5000 Years of Indian Art demystifies the story of Indian art spread over the millennia. This visually stunning book offers a panoramic view of Indian art from pre-historic times to the contemporary period. The absorbing narrative links different predominant artistic genres (like prehistoric art, ancient Indian art of Vedic and Buddhist traditions, temple art, Mughal miniature painting, colonial art, modern Indian art, and contemporary art) that were prevalent in different eras, instead of following formally demarcated historical periods.

The illustrated tale encompasses the entire gamut from the earliest primitive markings on stones, caves, and frescoes to exquisite paintings, sculptures, modern photography, finely crafted artefacts, media-inspired work, popular installations, and other forms of contemporary art. The book displays around 200 select masterpieces of art from museums, galleries, and private collections around India and the world. The history of Indian art is as old as the civilization itself and every major period of history has given it newer modes of expression. This book successfully captures all the myriad influences that have enriched Indian art over the years.

Features works from the following museums: American Museum of Natural History, New York, Archaeological Museum, Sarnath, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford British Museum, London, Brooklyn Museum, New York, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Gujral Art Museum, New Delhi, Harvard Art Museum/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Cambridge, Kabul Museum, Kabul, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, Indian Museum, Kolkata, Islamabad Museum, Islamabad, Lahore Museum, Lahore, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Mathura Museum, Mathura, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Musée Guimet, Paris, Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi, National Museum, New Delhi, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, Patna Museum, Bihar, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Sarnath Site Museum, Uttar Pradesh, Seattle Art Museum, Washington, Staaliche Museum of Berlin: 91, V & A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London Trustees of the British Museum, London .

Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is the first book to document the extraordinary activity at the LYC Museum & Art Gallery in Banks, Cumbria between 1972 and 1983. The LYC was the singleminded effort of the artist Li Yuan-chia, who moved to the rural North of England by way of London, Bologna, Taipei and Guangxi, China. At the LYC, Li organized exhibitions, published books, exhibited archelogical artifacts, arranged workshops and welcomed an array of visitors from local and international artists and art workers to nearby residents and travelers, many of whom became friends. In this book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Kettle’s Yard, the curators Hammad Nasar, Amy Tobin and Sarah Victoria Turner, establish Li’s work at the LYC as a form of worldmaking, connecting his cosmic conceptual art practice, to his interest in participation and friendship as well as his engagement with nature and the landscape. Nasar, Tobin and Turner’s account is accompanied by nine short texts – by Elizabeth Fisher, Ysanne Holt, Annie Jael Kwan, Lesley Ma, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Luke Roberts, Nick Sawyer & Harriet Aspin, Nicola Simpson and Diana Yeh – that trace the diverse threads and ramifications of Li’s practice historically and in the present. Richly illustrated, Making New Worlds offers a provocative new way of thinking the history of British art in the 20th century. 

“This book builds and expands the scholarship covering this central motif in African art and culture and serves as an authoritative contribution to the field.” – Nicole Beatty, ARLIS
“This volume is outsized and lavishly illustrated, befitting the art objects…represented.” – CHOICE
Horses are very rare in Africa. The few to be found west of Sudan, from the lands of the Sahara and Sahel down to the fringes of the tropical forests, belong to the king, the chief warrior and to notable persons. Due to the dense humidity of the tropical rainforest and the deadly tsetse fly, only restricted numbers of horses survive. And yet rider and mount sculptures are common among the Dogon, Djenne, Bamana, Senufo and the Yoruba people. The Akan-Asante people of Ghana and the Kotoko of Chad produced a good deal of small casting brass and bronze sculptures. Some of the artists could barely even have caught a glimpse of a horse. This visually stunning book presents a wealth of African art depicting the horse and its rider in a variety of guises, from Epa masks and Yoruba divination cups to Dogon sculptures and Senufo carvings. In Mali, the Bamana, Boso and Somono ethnic groups still celebrate the festivals of the puppet masquerade. The final chapter of this book is dedicated to the art and cult of these festivals, which are still alive and well. It is not the habit of the African artist to provide intellectual statements for his work, yet his unique creative dynamic and far-searching vision does not conflict with that of his Western counterpart. It is fair to state that the African, who though not educated in Western art history, contributed his fair share to the shaping of modern art. Features works from museums in both Africa and Europe, including the Musée Royal de L’Afrique Central, Tervuren in Belgium; Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, Netherlands; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Museum Rietberg, Zurich; The British Museum, London; Museu National de Antologia, Lisbon and National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria.

“In the beginning, there was tagging and writing on the walls.” From Style Writing to Art is the first anthology of Street Art ever published worldwide. Magda Danysz, the internationally renowned Street Art gallerist, guides the reader on this immersive journey into the heart of the most interesting artistic movement at the turn of the century. This book grapples with Style Writing, Graffiti, and Street Art. It focuses on the fascinating emergence of the movement amongst the graffiti pioneers of the 1960s, their first appearance in galleries in the 1980s, right up to the cutting-edge works made by the Street Artists of today. Spanning over four decades, the book is divided into three sections with each containing detailed accounts of the surfacing of different styles and techniques. Each period is complete with extensive biographies and analysis covering 50 legendary artists including Seen, JR, Miss Van, JonOne, Shepard Fairey, Quik, Blade, Doze Green, and Keith Haring. “Let me repeat myself,” Danysz writes, “if only for the sceptic eye, for the blind and lost or for the latecomers who ve simply just missed the boat: I believe this type of urban art to be the most important artistic movement at the turn of the century.”

The doyen of India’s art and theater scenes, Ebrahim Alkazi has been credited with garnering worldwide visibility for Indian art. Ebrahim Alkazi: Directing Art explores how his unique way of locating Indian art within a broader framework led to several formal engagements with artists such as MF Husain, FN Souza, SH Raza, Gieve Patel, and Anish Kapoor, among others. This volume brings together over 400 paintings, many of them exhibited at Art Heritage, and previously unpublished. They chase Alkazi’s landmark exhibitions of European modern art in 1954, a result of his and his wife Roshen’s passionate engagement with contemporary artistic production. Featuring several conversations and essays, Directing Art provides a context for the Alkazis’ participation in the evolution of a transnational history of modernism, and their long association with the Progressive Artists Group. Also included is an intimate portrayal by Amal Allana, Alkazi’s daughter, who talks of her father’s passion for art and theater, his revolutionary multi-disciplinary style, and the bohemian world of Mumbai’s post-colonial art scene. A chronicle of the remarkable life and work of Ebrahim Alkazi, Directing Art is an invaluable education in Indian art.

This beautifully designed book is a celebration of one of the world’s most creative, dynamic and fascinating cities: Tokyo. It spans 400 years, with highlights including Kano school paintings; the iconic woodblock prints of Hiroshige; Tokyo Pop Art posters; the photography of Moriyama Daido and Ninagawa Mika; manga; film; and contemporary art by Murakami Takashi and Aida Makoto. Visually bold and richly detailed, this publication looks at a city which has undergone constant destruction and renewal and it tells the stories of the people who have made Tokyo so famous with their insatiable appetite for the new and innovative – from the samurai to avantgarde artists today. Co-edited by Japanese art specialists and curators Lena Fritsch and Clare Pollard from Oxford University, this accessible volume features 28 texts by international experts of Japanese culture, as well as original statements by influential artists.

Everything is black and white. Takamatsu’s hand-painted monochrome images are created using a mixture of watercolor and opaque white pigments in gouache. “White and black metaphorically express the ambiguity of positive and negative, good and evil, race and religion,” the artist writes. After meticulously painting multiple gouache layers, Takamatsu colors each individual pixel of the object a different shade of grey, resulting in an astonishing sense of depth and surrealism. “His hologram-like, female characters look digitized,” writes Hi-Fructose, “though they’re executed entirely by hand.” This extreme attention to detail allows the viewer to experience Takamatsu’s fantastical depictions of Japanese women in an immersive presentation.

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

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

Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism is the first major UK exhibition of the renowned Impressionist since 1950. In partnership with the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, it will bring together around 30 of Morisot’s most important works from international collections, many never seen before in the UK, to reveal the artist as a trailblazer of the movement as well as uncovering a previously untold connection between her work and 18th century culture, with around 20 works for comparison.
A founding member of the Impressionist group, Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was known for her swiftly painted glimpses of contemporary life and intimate domestic scenes. She featured prominently in the Impressionist exhibitions and defied social norms to become one of the movement’s most influential figures. Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism will draw on new research and previously unpublished archival material from the Musée Marmottan Monet to trace the roots of her inspiration, revealing the ways in which Morisot engaged with 18th century art and culture, while also highlighting the originality of her artistic vision, which ultimately set her apart from her predecessors.
Highlights will include Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight (1875), painted while Morisot was on honeymoon in England, and her striking Self-Portrait (1885), which will appear alongside Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Young Woman (c.1769) from Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection. Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé, after François Boucher (1892), In the Apple Tree (1890) and Julie Manet with her Greyhound Laerte (1893), are among nine paintings on loan from the Musée Marmottan Monet, many receiving their first ever showing in the UK.

This publication appears on the occasion of Luc Tuymans’ retrospective exhibition in Hungary. With innumerable analyses by art historians, we thought the most fitting and exciting accompaniment to this display would be a collection of writers’ reflections on Tuymans’ work. Since one of the things to make this retrospective display special is its being the artist’s debut in Central-Europe, Hungary and Poland, we made a point of inviting authors from the region to comment on his art. We gave complete liberty to our authors to decide what to reflect on: a picture, Tuymans’ activity as a painter, or some other aspect of his personality.

The Belgian artist Sergio De Beukelaer has been working on a self-confident and uncompromising oeuvre of paintings for over twenty years. Leaf through his archive of sketches, designs and preliminary drawings made between the years 1997-2023. (cat.)(draw.) follows our first book published with Sergio called (cat.) and presents the prequel to the final result. Discover how an artist plots his designs, and handles his archive of drawings. This book gives a greater insight in the heart of the matter behind Sergio De Beukelaer’s artworks. Sergio’s drawings expose him indiscriminately, hence why he has waited until 2023 to reveal them. “What mathematics is to an engineer, drawings are to an artist. It is the seedbed from which an idea springs. When I am in a gallery or a museum, I want to gain insight and be nurtured. To paraphrase Umberto Eco, a work of art “is a machine for generating interpretations”. Sergio De Beukelaer is represented by PLUS-ONE Gallery.

Text in English and Dutch.

This exhibition catalog from renowned street art expert Magda Danysz introduces the reader to the most important street artists worldwide, offering an overview of the most important styles and techniques. With her own gallery having operated between Shanghai, London and Paris for the last decade, Danysz uses her expertize to shine a spotlight on urban art in Southeast Asia for the first time. The catalog presents exciting new talents, such as Felipe Pantone, whose work is also featured on the book cover. New works – created for the show and featured in the book – illustrate the vitality and diversity of the Street Art movement and its relevance today.

Hiroshige. Nature and the City is the most extensive overview of the career of the famed Japanese print artist, Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) in the English language to date. It is based on the largest collection of Hiroshige in private hands outside Japan, the Alan Medaugh collection. The catalogue consists of 500 entries, with an emphasis on urban and rural landscapes, fan prints and prints of birds and flowers. Grouped chronologically by subject, it presents Hiroshige’s interpretation of the urban scenes from his hometown Edo (present-day Tokyo), the great series documenting travel along the famous highways of Japan, and the idylls of nature as represented in his bird-and flower prints. Hiroshige often incorporated poetry in his works and for the first time all textual content is transcribed and translated. Additionally, the catalog pays due attention to the differences between variant editions of his prints. Thus, it provides essential comparative material for every scholar, dealer, and collector. 

‘Beauty is the beacon of God,’ said Botticelli. ‘No, it’s not. Love is,’ snapped his sister.

Beauty: Botticelli in Florence imagines what Botticelli was feeling and thinking as he painted. The people he loved and despised, his private struggle between spirituality and sensuality, the tempestuous times he lived through – all come to life in his images…

The novel is a speculation based on the few facts known about Botticelli, informed by his paintings. There are many surprises. The Birth of Venus was a tapestry design. And his famed self-portrait didn’t depict him (as widely believed) but Pierfrancesco de Medici, who sued his powerful cousin Lorenzo for robbing him, abolished Florence’s homophobic witch-hunts, funded Vespucci’s journey to the New World and commissioned Botticelli’s most famous works. There was boiling tension between him and Botticelli.

This is the first in a sequence of illustrated ‘painting novels’ that make sights as telling as words.

From long lost paintings to ephemeral sculptures; from whimsical performances to iconic public murals; and from independent films to landmark design objects, the surprising and provocative contents of Moving Focus, India have been provided by a varied group of experts. A first of its kind, this book invited 54 artists, curators, historians and writers to each create a list of five works of art, made at any time since 1900, by artists living in India or identifying as part of its diaspora.  

With over 250 individual nominations, including artists whose works have been exhibited at venues as various as Houghton Hall (Anish Kapoor, 2020), the Asia Society Museum, New York (MF Husain, 2019) and the Piramal Museum of Art, Mumbai (SH Raza, 2018), the exercise produced thrilling and unexpected choices across many mediums. Drawing from a wide range of private and public collections, the selections reveal the diversity and inclusiveness of today’s art scene: an art scene that has embraced the progressive changes evident in society at large. In addition to these lists, the book includes reflections on collecting, curating and canon-formation from a range of important voices, by way of a roundtable discussion and a series of essays.  

Spread over two volumes and marked by an innovative and fresh design sensibility, whether you are familiar with modern and contemporary art from the subcontinent or looking for an introduction, Moving Focus, India contains a wealth of information. Lavishly illustrated with over 1,000 archival and freshly commissioned photographs, this book is an important and timely addition to the global art discourse and a key source of reference. 

Nominated artists include Ramkinkar Baij, Chittaprosad, VS Gaitonde, Amrita Sher Gil, Rummana Hussain, Bhupen Khakhar, Nasreen Mohamedi, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Meera Mukherjee, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Gieve Patel, Sudhir Patwardhan, Nilima Sheikh, Jangarh Singh Shyam, KG Subramanyan, Vivan Sundaram, Zarina and many more. 

This book brings together works from one of the most important private collections of modern and contemporary art, the D. Daskalopoulos Collection with key pieces from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Providing a new context for both collections, it specifically focuses on the theme of the body, investigating the many and varied approaches that artists have taken across several decades when dealing with this most fundamental of subjects. Highlighting the work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, Robert Gober, Matthew Barney, Marina Abramovic and Sarah Lucas, the publication documents the confrontations and dialogues staged between the two collections, and provides a rich insight into one of the most compelling and provocative themes in twentieth- and twenty-first century visual art.

This book offers a beautiful exploration of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s works in lithography. It explores the new artistic approach to the poster at the end of the 19th century, which bridged visual and popular culture and turned the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art on its head. Technical innovations in lithography pioneered by Lautrec and other artists produced larger sizes, more varied colors and new effects and launched the role of the poster as a powerful tool for communication and marketing in fin de siècle Paris. Lautrec’s embrace of celebrity helped to define the famous hotspots (theaters, cabarets and café-concerts) of fin de siècle Paris and made their stars recognizable figures across the whole city.

Works by contemporaries such as Pierre Bonnard, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and Jules Chéret also feature, and Lautrec’s influence on British, and particularly Scottish, artists of the period will be explored. These include Walter Richard Sickert, Arthur Melville, John Duncan Fergusson and William Nicholson.

Art can contribute to a healing environment, supporting the work of hospitals and enriching the lives of both patients and staff members. In this book, Isabel Gruener, the art officer at the Robert Bosch Hospital in Stuttgart, explores how the hospital’s commissioned art program supports the complex process of healing. Whether it is seriously ill patients in the intensive care unit, visitors in the public corridors, or employees in sterile functional areas: each is affected in their own way by the total of 48 artistic interventions. The narrative describing these art projects, which were created between 1998-2018, is supplemented by specialist contributions from the fields of art, design, and corporate philosophy. They explore an interdisciplinary approach and offer a view towards the future potential of healing art in healing environments.

Contents: Art can be Communication, Art for Buildings and Hospitals, The Effect of Bulit Space on Convalescence.

Text in English and German.

“It’s a must-have art collection gathering dust on the coffee table, and it’s just that.” – NY Journal of Books on Street Art Today 1
“One of the best books on Street Art” – Amazon.com “It is a beautiful aggregation, and certainly many of these artists have been interviewed and regularly featured on websites and other free cultural outlets like this one providing depth, context, analysis, information, and exposure. Having a hard copy of this collection of fifty in your hand will help freeze this moment for posterity as the scene/s continue to evolve.” – brooklynstreetart.com on Street Art Today 1
Going beyond the cliché of street art as artistically responsible graffiti, this Who’s Who of the international contemporary street art scene features 50 of the top street artists working today, complete with exclusive interviews. More than a revised edition of Street Art Today (2015), this book offers a completely new and updated roster of artists, and highlights the evolution of street art in all its multi-faceted complexity. Street Art Today is beautifully presented and written, in the main, in straightforward language accessible to all.

This luxuriously presented monograph documents the life, work, architecture and design achievements, plus the art, jewelry and fashion collections of leading Australian cultural advocate Gene Sherman. Here she shares intimate accounts of her journey in her own words and is joined by many internationally renowned and influential art world commentators, curators, fashion designers, and educators who have contributed incisive essays — ich with personal anecdotes — on the impressive cultural trajectory of this world-renowned art advocate and academic, collector and philanthropist. Beautifully photographed throughout, The Spoken Object features many previously unseen pictures of Gene Sherman, along with photographs of her personal collections, iconic fashion items and jewelry, significant art and sculpture, designer furniture, significant architecture, including the beautifully designed interiors of the stunning home she lives in and shared with her late husband, Brian Sherman.

Accompanying a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, this catalog presents a broad selection of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century French and Danish art from the celebrated Ordrupgaard museum near Copenhagen. Assembled for the most part between 1892 and 1931 by the Danish insurance magnate Wilhelm Hansen (1868-1936), the Ordrupgaard collection offers a spectacular overview of French painting from Eugène Delacroix through to Paul Cézanne, as well as magnificent examples from the Danish Golden Age.

Fully illustrated and including an essay by Dr. Paul Lang, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada, the catalog provides the opportunity to experience the highlights of the Ordrupgaard collection. It includes remarkable groupings of works that reflect various stages in the careers of painters such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Paul Gauguin, C.W. Eckersberg, and Vilhelm Hammershøi. While French Impressionist and Danish works are a focus, other-often contradictory-art movements of nineteenth-century France, including the Barbizon school and Realism, are also well represented.

Text in English and French.

The National Galleries of Scotland comprises three galleries: the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Scottish National Gallery. Together these galleries house one of the finest collections of art to be found anywhere in the world, ranging from the thirteenth century to the present day. Many of the greatest names in Western art are represented by major works, from Titian, Rembrandt and Vermeer through to Picasso, Hockney and Warhol. This lavishly illustrated book contains one hundred of the National Galleries of Scotland s greatest and best-loved treasures. The selection made by the Director-General Sir John Leighton is intended to evoke the special character of the collection at the National Galleries with its distinctive interplay between Scottish and international art as well as the many conversations that it establishes between the art of the past and the present.

Raqib Shaw is one of the most extraordinary and sought-after artists working in the world today. Born in Calcutta in 1974 and raised in Kashmir, he came to London to study in 1998 and has lived there ever since. Inspired by a broad range of influences, including the old masters, Indian miniatures, Persian carpets and the Pre-Raphaelites, his paintings are infused with memories and longing for his homeland in Kashmir. His technique constitutes a completely unique kind of enamel painting. Spending months on preparatory drawings, tracings and photographic studies, he then transfers the composition onto prepared wooden panels, establishing an intricate design with acrylic liner, which leaves a slightly raised line. He adds the enamel paint using needle-fine syringes and a porcupine quill, with which he manoeuvres the paint. The finished works are intricate, magical and breathtaking in their color and complexity. This book accompanies an exhibition of eight paintings by Raqib Shaw at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, alongside two paintings which have long obsessed him and have influenced specific works: Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, 1849 (National Gallery of Scotland) and Lucas Cranach’s An Allegory of Melancholy, 1528 (private collection). The book includes the first full-length biographical study of the artist.