Cultural History

During the 17th century, Amsterdam became one of the leading economic centres in Europe. The city and its population grew rapidly, trade and art flourished. The influential bourgeoisie shaped the fortunes of the city and confidently celebrated itself in magnificent group portraits by the city’s leading artists, first and foremost Rembrandt.

On the 300th anniversary of Kant’s birth, 2024: From the search for knowledge and a new kind of science to debates about religion, human equality and freedom of mankind, the demand for civil rights, mercantilism and cosmopolitanism – many issues that great thinkers of the Enlightenment dealt with are now fundamental to our society. And we are still striving for some goals.

Play Life Illusion – the retrospective in book form refers to the title of a performance which Xanti Schawinsky developed in 1936 with students at Black Mountain College. The Swiss artist who worked at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau emigrated in the 1930s via Italy to the United States. The volume assembles autobiographical texts and letters regarding the life’s work of the multimedial artist and designer.

The Romantic Era was a particularly splendid epoch in miniature portraiture. A host of artists created portraits of great sensitivity and remarkable technical perfection. 142 masterpieces from the famous Tansey Collection illustrate the golden age of an art which was forced to give way to photography during the 19th century.

"Gothic Modern" illuminates the pivotal discovery of medieval Gothic art for Edvard Munch, Käthe Kollwitz and their artist contemporaries. It explores their deep attraction to the Gothic art of Europe’s north and German lands via paintings, prints and in other artistic media to imagine a new ‘Gothic modernity’, unlocking a different energy of modern art and creative experiment beyond nation-centric stories.

"Gothic Modern" illuminates the pivotal discovery of medieval Gothic art for Edvard Munch, Käthe Kollwitz and their artist contemporaries. It explores their deep attraction to the Gothic art of Europe’s north and German lands via paintings, prints and in other artistic media to imagine a new ‘Gothic modernity’, unlocking a different energy of modern art and creative experiment beyond nation-centric stories.

"Narrative Wisdom and African Arts" explores how historical and contemporary African arts make visible narratives rooted in collective and individual memory and knowledge. Historical works made by artists across sub-Saharan Africa during the thirteenth to twentieth centuries dialogue with contemporary works by African artists working around the globe.

Over one thousand years old, the Buddhist monastery complex of Tabo with its exquisitely preserved works of art ranks among the most fascinating cultural and historical treasures of mankind. The new edition of this richly illustrated volume shows the beauty of  these legendary sanctuaries for the first time in the highest digital resolution and describes in detail the entire gamut of Western Tibetan artistic styles.

Green-Wood, founded in 1838, was a leader in the Rural Cemetery movement in America. Its 478 acres encompass magnificent grounds, grand architecture and world-class statuary. Throughout four seasons, Bethany Eden Jacobson’s book captures the spirit of this verdant, history-drenched pastoral cemetery.

This publication examines the Japanese artistic understanding of China from the late 1600s, Japan’s period of seclusion, to its age of modernization after the mid-nineteenth century. The volume focuses on the ways Japanese painters from the late 1600s to the twentieth century pictured China, both as a real place and an imagined promised land. It features three essays by renowned Japanese art historians in addition to more than fifty catalogue entries highlighting unusual artworks ...