This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Helen McNicoll. An Impressionist Journey at Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, Quebec City, Canada 20 June 2024 to 05 January 2025. Edited by Anne-Marie Bouchard, curator of Modern Art, the volume focuses on the idea of mobility in the life of the Canadian artist Helen McNicoll (1879-1915).

In the early 1900s, when women from well-to-do backgrounds were often confined to family and domestic life, Canadian Impressionist Helen McNicoll stood out for her love of travel and the discovery of new spaces. The artist emphasized painting outdoors and researching the effects of light and atmosphere that her numerous trips sustained. Her favorite subjects were scenes of everyday life, although she succeeded in offering an interpretation distinct from the Impressionists in that she focused more extensively on women’s labor.

The Helen McNicoll. An Impressionist Journey exhibition presents more than 60 works by the artist, 25 of them from the Pierre Lassonde collection. Through the prism of travel, the book thus examines the themes of female independence, risk-taking, friendship, and freedom for women in the stimulating context of the struggle by English suffragettes to win the right to vote.

Text in English and French.

Restrooms are inescapably important amenities, but something of a grey zone when it comes to design. In a massive effort to make them inconspicuous, public restrooms have been standardized, buried in underground bunkers, hidden behind walls and unmarked doors. At times, it seems our embarrassment with their very existence has led to an inability to provide sound sanitation. This book presents a selection of over forty very diverse public restroom designs, in which toilets enjoy special status as a vehicle for various artistic and cultural expressions, corporate values and the needs of different social groups.

Four experts from different backgrounds and countries have been invited to write on sensitive issues in public restroom design. More than 500 full-color photographs, plans and detailed descriptions illustrate the designs in detail and provide fascinating information to architects, interior designers, students, and so on.

U Thong, 100 or so km north of Bangkok, has been an important site for over 2,000 years, as witnessed by the discovery of a 3rd century Roman coin. The moated city was connected to the Chin river, thereby gaining access to international trade routes.

The inhabitants of the early centers of Classic Southeast Asian civilization were already wealthy enough to own large quantities of ornate jewelry such as imported beads from India and carved stone from Taiwan. They had so much gold that central and western mainland Southeast Asia including the U Thong area was known in Sanskrit as Suvarnabhumi, the Golden Land.

This publication brings a new perspective to the study of ancient gold from U Thong. The author is a trained research metallurgy scientist, and these skills have been brought to bear on the highly significant corpus of early gold artifacts found in and around the moated city, the largest accumulation of such artifacts from any of the ancient muang of Thailand.

The goldsmiths were as highly skilled as those anywhere else in the world, but almost all previous studies have been written by people who can only study the outer appearance to draw conclusions regarding its age and place of origin.

“This book is a fascinating look at a history rarely told.” —The Guardian

“a fascinating look at a history rarely told” — The Observer

“In his new book “Around the World in 200 Globes” (Luster), he spot-lights some of the most significant and interesting, shpwing that a globe is more than a map on a ball.” — Wall Street Journal

“…a superb illustrator of changing boundaries and national self-regard” — Strong Words

“…exquisite examples that speak to our species’ ever-shifting ideas of who we are and where we live” — National Geographic Traveler

“…beautifully put together – and the photographs of the globes are straightforward but show off the magnificence of the collection admirably” — Amateur Photographer

The Dutch architect Willem Jan Neutelings (co-founder of Neutelings Riedijk Architects) is known as the architect of, among other things, the MAS in Antwerp and the Gare Maritime in Brussels’ Tour & Taxis district. Few people know, however, that Neutelings is also an avid collector who, over the years, has built up a very extensive and also very specific collection of hundreds of globes, made between 1900 and 2000. In this book, he presents his collection to the public for the first time. He selected 200 globes, each telling a very individual and interesting story about the time and place when and where they were created. Some globes bear witness to technological innovations by the way they were made, some show how advanced people’s knowledge of space was at the time, some were intended as navigational aids. Neutelings’ collection includes globes in cast iron, steel, wood and even paper; some look very old and fragile, others are very colorful, and some even give off light. Each one is a beautiful and intriguing object that teaches us a lot about the ever-changing world view of mankind. This beautiful and skillfully crafted book is an ode to these stories, to the unique objects often anonymous craftsmen produced in the last century, and to the special dedication of collectors.

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

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

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

Heyuan Garden, the largest existing private classical garden in Yangzhou, China, is the subject of this book, which offers a complete description and representation of the garden’s overall characteristics and its contributing components. It contains a wealth of maps, aerial photographs, and diagrams which are published here for the first time. Notably, this book uses high-precision point cloud images as its main graphic method in order to convey more garden detail than traditional, two-dimensional line graphics. Led by the ICOMOS-IFLA International Scientific Committee on Cultural Landscapes (ISCCL), the Garden Heritage Digital Document (GHDD) project was set up in 2018 to highlight representative cases of Chinese classical gardens, adopt international cultural heritage archive frameworks and standards, and use new digital technologies to establish high-quality heritage archives to make up for the shortcomings of existing classical garden records. This is the first publication of the GHDD project. 

Text in English and Chinese.

This history marks the tercentenary of Jacques de Gastigny’s founding bequest for La Providence, the French hospital for the Huguenot community in England. Its survival and continuing existence today bears witness to the tenacity of the community of Huguenot refugees and their descendants. Chapters on the successive phases of its history are illustrated with portraits of the Directors and Officers, and the silver, furniture, engravings, heraldry and other memorabilia associated with them. The book traces the history of this institution from the building of the original hospital in the parish of St. Luke’s, Finsbury, and the granting of the Royal Charter by George I in 1718, to the construction of a new building in Victoria Park, Hackney, in the 1860s designed by Robert Roumieu, an architect of Huguenot descent. In its present location in Rochester, Kent, La Providence provides sheltered housing for elderly people of proven Huguenot descent. For more information please visit: http://www.johnadamsonbooks.com/frenchhospital.html

What is the relationship between the Holy Trinity and social media? How do hashtags influence us? Why are we so inclined to use filters? Why do we treat digital images differently than analogue ones? Art history offers a beginning of answers.

Instagrammable explores the paradox of looking without seeing and seeing without looking. Koenraad Jonckheere examines trust in and distrust of images, drawing on 2,500 years of thinking about visual art. In eleven chapters, he examines the world of digital images through numerous intriguing examples from art history.

Francisco de Goya and Edvard Munch revolutionized art through their groundbreaking pairing of raw realism and unique imaginative power. Exploring inner worlds and existential questions, they had a formative impact on art history and our understanding of our times.

The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Goya and Munch: Modern Prophecies, the first comprehensive presentation of these two artists in tandem. It is lavishly illustrated with reproductions of all the exhibited works and features texts by Trine Otte Bak Nielsen, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Janis Tomlinson, Ute Kuhlemann Falck and Ask Salomon Selnes.

This book covers the history of the material-technical aspects of engraving, etching and intaglio plate printing through history. The historical developments of engraving and etching processes are discussed from their beginnings in the early fifteenth century with the first developments of intaglio printmaking techniques, and it sketches the latter’s dissemination through the ages. Intaglio printmaking is discussed in terms of the economic as well as workshop conditions, education and the supply of materials. Complete and detailed overviews of the making of the printing plate and printing are covered.

This book accompanies a major exhibition in the Ashmolean Museum on the early work of internationally acclaimed German artist Anselm Kiefer. It focuses on his paintings, drawings, photographs and artist books created between 1969 and 1982, in the private collections of the Hall Art Foundation. Anselm Kiefer: Early Works is the first institutional show and publication in the UK dedicated to Kiefer’s early practice. The book introduces themes, subjects and styles that have become signature to Kiefer’s work, while providing a more intimate and complementary context for his large-scale installations that he is best known for today. The early works are accompanied by three recent paintings from the artist’s own collections and White Cube, chosen by the artist himself.

Art historians, artists, curators and experts of Kiefer’s art from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Britain and the US have contributed 46 original texts on individual works, organized in a chronological structure. An illustrated chronology at the end of the book compiled by Stephanie Biron from the Hall Art Foundation provides an overview of the artist’s early practice and life, to contextualize the works.

The book begins with Kiefer’s iconic Occupations and Heroische Sinnbilder series, created in 1969 and 1970, which Kiefer views as his first serious works. Kiefer was among the first generation of German post-war artists to directly confront the country’s troubled past and identity. Full of complex references to German socio-political history but also to culture, literature and his personal life, Kiefer’s early works carry a unique iconography, linking classic ideas of great art with a distinctive understanding of concrete artistic materiality. The landscapes in his watercolors are historically charged; hand-written words on paintings are closely linked with poetry well known to most German viewers; motifs and symbols point at Nazi ideologies and a collective feeling of guilt.

The last fifteen years of Russian history have profoundly altered Moscow, bringing dramatic changes to the Communist city it was in the eighties. These alterations have increasingly highlighted Moscow’s many contrasts and multiple facets.

The guide seeks to do more than just recount and illustrate the city’s architectural history. It strives to be a tool to study the building trends that have shaped it. After a short introduction and the essential information needed to plan a visit, the book includes several essays that give the city’s historical context and then critically consider its possible future developments. The itineraries include about a hundred architectural works, both historical and contemporary, which are fully illustrated with images, drawings and descriptions, and are marked on the front of the map with a reference number corresponding to the section in the book and the icon on the back of the map. The guide also provides information about museums, libraries, institutions, movie theatres, restaurants and gathering places.

Sytin House was built in Moscow in 1803 by Brigadier Andrei Sytin to be his city residence. Built from wood but disguised to look like stone, a peculiarity of the Russian building tradition, it was a typical house for a member of the gentry class, built according to standardized designs and decorated with classical motifs. The otherwise modest house has a portico with four columns and a pediment, all from wood. The Sytin family moved in just a few years before the fire of Moscow in 1812 that devastated most of the city, but, amazingly, not this house, that is to this day an extraordinary survivor, one of only a handful of such houses left in Moscow. The house survived the early 20th century building boom, as well as the upheaval of the 1917 revolution when numerous wooden houses were dismantled for firewood. Divided into communal apartments during the Soviet period, it avoided demolition under Stalin, was listed in the 1960s, and finally restored in 1980. It was once again left empty in the 2010s however, and began to decline. Nestled between two of Moscow’s main streets, it has been recently triumphantly restored, and is today a witness of over 200 years of the city’s architectural history. 

Text in English and Russian.

100 years ago Siam declared war on Germany. In the early morning hours of 22 July 1917, army units and gendarmerie called the roughly 200 completely unsuspecting German and Austro-Hungarian men in Bangkok out of their beds, presented them with the declaration of war and went on to arrest them. At the same time, marine units boarded the nine ocean going German ships anchored on the river, capturing what was considered by all to be the greatest prize. With these events began Siam’s 17 months at war with two European powers.

The story of how these 17 months unfolded in Siam and in Europe is at the heart of this book. It is a complex tale interweaving political, diplomatic, military, cultural and social history. The book introduces adventurous and scared Thai soldiers on the battlefields of the Western Front, arrogant European politicians and diplomats convinced of their racial and cultural superiority, shrewd Thai officials beating the West at its own game of imperialism, princes rivalling over influence and power, German businessmen imprisoned by “Orientals”, Thai students caught up in world events and submarine attacks, and the King of Siam himself.

Siam’s participation in World War I was the single most important international event for contemporaries in the kingdom, its symbolism unmatched by any other occurrence of the times. The book is the first-ever extensively researched study of Siam and World War I in all its facets. By combining primary sources from Thailand, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Austria, the study describes local events in a global context and explains how world events manifested themselves in the royal palaces and on the streets of Bangkok. The legacy of the events a century ago is remarkably tangible even today, and the book connects the reader with this legacy.

The book is easily accessible to the non-specialist reader interested in history and political affairs, as it describes numerous colorful episodes and vignettes, and includes over 300 rare photographs and illustrations, reproduced in high-quality print. The book is published simultaneously in a Thai and an English-language version.

India is a nation of conflicting realities, where the old and the new, the traditional and modern regularly coexist. Here, the artists are concerned not solely with telling their own tales but also with exploring what it means to live in a nation steeped in tradition.

Within the context of modern and contemporary India, works on paper offered artists a way of cultivating transnational modernist expression while continuing to explore the potential of a medium that had deeper roots in older artistic traditions native to the subcontinent. This volume features over 100 watercolors, drawings, etchings, sketches and lithographs by senior Indian modernists, born primarily before the 1950s and who came of age in the decades directly following Independence in 1947. These artists span the transition from colonial to post-colonial India, embracing both realism and abstraction, exploring complex metaphors, and making political statements that directly engage India’s past, present, and future.

With contributions by Tamara Sears, Michael Mackenzie, Paula Sengupta, Emma Oslé, Darielle Mason, Rebecca M. Brown, Jeffrey Wechsler, Kishore Singh and Swathi Gorle. 

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was a radical inventor: an artist who discarded convention and disrupted hierarchies, overturning the traditional basis of culture while revolutionising the way people perceive and interact with art. Calder’s ‘new line’ was not simply an evolution of forms and styles. From the start, it was quite clear to all who witnessed him at work that – in his way of drawing attention and gaining notoriety – he was doing something radically new. This catalog shows how Calder’s work emerged from expectations of change in American popular culture. Calder, who was initially attracted by the structure and functions of the circus, looked for alternative models to triumph over respectability, public decorum, and the ambitions of industry. The catalogue, with twelve essays from major contributors, will examine how Calder, among the first college-trained artists, found techniques and inspiration in many disciplines and their development: technology, engineering, architecture, physics, and astronomy, among others. All these contributed to the development of his wire sculptures, mobiles, and stabiles. More than 100 works and comparative illustrations will guide the reader through this innovative and unique path.

Through various thematic perspectives and a range of media, this book will shed new light on the history of Surrealism. With the idea of the unconscious as a turning point, The Savage Eye traces the roots of Surrealism in Symbolism and shows how the two art movements both reflect each other and overlap. Some of the most significant artists in modern art meet here in the murky depths of the human mind, where logic and morality give way to dreams, disturbing impulses, and unbridled desire. In this illuminating book you will become familiar with two radical art movements that both explored the psyche with the aim of establishing a new concept of humanity. Through artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Paul Gauguin, Dora Maar, René Magritte, Lee Miller, Joan Miró, Odilon Redon, and Auguste Rodin we will take you on a journey through the limitless world of the unconscious.

Culture of Indigo: Plant, Product, Power contains papers selected from those presented at the International conference on Culture of Indigo – Exploring the Asian Panoram: Plant, Process, Product, Power in New Delhi in 2007. The book takes the reader on a timeline tour, with details of the plant’s cultivation and production processes. Highlights of indigo s commercial use and impact on fine arts, architecture, trade, heritage as well as an indepth analysis of its resurgence in the wake of environmental concerns enrich the reading experience substantially. With contributions from globally-renowned scholars and art connoisseurs, the inherent politics and pleasures associated with indigo come alive. Vivid illustrations, insightful analysis and extensively-researched text hold promise for readers who cannot resist the chequered lineage of Indigo as a plant, a product and a phenomenon. This book, on the history, politics, and commercialization of Indigo, will be useful for students, academicians, and historians. Contents: Foreword; Introduction; Neel in Bengali Culture; Indigo Dyeing in Karnataka: History and Tradition Indigo Culture in Nagaland; The Story of Indigo (Neer) and Ajrak: The Sacred Textile of Sindh Mohom: Northern Thai Indigo; The Revival of Indigo in Indonesian; The Place of Indigo in Japanese History; Indigo in Tibet: Advent and Symbolism; Neelambari: The Mysticism of the Goddess; Blue and Green in Ancient Classical Art Forms of Kerala; A Journey into Plants, Plant Products, and Minerals Employed; Five Colour Formula Sans Indigo in Kerala Painting Tradition; Evolution, Execution and Colour System of Traditional Mural Paintings of Kerala; Global Blue: Re-inventing Indigo for the 21st Century; End 2 End Natural; Indigo in Fashion; NID’s Varied Interactions; About the Contributors; Index.

This volume brings together leading scholars of Sikhism and of Sikh art to assess and interpret the remarkable art resource known as the Kapany Collection, using it to introduce to a broad public the culture, history, and ethos of the Sikhs. Fifteen renowned scholars contributed essays describing the passion and vision of Narinder and Satinder Kapany in assembling this unparalleled assemblage of great Sikh art, some of which has been displayed in exhibitions around the globe. The Kapanys’ legacy of philanthropic work includes establishing the Sikh Foundation (now celebrating its 50th year) and university endowments for Sikh studies. Through this profusely illustrated book’s chapters, scholars examine the full range of Sikh artistic expression and of Sikh history and cultural life, using artworks from the Kapany Collection.

In Florence, cassettai refers to the special group of street vendors who take their name from the drawer-like containers in which they display their wares. They have belonged to the association of the same name since 1909; today they are recognized as an important part of Florence’s historical and cultural heritage. They are both promoters and protagonists of a volume on the history of the illustrated postcard, in whose diffusion they have traditionally played an important role.

The history of the postcard intersects closely with that of the art of the last two centuries, beginning with the emergence of photography. Over time, the postcard became an art form in its own right; it also had a hand in transforming communication, providing travelers with the opportunity of recording spontaneous impressions while forever capturing a picture of the visited site.

Sponsored by the association of the cassettai, the volume offers a rich and varied overview of the illustrated postcard, which was once an extremely popular means of conveying messages through words and images. Still today, the postcard holds its own in a world dominated by more modern and rapid means of communication, while retaining its connection with a fascinating history, one imbued with culture, identity, beauty and romanticism.

Text in English and Italian.

Mohandas K. Gandhi has been described as ‘an artist of non-violence,’ crafting as he did a set of practices of the self and politics that earned him the mantle of Mahatma, ‘the great soul.’ His philosophy and praxis of satyagraha, non-violent civil disobedience, has been analyzed extensively. But is satyagraha also an aesthetic regime, with practices akin to a work of art? Is Gandhi, then, an artist of disobedience? Sumathi Ramaswamy explores these questions with the help of India’s modern and contemporary artists who have over the past century sought out the Mahatma as their muse and invested in him across a wide range of media from painting and sculpture to video installation and digital production. At a time when Gandhi is a hallowed but hollow presence, why have they lavished so much attention on him? A hundred and fifty years after his birth, Gandhi is hyper visible across the Indian landscape from tea stalls and government offices to museums and galleries. This is ironical given that the Mahatma appeared to have had little time for the visual arts or for artists for that matter. Yet fascinatingly, the visual artist has emerged as Gandhi’s conscience-keeper, reminding others of the meaning of the Mahatma in his own time and today. In so doing, these artists also reveal why this most disobedient of ‘modern’ icons has grabbed their attention, resulting in a veritable art of disobedience as an homage to one of the twentieth century’s great prophets of disobedience.

The history of Mughal glass has been predominantly neglected, leading scholars to speculate as to whether these spectacular specimens are European imports, made from European glass but decorated in India, or of entirely Indian manufacture. Mughal Glass: A History of Glassmaking in India delves into these questions while simultaneously exploring the development of new glass recipes, the impact of increased maritime trade, the Mughal emperors’ penchant for luxury goods, and the influence of colonial consumption in India. With a comprehensive catalog of Mughal glass objects gathered from both public and private collections around the world, this book stands as a definitive work, offering an authentic account that sheds light on a long-neglected aspect of Indian history.