Ben Nicholson: Distant Planes provides a succinct and insightful introduction to a little-known period of the artist's career: his years in Switzerland. Nicholson is one of the great British modernists of the twentieth century and this publication includes contributions from the leading specialists in the field, with original essays by Dr Lee Beard, director of the Ben Nicholson catalogue raisonné project, Peter Khoroche, author of Ben Nicholson: Drawings and Painted Reliefs (2002), and Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne Museum, Bath. In 1958, at the height of his creative powers and buoyed by recent accolades at the Venice Biennale and elsewhere, Nicholson left behind the coastal wilds of Cornwall for the serene beauty of Lake Maggiore. With a seemingly inexhaustible index of formal ideas, in Switzerland he returned with renewed vigour to the carved relief. Piano Nobile's publication is richly illustrated and includes several major reliefs which are presented alongside landscape drawings, both of which explore a poetic sense of place that was crucial to Nicholson's work during the period. It also includes previously unpublished material relating to Nicholson and his Swiss period.

The Chipstone Foundation’s annual American Furniture and its sister publication Ceramics in America are the most influential publications to have emerged in the decorative arts field during the last twenty-five years. These journals continue to set new standards for cutting edge research, photography, and graphic design while forging links between academia, museums, craftspeople, and the collecting world.Acknowledged as the journal of record in its field, American Furniture presents new research on furniture design, use, production, and appreciation. Begun in 1993, this award-winning annual provides a comprehensive forum on furniture history, technology, connoisseurship, and conservation by the foremost scholars in the field. It is the only interdisciplinary journal devoted exclusively to furniture made or used in the Americas from the seventeenth century to the present.

Elijah Pierce (1892–1984) was born the youngest son of a former slave on a Mississippi farm. He began carving at an early age when his father gave him his first pocketknife. Pierce became known for his wood carvings nationally and then internationally for the first time in the 1970s. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, this publication seeks to revisit the art of Elijah Pierce and see it in its own right, not simply as ‘naive’. Elijah Pierce made his living as a barber; he was also a qualified preacher. Just as his barber shop was a place for gossip and meeting, so his art reflects his own and his community's concerns, but also universal themes. Through his carvings Pierce told his own life story and chronicled the African-American experience. His subjects ranged from politics to religious stories but he seldom distinguished the race of his figures – he thought of them as everyman. His secular carvings show his love of baseball, boxing, comics and the movies, and also reflect his appreciation for American heroes who fought for justice and liberty. In 1932, Pierce completed ‘the Book of Wood’, which he considered his best work. Originally carved as individual scenes, the completed ‘Book’ tells the story of Jesus carved in bas-relief. He and his wife Cornelia held “sacred art demonstrations” to explain the meaning of the Book of Wood. Pierce’s work was first appreciated in the art world thanks to a fellow sculptor, Boris Gruenwald, who saw the expressive power of his work. As a later critic wrote, “There are 500 woodcarvers working today in the United States who are technically as proficient as Pierce, but none can equal the power of Pierce’s personal vision”. Pierce became known primarily in circles promoting ‘naive’ art, winning first prize at the International Meeting of Naive Art in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1973. The vast majority of his work is now held in Columbus, Ohio, which had become his home town. This book revisits Pierce’s art seeking to see it in its own right, and not simply as ‘naive’. Another critic wrote: “He reduces what he wants to say to the simplest forms and compositions. They are decorative, direct, bold and amusing. He uses glitter and all kinds of devices to make his message clear. It gives his work an immediacy that’s very appealing” – an appeal arising from a sophisticated art with its own particular voice.

This book recounts the exciting rediscovery of Giorgio Vasari’s painting Allegory of Patience, painted in 1551–52 for the Bishop of Arezzo, Vasari’s hometown. The painting was conceived in Rome with the aid of Michelangelo, as many surviving letters reveal. The work will be on view to the public at the National Gallery, London, through 2023. The monumental figure of a woman, life-sized, with arms crossed, watches time run down. The passing of time is symbolized in the drops that fall from an antique water clock beside her, gradually wearing away the stone on which she rests her foot. The Bishop of Arezzo regarded patience as the key to his career and achievements, and wished it to be represented in a picture. Vasari consulted his contemporaries and fellow humanists as well as the great sculptor Michelangelo when deciding what form it should take. The image represents more exactly the Latin tag ‘diuturna tolerantia’ (daily tolerance). The painting quickly became famous in its time and numerous copies were made of it - but not until now has the original emerged. Thanks to letters between those involved, the painting and the process of its creation are richly documented, and in particular provide insights and quotations about picture-making from Michelangelo. The book carries full documentation of the work and its known copies, some of which can be traced to leading patrons in Renaissance Italy. It also examines Vasari’s own autograph technique and artistic aims.

Peter Brandes is one of the most significant Danish visual artists alive today. He is represented in the collections of leading museums worldwide, including the Louvre, and is featured in the most important Danish museums. Peter Brandes’ monumental sculptures and jars can be seen throughout Denmark, and he has decorated a number of Danish churches along with churches in Norway and the United States. In Jerusalem, Brandes’ Isaac Vase, approximately five meters tall, stands at the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. Peter Brandes’ oeuvre is gigantic. It spans more than fifty years, and includes such varied forms of artistic expression as painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic art, ceramics, and not least photography and stained glass, for which he has developed new techniques. Dialogue with tradition—particularly the Jewish, Greek, and Christian traditions—runs throughout his work, marking Brandes as one of Denmark’s foremost practitioners of cultural migration. Peter Brandes: Meridian of Art is the first monograph on the art of Peter Brandes. The book pursues a series of central themes that cut across Brandes’ artistic production, connecting and traversing these with lines that the book’s author, Ettore Rocca, calls the “meridian of art.” The expression “meridian” is borrowed from the German poet Paul Celan, the author with whom Brandes has felt the greatest kinship throughout his career. For Celan, a meridian designates the indestructible, invisible line in a poetic conversation. Correspondingly, in the cultural migration that weaves throughout Brandes' art, Rocca finds a meridian that at once appears impossible and indestructible.

This book recounts the exciting rediscovery of Giorgio Vasari’s painting Allegory of Patience, painted in 1551–52 for the Bishop of Arezzo, Vasari’s hometown. The painting was conceived in Rome with the aid of Michelangelo, as many surviving letters reveal. The work will be on view to the public at the National Gallery, London, through 2023. The monumental figure of a woman, life-sized, with arms crossed, watches time run down. The passing of time is symbolized in the drops that fall from an antique water clock beside her, gradually wearing away the stone on which she rests her foot. The Bishop of Arezzo regarded patience as the key to his career and achievements, and wished it to be represented in a picture. Vasari consulted his contemporaries and fellow humanists as well as the great sculptor Michelangelo when deciding what form it should take. The image represents more exactly the Latin tag ‘diuturna tolerantia’ (daily tolerance). The painting quickly became famous in its time and numerous copies were made of it – but not until now has the original emerged. Thanks to letters between those involved, the painting and the process of its creation are richly documented, and in particular provide insights and quotations about picture-making from Michelangelo. The book carries full documentation of the work and its known copies, some of which can be traced to leading patrons in Renaissance Italy. It also examines Vasari’s own autograph technique and artistic aims.

Drawn to Paper: Degas to Rego is a publication showcasing works on paper by some of the leading figures of European modernism. The selection is built around a group of works from a private collection and have not been seen in public since they were acquired in the 1970s and early ‘80s. At the heart of the collection is a group of works made by leading artists on the mid-twentieth-century Paris art scene, including the American Alexander Calder and Spaniards Picasso, Dalí and Miró, as well as the French artists Raoul Dufy and Fernand Léger. The publication is fully-illustrated with a prefatory essay and catalogue entries.

The International Conference on Insular Art (IIAC) is the leading forum for scholars of the visual and material culture of early medieval Ireland and Britain, including manuscript illumination, sculpture, metalwork, and textiles, and encompassing the work of Anglo-Saxon-, Celtic- and Norse-speaking artists. The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the eighth IIAC, which took place in Glasgow 11-14 July 2017. The theme of IIAC8 - Peopling Insular Art: Practice, Performance, Perception - was intended to focus attention on those who commissioned, created, and engaged with Insular art objects, and how they conceptualised, fashioned, and experienced them (with ‘engagement’ covering not only contemporary audiences, but later medieval and modern ones too). The twenty-one articles gathered here reflect the diverse ways in which this theme has been interpreted. They demonstrate the intellectual vibrancy of Insular art studies, its international outlook, its interdiscplinarity, and its openness to innovative technologies and approaches, while at the same time demonstrating the strength and enduring value of established methodologies and research practices. The studies collected here focus not only on made objects, but on the creative processes and intellectual decisions which informed their making. This volume brings Insular makers – the illuminators, pattern-makers, rubricators, carvers, and casters – to the fore.

Published to accompany a major new exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, this book examines the spectacular and controversial vision of art practice that raged across the Western world from the end of the 19th century: Art Nouveau.The role of nature is a key focus of the exhibition. The common theme of translating plants into patterns will be explored as a defining feature of the modern style. Art and objects will represent Art Nouveau from different countries, where it appeared characterised as flowing, tensile line, and dramatic movement, or by organic imagery combined with an informal geometry. Artists and designers include René Lalique, Edgar Degas, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, William Morris; Alphonse Mucha and Gabriel Dante Rossetti.

The Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), who lived most of his life in Rome, was not only one of Europe’s most soughtafter artists; he was also a collector. In addition to his own works and drawings, he built extensive collections of paintings, prints, drawings and books – and of ancient artefacts from Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquity: coins, lockets, containers, vases, lamps, fragments of sculpture and more. He also acquired a large collection of plaster casts, primarily after ancient sculptures and reliefs, but also of works dating from the Renaissance and up until his own lifetime. Thanks to Thorvaldsen’s bequest to the city of Copenhagen, his birthplace, all of these collections are still largely intact and well preserved at his museum. Home to a total of 657 plaster casts, the Thorvaldsen Museum’s cast collection is unique for several reasons: The collection offers us insight into the sculptor’s working methods and the development of his work because it served a clear function as an image bank of forms, motifs and subjects for Thorvaldsen’s own endeavours. Furthermore, the dual fact that the collection is so well preserved and was established over a relatively brief period of time makes it a valuable example illuminating the trade and distribution of plaster casts during the first half of the nineteenth century. These areas of study form the central focal point of Volume I of this publication. Volume II contains a catalogue of the individual objects in the cast collection, while Volume III collects the overviews, inventories, concordances and primary sources referred to in the first two volumes. Arising out of many years of study of Thorvaldsen’s cast collection conducted by their author, the classical archaeologist Jan Zahle, these books contain comprehensive source material from the period, much of it previously unknown.

From Italy to France to Flanders, the arts of painting in the 14th century were practised in manuscript illumination, on panel, and in fresco. Recipes for pigments appropriate to all these arts are included in this collection. "Experiments upon Colours" were dictated by painters to a Frenchman, Jehan Alcherius, while the Italian artist, Cennino Cennini, was especially attentive to the practice and the pigments to be used in fresco painting in The Book of Art / Il Libro dell' Arte, of c. 1390. His descriptions reveal the craft of Giotto, whose works make up the plates in this collection.

Hartford Seen is the first modern-day art photography book to focus on Connecticut’s capital. Comprising more than 150 full-color images, it has been in the making since Pablo Delano began teaching photography at Trinity College in 1996. In this personal meditation on the city’s built environment, he implements a methodical but intuitive approach, using color and meticulous compositions to evoke the city’s essence, particularly the way global population flows impact the city’s physical structures. Hartford Seen is meant to be taken as a whole, as a visual document that can shed light on the unique characteristics of one city’s past, present, and potential futures.

Vividly written and handsomely illustrated, this account of Thwaytes v. Sotheby’s – one of the major art trials of recent times – will be of interest to dealers, conservators and lawyers as well as all admirers of Caravaggio. In 2006 the late Sir Denis Mahon, a renowned Caravaggio scholar then aged ninety-six, bought at Sotheby’s in London for just £50,400 a version of the painter’s famous Cardsharps in the Kimbell Art Museum, Texas. He then announced that the canvas was not by a ‘follower’ of the artist, as Sotheby’s had stated, but was in fact Caravaggio’s first version of the Kimbell masterpiece. When the story broke, the press announced that the painting ‘may be worth up to £50m’. Shocked by the news, Lancelot Thwaytes, who had consigned the painting to Sotheby’s, sued the auction house for negligence. The case came to trial at the High Court in London in 2014. The verdict had far-reaching implications for the way experts at auction houses catalogue paintings, for understanding the role of connoisseurship in establishing authenticity and for the use and misuse of technical evidence in determining the authorship of a work of art. This detailed account of Thwaytes v. Sotheby’s is told from the inside by an eminent art historian who acted as an expert witness in the case. He was instructed to tell the court if the Cardsharps in the Kimbell is an original, if the Mahon version is an original or a copy and, if original, whether it was painted by Caravaggio. As a result, a question that has been much debated by scholars – whether or not Caravaggio made replicas of his own paintings – ended up becoming a judicial matter.

The art world has become a point of contention within a range of debates and yet, strangely enough, while art criticism has been discussed at length, very little is said about art critics. Following in the footsteps of Lionello Venturi’s History of Art Criticism, in the current volume Lorente provides an updated reassessment of the great art critics from the Enlightenment down to the turn of the millennium. Conceived as a didactic handbook with a recommended bibliography at the end of each chapter, this concise work tells the history of a profession in permanent crisis, while also paying homage to its most influential practitioners in different cultural contexts.

The present volume shows the archaeological thinking as a form of art, revealing the poetics of the archaeological imagination. It shows that, in their work, archaeologists, without being inspired by contemporary artists, use creative methods, and their analysis of the art of the Past goes beyond the material culture of the art objects, into the realm of the mental processes of creation. Consequently, the purpose of this book is to present the archaeological research functioning as a sort of artistic creation, proposing new perspectives on the archaeological imagination. It offers an exploration of the creative processes, the possibility of finding inspiration in experientiality, and the approach to the act of creation as a subject for archaeological research. When analysing the art of the Past, or when using art methods to approach the Past, we are facing an act of creation where imagination, emotion, and creativity combine under the form of an experiential instrument of investigation. The book offers a vision of archaeological research, a means to understand the complexity of the human nature, and consequently, to approach the human thinking structured on similarity and symbolism, being able to detect cultural and psychological subjects ignored until today, and, at the same time, to offer a series of visions of art, seen from the perspective of archaeology.

Founded as a sovereign Commonwealth in 1901, a dominion in the British Empire, Australia set out immediately to present itself to the world as a nation with a great future. This book relates the untold story of how Australia’s first diplomatic mission was conceived, designed and built. Its international showcase was to be Australia House, a splendid purpose-built building at the Aldwych in the very heart of London, the Imperial capital, and of world trade and prosperity. Commenced in 1913, Australia House was opened in 1918 while the Great War still raged. It is a story of ambitions and achievements – global, imperial, local and personal. ‘This meticulous and engaging study, remarkable for the depth and breadth of its scholarship, shows that the new Federation’s projection of its growing national pride and self-assurance via an imposing stone building was also part of the quest to make of London a city that fully expressed the ambition, achievement and grandeur of empire.’ Frank Bongiorno FRHistS FASSA, Professor of History, Australian National University ‘The story of the building [of Australia House] and the wider context of the Holburn to Strand improvements at Aldwych of which it formed part is here brilliantly told.’ David M. Walker, Dictionary of Scottish Architects