Skira strana 2 z 5

This fourth and final volume in the Photography series addresses the major themes of contemporary photography and the issues regarding the production and use of photographs in present-day society. With the advent of digital technology and the Internet, the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have marked a crucial milestone in the evolution of the photographic language and technique affecting professionals, amateurs, scholars, and enthusiasts alike, thus leading to the creation of an incredible number of images, often shared amongst millions. Through over 200 photographs from 1981 to 2013, this book closes the great Skira series dedicated to the history of photography. Providing an absolutely and truly international overview, the volume sheds light on modern historical figures like Robert Mapplethorpe, Luigi Ghirri, Martin Parr, Boris Mikhailov, Nan Goldin, Jeff Wall, and Cindy Sherman as well as their younger heirs.

A broad monograph devoted to one of the preeminent names in contemporary Japanese photography. Moriyama's photography is provocative, both for the form it takes (Moriyama's photographs may be dirty, blurry, overexposed or scratched) and for its content. The viewer's experience of the photo--whether it captures a place, a person, a situation or an atmosphere--is the central thrust in his work, which vividly and directly conveys the artist's emotions. The approximately 200 black-and-white images s ketch out an original perspective on Japanese society, especially during the period from the 1950s to the '70s. During this time, he produced a collection of photographs -- Nippon gekijo shashincho -- which showed darker sides of urban life and relatively unknown parts of cities. In them, he attempted to show what was being left behind during the technological advances and increased industrialization in much of Japanese society. His work was often stark and contrasting within itself--one image c ould convey an array of senses; all without using color. His work was jarring, yet symbiotic to his own fervent lifestyle. In addition, the artist has included a number of photos shot in the past decade to complete this volume.

The second catalog dedicated to international developments in twentieth- century glass, after Glass from Finland in the Bischofberger Collection. Published in collaboration with the MAK Vienna and LE STANZE DEL VETRO on the occasion of the exhibition in Venice, this volume presents over 300 works from the collection of the MAK Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art in Vienna and private collections. It focuses, for the first time, on the history of glassmaking in Austria from 1900 to 1937, a period spanning the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the First Republic. In the early twentieth century, a group of young architects, designers, and fine arts and architecture students developed a special interest in the process of glassmaking. They paved the way to the first pioneering developments in twentieth-century glass production as they gained a thorough understanding of the material. The collaboration between architects and designers created the style of Viennese glass, found in new projects such as the Wiener Werkstätte or the Austrian Werkbund.

"One of the marvels of the fashion world." --Bernadine Morris, The New York Times Established in 1952 in Naples (where its headquarters are still located), Mario Valentino is a leading brand in the leather sector and a legendary manufacturer of shoes, accessories and clothing. Its history dates back to the early 1900s, when Mario's father Vincenzo, a highly professional artisan, made his first shoes under the Valentino brand, winning the praise of local aristocrats and international celebrities. Vincenzo's son Mario learned the secret of creating elegant, customized shoes at his small shop in the heart of Naples. In the early 1970s, following successes at fashion shows in Rome and in the US, Mario's business flourished and he soon expanded into pret-a-porter, where artisanal tanning skills meet the rules of haute couture and where leather takes on unexpected forms. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, top models like Verushka and Ashley Richardson contributed to the brand's success, while photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon, Mimmo Jodice, Helmut Newton and many others helped define the designs of Mario Valentino as a true art form. Drawing on archival documents, this publication recreates the extraordinary adventure of Valentino, recognizing the debt of this "enlightened Neapolitan" to his native land and outlining that "yet unwritten part" he played in the fame of "Made in Italy" businesses.

Hokusai, a grand protagonist of ukiyo-e , his legacy and powerful influence on European art. Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), an unchallenged master of ukiyo-e , the Floating World, active between the late 1700s and the first-half of the 1800s, stands out on the art scene not only for his Great Wave and the series Thirty-six V iews of Mount Fuji of which the print is a part, but also his great versatility expressed in his treatment of all types of subjects: from landscapes to nature, kabuki actor portraits, beautiful women, warriors and even ghosts and spirits, semi-legendary beings and animals. Hokusai is also associated with many changes: of residence, of name (over thirty, even though the main ones are six), of style, with dozens of followers, each of which, in some way, represents one aspect in the Master’s vast oeuvre. These include Shinsai, Hokkei and Gakutei who influenced the following generation of artists, together with another individual, who is not considered a direct student of Hokusai but who nonetheless determined in an interesting way the developments in prints of beauty and landscape from 1810 to 1830: Keisai Eisen. Through a selection of over 250 works from the Municipal Museum of Chiba and other Japanese collections, this publication offers a reading of Hokusai that also includes his legacy, accompanying and comparing his output with that by others who followed in his footsteps and gave life to new lines, forms and balances of colour within the classic themes of ukiyo-e and landscape, nature, beauty, actors, heroes and warriors.

Fifty years after Ernesto Guevara’s death, Che Guevara tú y Todos (the title tú y Todos , is taken from a poem written for his wife before leaving for Bolivia) aims to redeem his figure from the oblivion of the pop icon fuelled by posters and T-shirts, and to restore it to its more human, vital, and historical dimension. The book develops philologically in three levels, which have different multi-media solutions, all captivating and with considerable communication effectiveness. Using a journalistic style of narration, the first level talks about the geopolitical context. The second level is biographical. With numerous and original archived materials, it goes through the character’s private and public experiences, such as his official speeches, his considerations on education, foreign policy and economics, the sense of the revolution and hope in “New Man”. Lastly, there is an a-temporal level with an intimist tone. It focuses on texts of a more personal nature, such as his diaries and letters to friends and family, and includes recordings of poems dedicated to his wife Aleida, in which doubts, contradictions and reflections take shape. Hundreds of jotted down thoughts, diaries and letters intimately reveal one of the characters that most deeply marked an age. It is Ernesto Guevara, El Che, talking about himself.

The book features eighty paintings and drawings, most of which unpublished, which shed a completely new light on the artistic activities of the father of the Beat Generation. A special focus is given to analysing his labyrinthic creative process and his relationships with traditional American visual culture, and with other Beat movement authors from Allen Ginsberg to William Burroughs and the masters of Art Informel and the New York School with whom Kerouac started hanging out in the latter half of the 1950s. The strength of this works lies above all in the comprehensive identity that Kerouac managed to squeeze into life, literary works, and every other creative form of expression, such as music, singing, poetry, and film. Readers are taken on a journey through different nuclei that develop reflections interweaving Kerouac’s life with his poetics using everything from portraits of famous figures, such as Joan Crawford, Truman Capote, Dody Muller or Cardinal Montini, to references to the beat culture from Robert Frank to William S. Burroughs. The book also explores Kerouac’s relationship with Italy through a selection of photographs taken by Robert Frank and by Ettore Sottsass of his wife Fernanda Pivano, Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac, and is lent even greater depth by a new project about Kerouac by Peter Greenaway.

Beautifully illustrated, this is the first volume in the series on contemporary artists from Bangladesh. Kazi Ghiyasuddin (Madaripur, Bangladesh, 1951) has been living between Bangladesh and Japan since 1975. On this rare creative journey, he draws his inspiration from nature to project his desire for harmony and peace. Producing richly textured canvases, his unique style resonates with delicate, inwardly expanding applications of paint. His early, more formal works have evolved into suggestive dream-like contemplations. As if conducting a sensory orchestra, Ghiyasuddin has melded two distinct cultures and aesthetics. This book showcases over 200 colour plates tracing the artist's personal vision over three decades of change in Bangladesh, and will appeal to all those interested in contemporary art in South Asia; particularly collectors, curators, academics, and artists.

With work by Klimt, Schiele and others, Ver Sacrum set the standard for magazine design This book gathers the covers of Ver Sacrum, the official magazine of the Vienna Secession, which ran from 1898 to 1903. Published for the 120th anniversary of this historic magazine, it reproduces all 120 regular issues--plus some special, limited-edition covers--in 1:1 scale, alongside a selection of block prints, lithographs and copper engravings. Ver Sacrum (meaning "Sacred Spring" in Latin) was conceived by Gustav Klimt, Max Kurzweil and Ludwig Hevesi. During its six years of activity, 471 original drawings were made specifically for the magazine, along with 55 lithographs and copper engravings and 216 block prints, by artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Koloman Moser, Otto Wagner, Max Fabiani, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann. Writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Maurice Maeterlinck, Knut Hamsun, Otto Julius Bierbaum, Richard Dehmel, Ricarda Huch, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Arno Holz were published in its pages. Ver Sacrum reveals the tremendous originality of the Jugendstil language, a cornerstone of modernity that elaborated new forms of design, illustration and print/editorial composition.

Jewellery: From Art Nouveau to 3D Printing presents an extraordinary collection of jewels and jewelers from the start of the 20th century to the present day. The book is a global journey through taste and fashion, taking the reader from France to Russia, from the United States to Italy, from Britain to Germany and from the Netherlands to Scandinavia. Conceived of as an ideal gallery of the masterpieces of 20th-century jewelry, this volume proceeds chronologically. It begins with the Art Nouveau masterpieces of Lalique, Vever and Fouquet, followed by the Art Deco elegance of Cartier, Boucheron, Tiffany, Mario Buccellati and Fabergé. After World War II, Van Cleef & Arpels and Bulgari's whimsical inventions of the 1950s share space with the designs of the Dutch avant-garde and the artist's jewels of the 1960s. The book closes with the new millennium, with the intermingling of art and design and the introduction of new technologies like 3D printing, wearable technology and new modes of distribution and communication. A brilliant historical-critical essay by designer and academic Alba Cappellieri introduces the magnificent selection of pictures, and the objects are accompanied by thorough technical explanations and an exhaustive glossary. Beautifully produced and comprehensively researched, Jewellery: From Art Nouveau to 3D Printing promises to be an indispensable tool for the specialist, the collector and the jewelry-lover alike.

Recognized as one of the most interesting and vibrant artists of the Edo period, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) is a major exponent of ukiyo-e. His fame is tied to the series of polychrome xylographs that illustrate the 108 heroes from the novel Suikoden (Brigands), a late-18th-century bestseller in China and Japan that described a band of brigands who defend those oppressed by injustice and government corruption. The book conjures imagery of violent, powerful warriors with muscular tattooed bodies--imagery that today inspires manga, anime, tattoo artists and illustrators across the world. Kuniyoshi embraced the genre of warrior prints, but he was also interested in portraits of female beauties, kabuki actors, landscapes, children and ghosts, another greatly admired genre in Japan. Nonetheless, his name is above all associated with Arcimboldo-like composite figures, figures within figures and parodies of stories and battles. His images are fantastical, baroque, rich in color and detail, with imposing characters and dynamic actions. This book surveys the work of a versatile and intriguing figure whose impressive technique birthed a school that continued for generations.

With Idols, Annie Caubet, archaeologist and Curator Emeritus of the Louvre, takes readers on an aesthetic journey across time and space. Caubet surveys the beginnings of human figurative imagery from 4000-2000 BCE, as the Neolithic Era's ambiguous three-dimensional figures developed and spread across the world, from the Iberian peninsula to the Indus Valley, from the gates of the Atlantic to the confines of the Far East. Caubet's book traces an artistic revolution that would shape the rest of human history, as the idol (from the Greek eidolon, or image) evolved to represent and express power, myth and belief in the human form. Idols climbs mountains, treks through steppes and deserts and braves oceans and seas to reveal networks of connections, a commonality of perception and contacts between remote lands at the dawn of anthropomorphic figurative culture.

As the art world shifts and expands, the position of everyone in its orbit--from viewers to critics and curators to artists themselves--is continuously reinvented and transformed. Though the artist remains at the center of the artistic universe, what it means to be an artist is in constant flux. Setting out to explore this condition, art advisor, collector and journalist Marta Gnyp conducted a series of interviews with artists and their interlocutors; You, Me and Art collects these conversations. Here, François Pinault speaks about his experiences and his vision of contemporary art as a collector; Anthony d'Offay reflects on artists and the postwar art system from the perspective of a gallerist; and Demetrio Paparoni reflects on the state of contemporary art in his role as an art historian, curator and critic. Artists such as Carl Andre, Michael Borremans, Mark Bradford, Damien Hirst, Robert Longo, Sarah Lucas, Danh Vo and more speak about what the work and life of an artist can look like now, testifying to the diversity and variability of that position. You, Me and Art: Artists in the 21st Century offers fresh insights into the artistic practices of our time, giving readers a glimpse of the extraordinary range of things an artist might do or think about, and how these concerns shape our contemporary art system.

Nasser Alyousif

Rafa Nasiri : Artist Books

The first monograph of the Indian artist Sohan Qadri, a modern Tantric painter. This book presents a huge selection of the artist's medium-size dye-and-ink-on-paper works.