to nature' to a highly individual form of Pre-Raphaelite observation of nature. This catalogue accompanies the first retrospective exhibition of Hunt's work for more than 100 years.
{
160pp,
280x220mm,
September 2004;
PB,
£14.95,
1854441965:9781854441966
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
PU QUAN & HIS GENERATION
: Imperial Painters of Twentieth Century China
[Shelagh Vainker & James Lin]
Pu Songchuang (1913-1991) was born into the last generation of the Qing imperial family, a cousin of the last emperor Pu Yi. An exhibition of his work was held Oxford from Decemer 2004 to March 2005 and included paintings from all periods of his career, documenting a change in style from traditional gongbi birds and flowers, to sweeping landscapes in ink. Some early paintings are executed on Ming dynasty silk from the imperial treasury, while several of the later landscapes in ink on paper depict scenery from the route of the Long March, which Pu travelled in 1956 with a group of artists as part of the celebrations of the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. The paintings came from the collections of the artist’s family in Hong Kong, and from a private collection in Oxford and were displayed here in public for the first time. Most have never before been published.
{
96pp,
175x245mm,
December 2004;
PB,
£12.95,
185444204X:9781854442048
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
RETA SUMMERS COWLEY
[Terry Fenton & Korbala Peter Puplampu]
Reta Cowley was a painter in step with changes taking place in her country. She began by painting in the British watercolour tradition & through a broadening influence developed her own artistic vision. Working primarily on location, Cowley painted the landscape around her home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, & in 1964 received national recognition with a touring exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Canada. Many public & private exhibitions followed throughout the 1970s & 1980s, securing her reputation as a nationally recognised Canadian artist. Drawing upon a variety of source material, including reviews, exhibition catalogues, art history reference books, taped interviews, & even diary & journal entries, author Terry Fenton delivers a comprehensive picture of this influential prairie painter. With stunning colour photography & a detailed biography, this book is an indispensable resource for collectors, galleries, libraries, museums, & art researchers interested in the diversity of Canadian art.
{
108pp,
255x180mm,
May 2006;
PB,
£17.99,
1552381838:9781552381830
, University of Calgary Press
} |
 |
RICHARD DIEBENKORN IN NEW MEXICO
[Mark Lavatelli, Gerald Nordland & Charles Strong; Foreword by Charles Lovell]
Internationally acclaimed artist Richard Diebenkorn lived in Albuquerque from 1950-1952, where he executed an impressive body of more than a hundred paintings, drawings, and welded-metal sculpture. Until recently much of Diebenkorn's New Mexico work remained forgotten. With his coming to New Mexico, Diebenkorn moved toward a kind of painting that, although rigorous and considered, emits energies of freedom, freshness, and spontaneity and has inferences of landscape. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of this New Mexico period, and investigates the critical role it played in Diebenkorn's exploration of the idiom of abstraction and the maturation of his art. It also demonstrates how New Mexico's desert landscape and light affected Diebenkorn's artistic route toward figurative painting and the landscape-inspired abstractions of his greatly acclaimed "Ocean Park" series. Companion to an exhibition to open at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos,New Mexico, this book offers not only stunning reproductions of the artist's work but also important new research into the life of one of the creative giants of the second half of the twentieth century. Published in association with the Harwood Museum of Art.
{
154pp,
260x320mm,
June 2007;
HB,
£33.50,
0890134987:9780890134986
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
SAINTS IN ART
[Clara Eskine Clement]
This superb book, originally published in 1899, has been completely reset for this new edition. Whether it be at the Louvre or a thousand museums, churches or shrines, visitors cannot escape being struck by the presence of the saints in the pictures. But why are they there and what does the presence of this or that saint mean to the viewer? What was the artist attempting to convey? Ms. Clement brings to life both historical and devotional pictures, explaining what the saint's presence brings to the pictures, be it scriptural or legendary. She paints a picture with words which readers find enlightening in the broadest sense. Light is shed on the meaning of the presence of a single saint in a picture versus a group of saints. What was the intention of the artist? To convey charity, benevolence, love of God, piety or certain miracles? In an age when Madison avenue cravens attack our senses with visual commercials on almost everything our eyes fall upon, it is refreshing to read that there are pictures which call for our contemplation and not our money.
{
140pp,
155x230mm,
April 2004;
HB,
£36.99,
1590330374:9781590330371
, Nova Science Publishers
} |
 |
SECRETS OF CASAS GRANDES
: Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology of Northern Mexico
[Melissa Powell (ed)]
This catalogue -- published to coincide with an exhibition at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture -- explores the acclaimed ceramic traditions of the largest pre-Columbian civilisation in northern Mexico. Casas Grandes, located in present-day Chihuahua, was a major regional centre during the thirteen and fourteenth centuries that blended elements of the Pueblo culture to the north and Mesoamerican civilisations to the south. Leading archaeologists discuss the geometric polychrome vessels, representational pots, and effigy pots that display a spectacular ceramic artistry, and give rare insight into an ancient culture just beginning to receive its archaeological due.
{
136pp,
230x255mm,
November 2006;
PB,
£19.99,
0890134952:9780890134955
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
SHARED IMAGES
: The Innovative Jewelry of Yazzie Johnson & Gail Bird
[Diana Pardue; Foreword by Martha Hopkins Struever]
Gail Bird (Santo Domingo/Laguna) and Yazzie Johnson (Navajo) have been making jewellery together since 1972 and are considered among the first rank of Native American artists. SHARED IMAGES is a retrospective of their career in the decorative arts, spanning the early 1970s to the present. The jewellery creations of Johnson and Bird are frequently dramatic, always wearable, and compositionally arresting. Their use of non-traditional stones and uncommon juxtapositions of materials has earned them a place in the world of contemporary art alongside the most influential jewellers of their generation. Drawing inspiration from prehistoric pictograph and petroglyph sites, Johnson and Bird have developed a distinctive set of designs that continue to inspire contemporary creations. SHARED IMAGES emphasises the forty-six thematic belts that have won the artists well-deserved acclaim at Santa Fe's annual Indian Arts Market. The book documents Johnson and Bird's collaborative process and features a range of exemplary pieces shown in museums and galleries across the country. Published in association with the Heard Museum.
{
188pp,
230x280mm,
February 2007;
HB,
£29.99,
0890134960:9780890134962
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
SOQ
: Contemporary Art in Southern New Mexico
[Betty Gold; Introduction by Marsha C Bol]
Companion to an exhibition organised by the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, SoQ presents the work of sixty-four New Mexico artists living and working in towns and villages south of the state's population centre, Albuquerque. The isolation of some of the artists' homes and studios distinguishes them from their 'northern' counterparts in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos. Freed by the pressures of gallery shows and the stimulation and influences of other artists, many of the artists have opted for the 'freedoms' allowed by living in remote and rural areas of the state. Representing recent works in a variety of mediums -- including painting, sculpture, photography, fibre art, ceramics, videography and earthworks -- this catalogue features a roster of established artists, both prominent and lesser known, including H Joe Waldrum of T or C, Elmer Schooley of Roswell, Luis Jiminez of Hondo, Iva Morris of Belen, Sharon Brush of Gila, and José Andrés Girón of Reserve.
{
136pp,
230x280mm,
June 2004;
PB,
£13.50,
096751066X:9780967510668
, Museum of New Mexico Press (Museum of Fine Arts)
} |
 |
TREASURES FROM THE HOCKEN COLLECTIONS
: Ka Taoka Hakena
[Stuart Strachan & Linda Tyler (eds)]
Published to celebrate the centenary of its foundation, this book introduces and samples the Hocken Library's principal collections. There are many outstanding items in these collections, including significant holdings of twentieth-century New Zealand art, early New Zealand manuscripts, maps and publications, early Australian manuscripts and many other items of great interest. Designed to illustrate the richness of these collections, the book also stands as a tribute to the many benefactors, beginning with Dr T M Hocken at the end of the 19th century, who have the endowed the Hocken. This book will be both a surprise and a delight to all readers.
{
240pp,
215x250mm,
November 2007;
HB,
£34.50,
1877372404:9781877372407
, University of Otago Press
} |
 |
TREASURY COLLECTION AT ROSENBORG CASTLE -- 3 VOLUME SET
: Royal Heritage & Collecting in Denmark-Norway, 1500-1900
[Jorgen Hein]
Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen is among the 10 best princely treasures of Europe. It has been preserved in its natural surroundings and about 95% of the more than 1000 objects have survived. The first volume tells the history of the collection and ends with an art historical summary of its contents. This account builds partly upon hitherto unknown evidence, for example travel diaries from foreign archives. The finds offer a new picture of royal political propaganda and of the making of Danish national identity. The last two volumes contain a catalogue raisonne. Each object is listed with an extract of the proper inventories, an illustrated description with reference to parallels abroad, and a bibliography.
{
1720pp,
March 2009;
HB,
£190.00,
8763501317:9788763501316
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
TRIUMPH OF ART AT THORVALDSENS MUSEUM
: 'Løve' in Copenhagen
[John G W Henderson]
Thorvaldsens Museum opened in central Copenhagen in 1848. The great Danish sculptor had arranged to donate his own works of art and his collections to the city, provided that the museum be built for the purpose; it would become his tomb. The Museum was decorated with a colourful frieze depicting the triumphant arrival of Thorvaldsen and his magnificent works of art in Copenhagen from the artist’s studio in Rome. The dramatic frieze, designed by the Danish artist Jørgen Sonne, made a big splash at the time, and has captivated visitors ever since. In this learned and lively study of the Museum and its frieze, John Henderson shows how the frieze takes inspiration from classical models, including the Parthenon and Roman monuments, in delivering the finest neoclassical art, and its cosmopolitan European culture, to the attention of a newly modernized public. This beautifully illustrated book breaks new ground in Danish History of Art, bringing an important and unique Danish work of art to an international audience with the blessing of the Museum.
{
170pp,
November 2005;
HB,
£23.00,
8763501325:9788763501323
, Museum Tusculanum Press
} |
 |
VILLA AT 90
: His Life, Work & Influence
[Karel Nel, Elizabeth Burroughs & Amalie von Maltitz (eds)]
Edoardo Villa is one of South Africa’s most respected sculptors. His creativity has been characterised by a disciplined work ethic encapsulated in his phrase, ‘to work is to live’. At the age of 90 he still adds monumental pieces to his prodigious body of work. The book, conceived as a tribute to coincide with Villa’s 90th birthday, is a rich visual document of his sculptural development over six decades. Lavishly illustrated with photographs of the contemporary works by Mario Todeschini, and a gallery of finely distilled historical images by Egon Guenther, the wealth of photographs not only provides the reader with both the full trajectory of Villa’s evolving oeuvre, but also chronicles his life from his early beginnings in Bergamo right through to his 2005 landmark exhibition at Lanzerac in the Western Cape. The essays offer insights into how Villa forged a unique and productive oeuvre from the European and African sculptural influences which converged in both his life and his work. This book, with its generous array of pictures and careful analysis, will help ensure that his remarkable work becomes more widely known, both nationally and internationally.
{
226pp,
280x330mm,
January 2006;
PB,
£20.99,
1868422577:9781868422579
, Jonathan Ball Publishers
} |
 |
VILLAGE OF PAINTERS
: Narrative Scrolls from West Bengal
[F J Korom]
Documents a type of folk art in West Bengal, India, that combines traditional narrative scroll painting with singing and storytelling. Depicts the life and work of modern day artists who have reinvigorated their folk art by depicting contemporary social issues.
{
120pp,
215x280mm,
October 2006;
PB,
£19.99,
0890134898:9780890134894
, Museum of New Mexico Press
} |
 |
WATCHES
[David Thompson]
The collection of watches in the Ashmolean Museum are largely as a result of three major bequests, including Bentinck Hawkins collection of 1894, the bequest of J Francis Mallett in 1947 and the collection of Eric Bullivant in 1974, comprising of 120 watches. Together these make the Ashmolean collection one of the most important outside London. The history and development of watch design and decoration is extremely well served, with many important examples dating from the 16th century to the mid 19th century. This handbook explores 30 of the best from the collection.
{
92pp,
150x210mm,
November 2007;
HB,
£11.95,
1854442198:9781854442192
/
PB,
£7.95,
185444218X:9781854442185
, Ashmolean Museum
} |
 |
WOMAN BEHIND THE PAINTER
: The Diaries of Rosalie, Mrs James Clarke Hook
[Juliet McMaster (ed)]
The wife of the prominent Victorian painter of seascapes, James Clarke Hook (1819-1907), Rosalie was a trained artist herself, and brought her artist's sensibility, her humour, and her talent for relationships to the project of writing a diary of their travels to Italy in the two turbulent years of the Risorgimento leading up to 1848. Hook had won a travelling studentship from the Royal Academy, on the strength of which he married, so the couple's European travels were their working honeymoon. Hook's career as an Academician lasted over fifty years, during the great boom in the Victorian art market; and Rosalie's subsequent diary records a busy professional couple in the thick of running a country home with studio, annual trips to the bracing coastal sites where Hook painted, and their relations with such famous contemporaries as Holman Hunt, G F Watts, and John Everett Millais. Juliet McMaster, a descendant of the Hooks, provides a fascinating introduction on their professional and personal lives. The book is illustrated throughout by Hook's vivid sketches of Florence, Rome, Parma and Venice, hitherto unpublished, and by many of James's and Rosalie's paintings.
{
352pp,
175x255mm,
December 2005;
HB,
£29.50,
088864437X:9780888644374
, University of Alberta Press
} |
 |
ACT OF CREATION & THE SPIRIT OF A PLACE
: A Holistic-Phenomenological Approach to Architecture
[Nili Portugali]
NOMINATED FOR THE RIBA INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2007. In this book Nili Portugali, presents her particular interpretation of the holistic-phenomenological worldview in theory and in practice, a worldview which stands in recent years at the forefront of the scientific discourse, and is tightly related to Buddhist philosophy. The purpose of architecture is first and foremost to create a human environment for human beings. The real challenge of current architectural practice is to make the best use of the potential inherent in our modern technological age. Yet, modern society has lost the value of man and thus created a feeling of alienation between man and the environment. Contemporary architecture sought to dissociate itself from the world of emotions and connect the design process to the world of ideas, thus creating a rational relation between building and man, devoid of any emotion. Portugali argues that in order to change the feeling of the environment and create places and buildings we really feel ‘at home’ and want to live in, what is needed is not a change of style or fashion, but a transformation of the mechanistic worldview underlying current thought and approaches. Based on Christopher Alexander’s basic assumption that behind human architecture there are universal and eternal codes common to us all as human beings, and that there is absolute truth underlying beauty and comfort, Portugali demonstrates how this approach, as well as her unique planning process stemming from it (based on the way things actually exist already on site) generates that common spiritual experience people undergo in buildings endowed with soul, no matter where or from what culture they come from. That she demonstrates through a variety of her buildings and projects (with over 600 color illustrations and drawings), in relation to the physical, cultural and social reality of the place they were planned and built on, an Israeli reality which reflects a unique interface between the orient and the west, a cultural interface she personally represents. The book is valuable to architects, artists, scientists, philosophers and anyone who cares about the quality and beauty of the environment we live in.
REVIEW: "There is no other book quite like this one, it really is singular and worthy of your close attention." -- The RIBA Bookshops. "It is not every day that a book is published which describes the world view of an Israeli architect with a fascinating body of work and a structured thesis about how architecture should be practiced here, Such is Nili Portugali’s book." -- Books Supplement, 'Ha’aretz', December 13, 2006.
{
248pp,
220x280mm,
May 2006;
HB,
£39.90,
3936681058:9783936681055
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
AIA GUIDE TO THE TWIN CITIES
: The Essential Source on the Architecture of Minneapolis & St Paul
[Larry Millett]
Get ready to discover the great architectural Mecca that is Minneapolis and St. Paul. The first comprehensive, illustrated handbook of its kind, AIA Guide to the Twin Cities is the ultimate source to the architectural riches of the metropolitan area. Organised by neighbourhood and featuring a wealth of sites -- from the highest point on the Minneapolis skyline to the modest St. Paul bungalow vibrant with historical and architectural significance -- this invaluable reference has it all: Illuminating entries for more than 3,000 buildings Behind-the-scenes details of the structures and their architects Lively information about local history and regional styles Highlights of important buildings nearly lost in time Sixty easy-to-read maps that pinpoint the location of every structure Dozens of planned walking and driving tours Over 1,000 photos that illustrate significant buildings and features Retired Pioneer Press architecture critic Larry Millett has spent more than two decades researching and exploring the architectural heritage of the Twin Cities. Millett's AIA Guide to the Twin Cities is your ticket to the best tour in town. Sponsored in part by the American Institute of Architects Minnesota.
{
666pp,
125x255mm,
May 2007;
PB,
£19.99,
0873515404:9780873515405
, Minnesota Historical Society Press
} |
 |
ARCHITECTURE AS PHILOSOPHY
: The Work of Imre Makovecz
[János Gerle]
At the start of this book Imre Makovecz gently criticises the commentators who first brought his work to the West. He is grateful to them of course, but he claims they only half understood, simplifying and misinterpreting. They presented him as a heroic rebel against the communist system, rather than seeing his battle against a larger enemy that we all still face: this he calls impersonal intelligence. When he remarks that architecture is not regarded as an art in Hungary, but as a service, and that it has no place in the Ministry of Culture, we find it all too familiar. It is perhaps understandable that someone so concerned with cultural memory -- especially long-repressed folk memories -- should arise in much-oppressed Hungary, which was fought over for millennia even before the advent of the Soviet Empire, but the same cultural amnesia is occurring throughout the world, exhibited in increasing rootlessness and placelessness. Perhaps the most misleading reading of all has been Makovecz the wild man or primitive, but this book shows him to be a highly articulate architectural philosopher and intellectual, conversant from the start with a wide range of international sources. There is much more to the work than the expressive image we first encounter. It warmly embraces place and community, and quite aside from its ecological dimension, there is a concern with the building process and the participation of craftsmen that would have warmed William Morris’ heart. Most bold and most intriguing is Makovecz’s claim to be tapping into ancient and universal folk memories that are lodged in hand-made patterns, gestures and even dance. Over the last century we have had to revise our sense of civilisation, for cities and writing are but five thousand years old, yet our forebears tens of thousand years ago could scarcely have been less intelligent and communicative than ourselves.
{
252pp,
240x300mm,
January 2006;
HB,
£49.00,
3932565568:9783932565564
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
ARCHITECTURE OF ROME, 2ND EDITION
: An Architectural History in 402 Individual Presentations
[Stefan Grundmann (ed)]
Rome is where the history of European architecture was written. The foundations were laid in ancient Roman times when the first attempts were made to design interiors which could be experienced as something physical. Ancient Roman architects also started to develop building types that are still valid today, thus creating the cornerstone of later Western architecture. This guide has been arranged chronologically. Every epoch is preceded by an introduction that identifies its key features. This produces a continuous, lavishly illustrated history of the architecture of Rome, indeed, the whole of the West. The book includes an alphabetical index and detailed maps, whose information does not just immediately illustrate the historical picture, but also makes it possible to choose a personal route through history. In order to clarify the historical development, the key buildings of each period and other major works are emphasised both in the text and on the maps.
{
384pp,
160x225mm,
September 2007;
HB,
£24.00,
3936681163:9783936681161
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
ARCHITECTURE, TOWN PLANNING & COMMUNITY
: Selected Writings & Public Talks by Cecil Burgess, 1909-1946
[Donald G Wetherell]
This collection of Burgess' public talks and writings offers a unique insight into the social and intellectual dimensions of architecture and town planning during the first half of the twentieth century. Architectural history, the impact of the Arts and Crafts and Modernist movements, the meaning of domestic architecture, and the connection of architecture and town planning to everyday life figure prominently in this collection. A contemporary of Cecil Burgess said that no one in Canada was superior in architectural scholarship. Cecil Burgess was professor of architecture and resident architect at the University of Alberta between 1913 and 1940.
{
440pp,
150x230mm,
August 2005;
PB,
£23.50,
0888644558:9780888644558
, University of Alberta Press
} |
 |
BENARES
: The Sacred Landscape of Varanasi
[Niels Gutschow]
The book gives a comprehensive view of the complex world of India's sacred place par excellence, also known as Benares. Beyond a scholarly presentation of pilgrimages and documentation of their routes the book opens a new view: visually compelling photographs focus on sacred objects.
{
498pp,
280x270mm,
February 2006;
HB,
£89.00,
393668104X:9783936681048
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
CARLO SCARPA
: Layers
[Anne-Catrin Schultz]
In recent decades, Carlo Scarpa’s relevance has been steadily on the rise. At a time when architects have to use existing city and building structures as a point of departure for their work, his oeuvre remains a source of inspiration. Buildings such as the Castelvecchio in Verona show us that architecture is capable of communicating its own history, has meaning, and develops a contemporary dynamic of its own. Scarpa’s layered architecture makes visible the process of becoming and the time-related sedimentation of material and meanings. It is especially at points of transition and interface that layering becomes a narrative element that elucidates the tectonic qualities of the building. Overlaying includes leaving a record of how an object came into being -- either by means of the sediments of its history or through the intervention of the architect. In this book Anne-Catrin Schultz presents her research about the phenomenon of layering in Carlo Scarpa’s architecture. Layering describes the physical composition of layers defining space as well as the parallel presence of cultural referrals and formal associations imbedded in the physical layers. Scarpa’s work is an embodiment of multidimensional layering and, at the same time, a focal point for architectural movements of his time that have stratification as their theme. In most buildings, the principle of layering may be regarded as something that is part of the nature of building. Functional conditions call for planes, elements, or "layers" to provide the supporting structure, and others to protect from rain, cold or the heat of the sun. However, architectonic layering goes beyond merely fulfilling technical requirements -- the principle of layering may be used as a formative method that allows elements of different origins to be combined into a non-hierarchical whole. Layering exists in a realm of complexity and implies a capacity of being interpreted that goes beyond itself and creates references to the world at large. The first part of the book examines Scarpa's fields of influence and intellectual roots and puts them in perspective with former theories and their interpretation of architecture as layered, for example Gottfried Semper's theory of clothing. The second part displays an analysis of three major projects, Castelvecchio and Banca Popolare in Verona and the Querini Foundation in Venice.
{
152pp,
235x300mm,
September 2007;
HB,
£39.90,
3930698145:9783930698141
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
CHINESE ARCHITECTURE & PLANNING
: Ideas, Methods, Techniques
[Qinghua Guo]
China possesses a long continuous architectural history, and architecture plays a distinctive role in Chinese civilisation itself, in which the concept of architecture and the way of construction are entirely different from those in the West. In the field of architectural history, a specialist study by a variety of distinguished scholars, both Chinese and non-Chinese, covered the style and aesthetics of Chinese architecture that has been recognised as timelessness and unchanging quality. The architectural diversity and variation, and technological innovation and evolution of Chinese architecture have largely been ignored. This book presents a thematic discussion of architectural history and a critical evaluation of city planning, with a focus on the issues of ideas, methods and techniques in the context of the culture, politics and religion of the pre-modern China. In the book, Qinghua Guo establishes a broad periodisation for the architectural formation and development with a clear conceptual framework for it, and interprets its architectonics and typology in details. This study attempts to identify major characters of Chinese architecture and planning in order to understand how they were formed and why.
{
168pp,
235x285mm,
October 2005;
HB,
£39.90,
3932565541:9783932565540
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
EGON EIERMANN / SEP RUF, GERMAN PAVILIONS, BRUSSELS 1958
[Introduction by Immo Boyken; Photographs by Heinrich Heidersberger und Eberhard Troeger]
Text in English and German. Architects Egon Eiermann and Sep Ruf created The German Pavilions at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. Walter Rossow was landscape and garden planner, and Hans Schwippert responsible for the exhibition programme. The architects placed eight pavilions of different sizes on a square ground plan, linked by bridge-style walkways and surrounding an inner courtyard. This courtyard created a peaceful garden which allowed visitors to look through the linking bridges to the outside world. The pavilions were raised off the ground by a plinth of clay-yellow brick, which gave the impression they were floating. From the outside, their floors showed outside as black bands in front of which was a network of white-painted steel tubes, forming a kind of filigree epidermis. The wooden floors in red pine matchboarding were reminiscent of classical sailing yachts. Blinds were set at the outer edge of the ceilings that when lowered transformed the open impression into a closed, cubic impression. Le Figaro remarked about the pavilions: ‘The Germans have created an exhibition of exemplary lucidity, treated delicately and with an entirely Parisian grace’.
{
56pp,
280x300mm,
August 2007;
HB,
£24.90,
3932565622:9783932565625
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
ESPACE DE L'ART CONCRET, MOUANS-SARTOUX
[Axel Sowa]
Text in French and English. Mouans-Sartoux, a small community near Cannes, has become a Mecca for concrete art. Since 1990 two collectors from Switzerland, Sybil Albers and the artist Gottfried Honegger, have been working to establish the Espace de l’Art Concret (EAC). Neither a museum nor a municipal gallery, this institution is located in the Château de Mouans and in two new buildings in its large park. The first of the two new buildings was a studio designed by Marc Barani from Nice for children who come here to paint and to develop their aesthetic senses. Barani began work in 1990 with the extension to the cemetery of Saint Pancrace in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The way he located the cemetery in the local landscape and his use of original vegetable and mineral materials immediately brought him to international notice. In 2000 Albers and Honegger decided to donate their collections to the French state, on the understanding that it would finance a building to house the nearly 500 works of art. A competition was launched and was won by the Zurich architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer. The building, which opened its doors in 2004, stands on a steeply sloping wooded terrain. As one enters the park, one sees its yellowish-green hues through the branches of the trees. The monochrome colour unifies the five levels of the building that give no clue as to what it contains. While the outside of the building looks artificial, independent, sculptural, its interior is set up in accordance with Honegger’s special instructions. He wanted the building that was to house his collection to be distinct from the official and sterile museums that are often laid out on the gallery model, passageways for contemplation, internal streets with overhead lighting. Honegger prefers an interior that is like a private home rather than a public institution. The domestic framework of the rooms must reflect a principle dear to the heart of the donors: that the works are to be lived with. Honegger takes an overall view of our material environment and emphasises that for him the distinction between fine arts and applied arts has no meaning, because “an unapplied art would have no purpose and would be bound to be insignificant and disappear”.
{
60pp,
280x300mm,
April 2006;
HB,
£24.00,
3932565584:9783932565588
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
FRANZ RIEPL
: Architect / Architekt
[Paulhans Peters]
Text in English and German. Franz Riepl is the outstanding exponent of the architecture now called 'the other architecture'. Housing was the dominant architectural theme of his entire working life. Riepl has always gone his own way, not attaching himself to the general trends of the day or to ideologies. Instead, his housing is distinguished by its humane form, and outstanding suitability for normal daily life inside it: calm, without exclamation marks so to speak. It is part of that other Modernism, which is austere but comprehensible without being populist. This also includes the disciplined building details, in many cases improved industrial products. The characteristics of Riepl’s buildings are durability, flexibility, sustainability and reticence. The book also intends to show that they do not become obsolete in terms of use, nor do they become old-fashioned. At the same time, lively respect has to be paid to Riepl’s buildings because of their surroundings. A second area of his work is building in the country. His buildings there show up-to-date, hence topical handwriting, fulfilling today's functions and fitting in with village and landscape without borrowing from folklore, local styles or even modernisms. All of them suggest and indicate that the country is an important space for current building as well.
{
232pp,
250x310mm,
June 2006;
HB,
£49.00,
3936681007:9783936681000
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
FRIEDRICH AUGUST STULER
: The Architectural Work Today/Das Architektonische Werk Heute
[Hillbert Ibbeken (ed)]
Text in English and German. Friedrich Stuler was the third great Prussian architect of the 19th century, alongside Karl Schinkel and Ludwig Persius. This book produces most of Stuler's important buildings as well as exploring new academic aspects of his work. The essay herein sum up Stuler's life and work, his relationship with the middle ages, analysis of the museums, influences from the restoration in Prussia, the influence of Schinkel, Persius and Stuler on later architects.
{
348pp,
280x300mm,
November 2006;
HB,
£68.00,
3936681104:9783936681109
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
GUNTER RAMBOW
: Plakate / Posters
[Eva Linhart (ed)]
Text in English and German. Gunter Rambow (b.1938) is one of the most prominent designers in the area of visual communication and cultural advertising. He produced numerous photo books and outstanding posters at the Rambow & Lienemeyer graphic design studio (1961-86), and is now carrying on his work at the Rambow, van de Sand studio. Particularly with his posters for the Schauspiel Frankfurt under the direction of Peter Palitzsch, Rambow succeeded in creating symbols for theatre’s claim to political involvement and effectively introducing them into the urban environment. From 1974 to 2003 Gunter Rambow taught at the Universität Kassel and the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe as a professor of visual communication. In 2007, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt is following the example of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Shanghai Art Museum and many other institutions and dedicating a major solo exhibition to his work. The show is an encounter between more than one hundred posters by Gunter Rambow -- dating from 1962 to the present -- and Richard Meier’s museum architecture. The publication appearing in conjunction with this exhibition documents the dialogue between Rambow’s poster art and Meier’s museum building. Authors Eva Linhart, Anita Kühnel and Volker Fischer acquaint readers with Rambow’s poster oeuvre -- far beyond the limited number on exhibit -- and his aesthetic strategies. Not only is light shed on the latter from the art-historical perspective, but a sense is conveyed of Rambow’s innovative achievement in using the medium of the poster to create unmistakable corporate designs for a spectrum of widely differing institutions. The catalogue moreover provides an analytical appraisal of Rambow’s ability to trigger insights about the environment and human relationships in those who view his posters.
{
176pp,
245x300mm,
June 2007;
HB,
£39.00,
3936681198:9783936681192
, Edition Axel Menges
} |
 |
GYPSY ARCHITECTURE
: Houses of the Roma in Eastern Europe
[Renata Calzi & Patrizio Corno]
The fact that there is Gypsy architecture may surprise quite a few people, for Gypsies are regarded as nomads who roam through the world and settle now here, now there, |
