When Ziggy played The Marquee Club in Soho, London, in October 1973, most of those invited to the small venue did not realise that this would be the last performance David Bowie would ever give as Ziggy Stardust. Terry O’Neill, celebrated photographer, was given unprecedented access to document the event.

O’Neill captured Bowie and his crew backstage as they went through costume changes, and Bowie transformed into the character he’d soon put to rest. On stage, dodging television cameras and lights, O’Neill snapped the incredible stage presence for which Bowie and his crew had become renowned. O’Neill remembers of Bowie: “He became a character on stage. As much as a person takes a role in a play for the West End or on Broadway, learning the lines, putting on the costumes – this was, I think, the way Bowie treated his stage. This night at the Marquee, I witnessed a modern-day Hamlet – and it was Ziggy Stardust”.

Award-winning music writer Daniel Rachel interviews key contributors of the day, including O Neill, Ava Cherry, Amanda Lear and Geoff MacCormack along with new insights and memories from fans who were in the audience who played witness to this incredible moment.

A portrait of an eminent jewellery artist and her unique creations!

Inspired by the Arte Povera movement, the Italian jewellery artist Annamaria Zanella (b. 1966) uses base materials, which only gain meaning through their context. Corroded metal or found objects convey statements that can be both political and personal in nature. Zanella wants to bring the soul of the material to light through the work of her own hands.

The colour used is intended to evoke feelings and reactions. To this end Zanella studied the history of colours and their production, especially that of her unmistakable blue. She produced a blue pigment according to a recipe from the fourteenth century, invoking in its modern use pioneering artists such as Giotto, Wassily Kandinsky and Yves Klein.

Annamaria Zanella is represented in numerous museums, including Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (FR); Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin (DE); Die Neue Sammlung The Design Museum, Munich (DE); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (US); Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim (DE); Museo degli Argenti, Florence (IT); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (GB); Palazzo Fortuny, Venice (IT); Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (US); Swiss National Museum, Zurich (CH).

Text in English and Italian.

Caroline Broadhead (b. 1950) is a highly versatile artist who started in jewellery 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.

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.

Sculptor Claus Bury (b. 1946) has been enhancing public spaces in Germany for more than four decades with his monumental sculptures, which by now total more than 100. His canon of forms is comprised of geometric basic corpuses, such as squares and cubes, triangles and pyramids, rectangles, rhombuses and segments, which he employs in a contemporary Archaic style oriented on the antique structures of Egypt, Greece and Mexico. Bury’s sculptures are almost always accessible, and the contingent changes in perspective do not only thematise the basic requirements of the human experience of form and space; they also articulate people’s experience in their surroundings, impressively underpinning Hegel’s theory that the world has a ‘house character’ and that man is fundamentally a domestic creature. A spectacular review of Claus Bury’s monumental works in ships, gates, houses, arches, bridges and temples.

Text in English and German.

Glass is a threshold material, serving as both a divider and an opening, for one can always see what is behind it. This is a unique phenomenon and it is confounding, as well as being alluring and enhancing, making the space breathe. Florian Lechner (b. 1938) has dedicated himself to this unique material. He explores its substance and formal possibilities through architectural works and sculptural objects. He also experiments with it in combination with the media of light, sound and movement. For him it is essential to forge his work single-handedly, because only unrestricted personal creative input and the development of one’s own, often innovative ways of working can ensure an authentic result. However, the concepts behind his works and their spiritual roots are always more important to him than the process of their creation. Intellectual significance defines Florian Lechner as an artist. He takes an intellectual and philosophically motivated approach, but the result is always a sensory experience and never dominated by dry theory.

Text in English & German.

Gene Koss creates majestic works in glass and steel that require demanding techniques to realise their monumental scale. These massive volumes of glass are married with elaborately engineered steel elements. Koss casts molten glass directly from the hot furnace, working with teams of highly-skilled assistants and rigging together intricate systems for transporting his finished abstract works for display in museums, galleries and public spaces. The artistic works deal with the self-sacrificing work of the American farmers in whose milieu the artist grew up. The first monograph published on the work of this groundbreaking glass artist features Koss’s most important achievements and, through insightful essays by curators and critics, places them in historic perspective.

Since her debut in 1995, the Danish ceramist Gitte Jungersen (b. 1967) has gained much attention for her innovative work with ceramic glazes. She experiments with extremely active glazes that melt and run during firing, and form individual masses and cracks in a way that is reminiscent of geological processes. After cooling, the works appear as congealed traces, balancing on the edge between chaos and control. Whether we can expect an imminent dissolution, or a new narrative is taking shape is open to question. The objects give rise to a feeling of something uncontrollable and catastrophic, yet at the same time her ceramics have a sensually enticing feel to them as well as great visual appeal. For the first time, an overview is being presented of Gitte Jungersen’s work from 1995 to 2017, with comprehensive illustrated documentation of around sixty pieces.

The Padua School originated from the Istituto Pietro Selvatico in Padua. The distinctive features of this jewelry are the use of gold reminiscent of the goldsmith’s art in antiquity and a modern and abstract formal expression within the group. Mario Pinton, who brought the goldsmith movement international recognition and acclaim in the 1950s and ’60s, is credited with founding the experimental goldsmith movement in Padua. Francesco Pavan has enlarged the scope of the Padua School with his kinetic and geometric formal idiom.

The breakthrough on the international jewelry scene took place in the late 1960s with Giampaolo Babetto, under whose support the geometric and Minimalist tendency was most pronounced. Other distinguished artists in jewelry such as Graziano Visintin, Renzo Pasquale, Annamaria Zanella, Stefano Marchetti and Giovanni Corvaya continued along these lines or went their own highly individual ways by experimenting with the use of new materials including plastic. The work of these creative artists is beautifully displayed through color photographs, which serve to highlight their great talent.

Austin Cooper was by chance of birth a Canadian but built his career as a commercial artist in London. Art-educated in Wales and Scotland, he became, in the inter-war years, one of the most highly-respected poster artist in the United Kingdom – one of L.N.E.R’s ‘elite’ five, his name comparable to that of McKnight Kauffer for work for London Transport, and a contributor to Post Office posters for some ten years. He was to become the Principal of the distinguished Reimann School for its short life in London just prior to WWII. He then virtually disappeared from the commercial art world, leading a reclusive life in a frustrated attempt to build a belated career as a ‘fine’ artist. His ‘Making a Poster’ book is as valid in its advice now as when it was written in 1938.

Packaging is something of a hot topic at the moment, but in our eagerness to get rid of as much of it as possible we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Wrapping It Up gives an account of the usefulness of packaging to all involved – manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer and consumer – beyond its commercial value as a marketing and advertising tool. Homage is paid to the many graphic artists and designers – whether employed by manufacturer or retailer, by a design studio or an advertising agency – whose ingenuity was so successfully applied to the problem of how to protect goods in transit and in storage as well as having them attract attention. A visit to a super-market or a daily check in kitchen cupboards will never be quite the same.

Throughout its history, the Ashmolean has evolved to meet changing needs and reflect new ideas. In the process, it has transformed from a cabinet of curiosities, representing the world in microcosm, to a museum of art and archaeology, illustrating connections between cultures over time. This book tells the story of that remarkable transformation. It shows what the Ashmolean was like at various points in the past and introduces the people who helped to make it the museum it is today. It looks at the buildings that have housed the Ashmolean and how they have been continually altered and adapted, as well as at the collections and how they have been interpreted and reinterpreted over the centuries.

The collection of drawings in the Ashmolean is one of the greatest treasures of the University of Oxford. It began spectacularly in 1843 when a group of drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo that had previously belonged to the portrait painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence, was bought by subscription. Lawrence’s collection was one of the greatest collections of Old Master drawings ever assembled and its dispersal was much regretted. The Raphaels and Michelangelos, however, were the jewels in its crown. Following their arrival in Oxford, their fame attracted a number of gifts and bequests of drawings and watercolours by Dürer, Claude Lorraine, Brueghel, J. M. W Turner, Henry Moore and many others.

This is a story not only of Old Masters but of benefactors – Francis Douce, Chambers Hall, John Ruskin and their successors – whose different tastes account for the variety of the drawings in the modern Print Room. It is a story also of the curators who bought them. In particular, it is the story of Sir Karl Parker who arrived at the museum in 1934 and left a collection when he retired in 1962 that comprehensively covered the history of the art of drawing in Europe from its origins to the present day. The exhibition, Master Drawings: Michelangelo to Moore, celebrates this history. It includes many of the finest drawings in Oxford, representing the work of many different artists: Raphael and Michelangelo; Dürer and the artists of the Northern Renaissance; Guercino and Rubens; Boucher and Tiepolo; German Romantics; J. M. W. Turner; Degas and Pissarro; the artists of the Ballets Russes; British twentieth-century artists from Gwen John to Hockney; and much else.

“It is a rare species, but it exists,” as ’60s art critic Pascal Renous pointed out on the subject of artistic couples. This designer-decorator duo of Janine Abraham and Dirk-Jan Rol met at Jacques Dumond’s studio in 1955. The couple shares the same love of precision, line and plain colours. Their earliest joint creations were first exhibited at the Salon des artistes décorateurs, in Paris. Their furniture, made of wicker, wood and aluminium, twice won prizes at the Salon des artistes décorateurs (a sideboard in 1956 and an armchair in 1958), garnering notice from the public and professionals alike. Jean Royère did not hesitate to use their emblematic Soleil armchair (gold medal at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair) in the decoration of the palace of the Shah of Iran, in Teheran. Their light and functional designs are available today, re-edited by Yota Design. Abraham & Rol were also interior designers and intervened in this capacity for both individual clients and large corporate clients, such as Yves Rocher and Saint-Gobain, with the same precision and sense of composition that define their furniture pieces. Finally, the couple also expressed their creativity through architecture, their mastery of this discipline enabling them to design some twenty houses from the 1960s through the 2000s in the Île-de-France region. Their homes are genuine inhabited sculptures, of which certain have become truly emblematic. Text in English and French

Born into the American aristocracy, Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux abandoned high society to pursue an artistic career. Starting her training with Constantin Brancusi, she then arrived in Paris in 1919, following her marriage to French diplomat and writer Pierre de Lanux. She soon met the designer Eileen Gray. Eyre took over Gray’s research on laquer and continued experimenting with innovative materials not previously used in furniture, namely cork, amber and linoleum. With Evelyn Wyld, she created a literary universe in which the poetry of her rugs, blended with furniture and lamps in totally new ways, all in an environment of muted shades and modern comfort.

An ambitious artist in the Surrealist Paris of the interwar years, she wanted to believe in a peaceful future. But the crash of 1929 and World War II sounded the death knell for the career of this fresh new talent, ensuring that her creations became the rarest of objects. A bridge between the pioneering Eileen Gray and the rational Charlotte Perriand, like them, Eyre de Lanux drew inspiration from Japonism. Neither poor, nor stripped bare, her rare architectured interiors have remained secret until now.

Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux is a recognised name but a forgotten talent. With Eileen Gray, Eyre de Lanux, Charlotte Perriand and Maria Pergay, the four cardinal points have now been identified.

Artists of Nigeria analyses the influence of different art systems (museums, cultural institutions, art fairs, galleries, the internet) and cultures on the development of modern and contemporary Nigerian art in the past 100 years. Organised chronologically, and including biographical notes on the artists and lavish colour illustrations, this unprecedented book charts the development of modern Nigerian art, and analyses the works of significant Nigerian artists and art movements within the country and beyond. This comprehensive overview demonstrates the variety and vitality of Nigerian artists and confers on them a visibility they are often denied in global publications. Among the artists featured are Olowere, whose work is in the collections of the British Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution; Chike Aniakor, who has a PhD from Indiana University; and Uche Okeke, whose work has been shown at the Sherman Gallery at Boston University.

Kulango Figurines is designed to introduce various miniature works created by the Kulango in northeastern Côte d’Ivoire, who were formerly vassals of the two kingdoms that inhabited the country (Bouna and Gyaman). Their extraordinarily varied art, which can be both intriguing and disconcerting, is relatively unknown. Their metal sculptures in particular display a strikingly free expressiveness, breaking as they do with the iconographic codes that govern their works in wood. Doing away with immobile remoteness, bodies seem to reinvent movement, sometimes adopting almost choreographic gestures, an airy grace, sinuous lines. Or, in trembling tension, some display unexpected twists and provocative curves, while others stretch out impossibly or offer a chance for virtuoso foreshortening and stylised bodies. Still others are even stranger, like Siamese twins, inseparable triplets, headless figures or figures with one head on two torsos, with one leg or four, webbed feet, outsize arms and hooped bodies. Who are these enigmatic beings whose bulging eyes peer at the invisible? Is the sculpture confined to just these specimens? The range of styles is simply astonishing, the forms beyond imagination. The collection includes over 100 figurines, none of which is over 10cm tall: pendants, amulets, fortune tellers’ statuettes or weights for gold. Introduced into our world through the metamorphosis of photography, transfigured by lighting and framing effects, these resurrected works have been revitalised, like apparitions from another world. Text in English and French.

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum houses an extraordinary collection of ‘prisoners’ objects’. These were made by prison inmates and presented to the ICRC delegates who visited them, as provided for by the Geneva Conventions. For over a century, these objects have borne mute witness to the numerous violent episodes that continue to ravage our planet, from Chile, Vietnam, Algeria and Yugoslavia, to Rwanda and Afghanistan. Made from simple materials – whatever comes to hand in a prison – these objects express the need to escape the world of the jailbird. As a Lebanese inmate puts it, ‘Creating is a way of acquiring freedom of expression, it gives us a means to say what we think while everything we see around urges us to keep quiet and to forget who we are.’ While some of these works touch us through their simplicity, others astonish us with their beauty or ingeniousness. Each bears the imprint of a personal story loaded with emotion, inviting us on a journey through time and collective history.

Now in its 22nd edition, Italian Wines 2019 is the English-language version of Gambero Rosso’s Vini d’Italia 2019. More complete than ever, the guide reviews 2,530 wineries and a total of 22,100 wines, awarding the classic scores ranging from 0 to 3 Glasses according to the quality of the label. 447 wines received our experts’ highest rating this year. This is a fundamental and essential volume for all those who work in the sector or are interested in quality Italian wines.

Richard Minsky, founder of the Center for Book Arts in New York City, is known for his conceptual approach to hand bookbinding and his commitment to changing the perception of the book arts from craft to fine art. He combines a background in economics with an innovative use of traditional methods and new materials to create sculptural, often political, bookworks. Minsky’s blending of an eclectic mix of interests, from musical and theatre performance to social issues and virtual worlds, remains a hallmark of his career. This collection showcases his editioned (non-commissioned) bookworks alongside selections from the Richard Minsky Archive, which documents the history of his career and his working process. Also available: The Art of American Book Covers 1875-1930 ISBN: 9780807616024

A Passing Bell is the culmination of a life’s work. The poem skillfully takes the form of a series of classic Persian ghazals, a style perfected by poets such as Hafiz and Rumi, into a contemporary setting. The ghazal is a lyric poem often compared to the sonnet for its traditional invocation of love, longing and melancholy. Each line of a ghazal has two parts and resembles a couplet. The final line usually contains the poet’s name, but Kane has reworked this tradition, and included his wife’s name in the final line of each ghazal, making her absence ever more present. In 2013 the poet’s wife fell ill to the devastating motor neuron disease ALS, and in 2015 she returned home to Australia to die. A Passing Bell begins at this tragic ending, and traces the poet’s grief, from a time when he is so bewildered by loss he is ‘shocked to be alive’, to his return home, to the house he built for his wife in Australia, to reflect on his life and loss, arriving at a place where ‘there comes a time every day when I travel backwards, as if against the tidal flow of my future’. Kane’s poetry offers luminous sorrow and the glimmering possibility of joy restored.