"Vivere a Firenze", edito da Marsilio Arte, è un racconto inedito di Firenze che nasce dall'amore per la tutela dei suoi luoghi e dalla volontà di offrire uno sguardo intimo e originale sulla bellezza e la sapienza secolare delle botteghe artigiane cittadine, che fanno del capoluogo toscano una delle città più ammirate al mondo. Gli splendidi scorci, i minuziosi dettagli dell'arredo, le inquadrature, la cura e l'attenzione nel raccontare e descrivere l'opulenza e la raffinatezza delle dimore fiorentine, sono solo alcuni degli elementi che l'autrice Livia Frescobaldi ha selezionato per tracciare un itinerario alla scoperta dei suoi luoghi del cuore. Attraverso la fotografia di Alessandro Moggi e Eugenia Maffei, il volume incarna lo spirito di un affresco dagli infiniti scenari, i cui protagonisti sono gli eredi di una storia millenaria, in un difficile equilibrio tra modernità e tradizione. Sedici sezioni per sedici dimore - tra palazzi, giardini ed ex conventi - ciascuno dei quali legato ad uno specifico mestiere artigianale: il primo binomio raccontato è quello tra Palazzo Frescobaldi e l'Antico Setificio Fiorentino, il cui connubio è reso indissolubile dalla stoffa personalizzata Frescobaldi in produzione da tempi immemorabili. "Vivere a Firenze", oltre ad essere specchio della ricchezza architettonica e artistica fiorentina, è proprio un atto d'amore verso quelle figure professionali che, come sostiene Leonardo Ferragamo nel suo saggio introduttivo, «continuano a creare la storia del futuro con la loro ingegnosa, perseverante e dedicata passione». Arricchito dalle introduzioni di Eugenio Giani, Presidente della Regione Toscana, e Bernabò Bocca, Presidente della Fondazione CR Firenze, la pubblicazione reclama l'unicità e la storicità di una città, Firenze, che gelosamente custodisce i mestieri d'arte e le botteghe artigiane, i palazzi noti e quelli più nascosti, i giardini e gli spazi dedicati all'epoca contemporanea. Un itinerario pensato per chi vuole vivere Firenze, oltre che visitarla.
Il catalogo Caravaggio 2025, edito da Marsilio Arte e curato da Francesca Cappelletti e Maria Cristina Terzaghi, accompagna l'omonima mostra allestita a Palazzo Barberini dalle Gallerie Nazionali d'Arte Antica in collaborazione con Galleria Borghese (7 marzo - 6 luglio 2025), un progetto tra i più importanti e ambiziosi dedicati a Michelangelo Merisi detto Caravaggio (1571-1610). Riunendo alcune delle opere più celebri, l'esposizione vuole offrire una nuova e approfondita riflessione sulla rivoluzione artistica e culturale di Caravaggio, esplorando per la prima volta in un contesto così ampio l'innovazione che introdusse nel panorama culturale, religioso e sociale del suo tempo. Il volume illustra gli snodi biografici e gli sviluppi dello stile dell'artista attraverso saggi redatti da studiosi che, in ambito internazionale, hanno maggiormente lavorato su questi temi. Il catalogo si apre con il saggio di Keith Christiansen che traccia la parabola artistica del grande maestro, mentre i contributi delle due curatrici, Maria Cristina Terzaghi e Francesca Cappelletti, si concentrano sull'arrivo del grande maestro a Roma e sul collezionismo delle sue opere da parte delle grandi famiglie romane. Giuseppe Porzio ripercorre gli anni meridionali dell'artista, tra Napoli, Malta e la Sicilia; Alessandro Zaccuri propone una riflessione sul legame di Caravaggio con la spiritualità del suo tempo; Gianni Papi affronta uno degli argomenti più dibattuti, ovvero la ritrattistica - vera o presunta - del Merisi; Francesca Curti presenta, a partire da documenti d'epoca, le figure femminili ritratte dall'artista; Claudio Strinati e Stefano Causa affrontano un excursus storico delle mostre dedicate a Caravaggio e la sua fortuna critica, a partire dalla famosa mostra di Milano del 1951 che di fatto fa riscoprire l'artista dopo secoli di oblio; chiude Rossella Vodret con un'attenta analisi sulla tecnica esecutiva dell'artista. Le opere in mostra - ventiquattro e tutte di mano del Merisi - vengono analizzate attraverso schede dettagliate e approfondite che danno conto dei principali problemi critici, attributivi e di datazione. L'intero catalogo è illustrato con ricchezza di dettagli e le immagini coprono quasi interamente la produzione del maestro; completa il volume un'ampia bibliografia.
The first-ever English translation of Bruno Munari's classic treatise on creativity, replete with new contextualizing annotations.
"But isn't imagination also fantasy? And can't fantastic images also assume the form of sounds? Musicians speak of sonic images, sound objects. How does one invent a fish tale, an air-cooled engine, a new plastic? ... fantasy, invention, creativity think; imagination sees."
Never before translated into English, Bruno Munari's Fantasy, originally published in Italian in 1977, invites the reader to explore their own imagination, creativity and fantasy through a journey into Munari's mind and work. His theory of creativity, developed in conversation with the Reggio Emilia Approach (a self-guided approach to education) and the work of Jean Piaget (a Swiss developmental psychologist who proffered a theory termed "genetic epistemology") foregrounds the book's journey through Munari's design processes, both working for clients and teaching design principles to children. By turning both life and work into a classroom, Munari unlocks a path through imagination in order to access his, and in turn the reader's, deepest sense of play.
The facsimile reprint is accompanied by new contextual annotations by Munari scholar and design historian Jeffrey Schnapp. These microinterventions highlight the innovations that make this work as relevant today as when originally published.
Bruno Munari (1907-98) was an Italian artist, designer and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in Modernism, Futurism and Concrete art, as well as to nonvisual arts (literature, poetry) through his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning and creativity.
Roger Excoffon (1910-83) was an iconic French designer, painter and philosopher, best known for his typeface designs. This volume celebrates the beloved designer's oeuvre through a selection of his foundry specimens, which were slim but exquisitely designed booklets published to accompany the introduction of a new typeface. Taken from the impressive collection at Letterform Archive, these rare foundry specimens offer insight into the making and uses of such historic type designs. Type by Roger Excoffon reproduces these specimens as facsimilles bound together in a trifold hardcover portfolio and includes an additional interior pocket housing smaller booklets.
Using the painter's queer identity as a framework to understand his visceral approach to figuration
Francis Bacon is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century, best known for his distinctive way of portraying human figures. Especially in his male portraits and nudes, the physicality of the body--skin, flesh, muscles--is translated by the artist into thick, oily textures, giving the figures almost abstract shapes. Flashes of teeth, torsos and rib cages underscore Bacon's visceral philosophy regarding the human form. As the artist famously said: "We are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it is surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal."
Beyond their carnal overtones, these paintings unite a wide variety of influences, revisiting canonical themes and combining references to the great masters of painting with Bacon's own perceptions of the male body. Both his biography and oeuvre were permeated by the presence of his lovers, with whom he established intense and turbulent relationships. Francis Bacon: The Beauty of Meat accompanies the 2024 exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, exploring the queer aspects of the artist's work and highlighting how Bacon, with his innovative and impactful painting, paved the way for queer presence in visual culture.
Born in Ireland, British painter Francis Bacon (1909-92) worked in furniture design and interior decoration until 1945, when his career as a painter took off. He enjoyed colossal success in his lifetime, especially as part of a London cohort that included such contemporaries as Lucian Freud and John Deakin.
The luminous and radical dance performances of Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) at the turn of the 20th century were unlike anything that had ever been staged before. In her Serpentine Dance, she wore a large, diaphanous gown she manipulated with her arms to form undulating waves, while colored lights projected onto the fabric gave the illusion of birds, animals or flowers. While her profound influence on writers and artists such as Mallarmé and Rodin is well documented, less well known is Fuller's passion for technology and her involvement with the leading scientists of the time.
Lecture on Radium spotlights Fuller's scientific forays in her own words alongside an array of archival documents and photographs of the dancer in action. The centerpiece of the book is her 1907 lecture on the invention of radium, her notes on meeting Marie and Pierre Curie and Thomas Alva Edison, and her literally explosive efforts to create a glow-in-the-dark dance performance. Featuring an introduction by renowned cinema scholar Tom Gunning, this book presents Fuller's eccentric passions and pioneering pursuits in a fresh light.
Plus de 300 nouvelles oeuvres de Letizia Battaglia (née en 1935), l'un des photographes les plus célèbres d'Italie, sont rassemblées dans cette nouvelle enquête majeure couvrant l'ensemble de ses 30 ans de carrière. Dans des photographies et des planches contact provenant des archives de Battaglia, le livre propose une synthèse complète du modèle engagé de son travail, illustré par ses représentations emblématiques de manifestations politiques et de meurtres de mafias dans sa ville natale de Palerme en Sicile, prises pendant que Battaglia était employée comme photographe.
"In book form, Kitchen Table is more intimate.... Unlike the experience of meandering through a museum, stepping back to appreciate the images and nearing the text panels to skim them, the pace of exploration is now in a person's hands." -Hilary Moss, New York Times This publication is dedicated solely to the early and canonical body of work by American artist Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953). The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman's life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships--with lovers, children, friends--and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude.
As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts "the battle around the family ... monogamy ... and between the sexes.G6 Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. Kitchen Table Series seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist's words, "unrequited love."
Edition anglaise : L'extraordinaire auteur et illustrateur de livres pour enfants, Dario Cestaro (né en 1971), présente la beauté de Paris à travers l'architecture spectaculaire en papier d'un livre pop-up.Cestaro emmène les lecteurs jeunes - et les moins jeunes - dans un fascinant voyage à travers les bâtiments les plus célèbres de Paris: la Tour Eiffel, la Bourse de Commerce, le Louvre, la cathédrale Notre-Dame, le Centre Pompidou et l'Arc de Triomphe. Cette visite animée des pages colorées de Cestaro est animée par de courts textes et de douces anecdotes qui racontent l'histoire de la ville à travers ses bâtiments les plus emblématiques. Les lecteurs découvriront la construction de la tour Eiffel pour l'exposition universelle de 1889, conçue par le célèbre «architecte du fer», qui lui a donné son nom; les histoires pré et post-révolutionnaires du Louvre et du jardin des Tuileries, données d'abord aux princes, puis au peuple; La restauration minutieuse de la Bourse de commerce du XVIIIe siècle par Tadao Ando pour en faire une galerie d'art contemporain, et bien plus encore
Replete with complexities, abjection, beauty and joy, Women Painting Women offers new ways to imagine the portrayal of women, from Alice Neel to Jordan Casteel.
A thematic exploration of nearly 50 female artists who choose women as subject matter in their works, Women Painting Women includes nearly 50 portraits that span the 1960s to the present. International in scope, the book recognizes female perspectives that have been underrepresented in the history of postwar figuration. Painting is the focus, as traditionally it has been a privileged medium for portraiture, particularly for white male artists. The artists here use painting and women as subject matter and as vehicles for change. They range from early trailblazers such as Emma Amos and Alice Neel to emerging artists such as Jordan Casteel, Somaya Critchlow and Apolonia Sokol. All place women--their bodies, gestures and individuality--at the forefront.
The pivotal narrative in Women Painting Women is how the artists included use the conventional portrait of a woman as a catalyst to tell another story outside of male interpretations of the female body. They conceive new ways to activate and elaborate on the portrayal of women by exploring themes of the Body, Nature Personified, Selfhood and Color as Portrait. Replete with complexities, realness, abjection, beauty, complications, everydayness and joy, the portraits in this volume make way for women artists to share the stage with their male counterparts in defining the image of woman and how it has evolved.
Artists include: Rita Ackermann, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Emma Amos, María Berrío, Louise Bonnet, Lisa Brice, Joan Brown, Jordan Casteel, Somaya Critchlow, Kim Dingle, Marlene Dumas, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Nicole Eisenman, Tracey Emin, Natalie Frank, Hope Gangloff, Eunice Golden, Jenna Gribbon, Alex Heilbron, Ania Hobson, Luchita Hurtado, Chantal Joffe, Hayv Kahraman, Maria Lassnig, Christiane Lyons, Danielle Mckinney, Marilyn Minter, Alice Neel, Elizabeth Peyton, Paula Rego, Faith Ringgold, Deborah Roberts, Susan Rothenberg, Jenny Saville, Dana Schutz, Joan Semmel, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Arpita Singh, Sylvia Sleigh, Apolonia Sokol, May Stevens, Claire Tabouret, Mickalene Thomas, Nicola Tyson and Lisa Yuskavage.
Inventor, designer, artist and musician Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) devoted his life to the creation of a new art form-"Lumia," or the art of light. He invented his own version of a color organ (a term he disliked) and dubbed it the Clavilux, from the Latin meaning "light played by key." After a successful international tour in the 1920s, Wilfred reinvented these large-scale performances as self-enclosed light shows for domestic entertainment. While they enjoyed a short commercial life, Wilfred's aesthetically elegant and interactive Clavilux and Lumia home models soon found their way into storied collections. His work was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1952 exhibition 15 Americans, where it was seen by many artists who would work with light as their medium in the 1960s and '70s.
Clavilux and Lumia Home Models presents a stimulating collection of archival material culled from the Wilfred archive at Yale University and other sources, including Wilfred's never-before-published sketches.
Published by leading outsider art imprint Raw Vision, Singular Spaces is a groundbreaking survey of art environments created by self-taught artists from across Spain. The book introduces and examines 45 artists and their idiosyncratic sculptures, gardens and buildings, most of which have never been published. The sites are developed organically, without formal architectural or engineering plans; they are at once evolving and complete. Often highly fanciful and quixotic, the work is frequently characterized by incongruous juxtapositions, an approach that appears impulsive and spontaneous. Director of the organization SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments), Jo Farb Hernández, combines detailed case studies of the artists and their work with contextualized historical and theoretical references to art history, anthropology, architecture, Spanish area studies and folklore. Breaking down the standard compartmentalization of genres, she reveals how most creators of art environments, who are building within their own personal spaces, fuse their creations with their daily lives.
A visually immersive exploration of the provocative and humanistic themes at the heart of Almodóvar's cinema.
Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most daring and influential writer-directors of our time. He directed his first feature in 1980, during La Movida Madrileña (the Madrid Scene), a countercultural and democratic movement in Spain, and has been pushing boundaries for over four decades. Often outlandish and provocative, and rife with passion, Almodóvar's 22 films to date explore the full spectrum of the human condition. In the process, they have transformed Spanish cinema and contributed invaluably to the global film scene.
Pedro Almodóvar: Installation/Instalación accompanies an immersive exhibition created by Almodóvar for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Spanning 1984's What Have I Done to Deserve This? to 2019's Pain and Glory, Almodóvar's 12-channel film installation distills his filmography around iconic scenes and key themes including Family, Bodies, Guilt and Pain, Mothers, Musicals, Noir and Religious Education. This lush volume devotes a visual chapter to each, showcasing Almodóvar's muses--including Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas, Pina Bausch, Penélope Cruz, Rossy de Palma, Marisa Paredes and Julieta Serrano--and the inspiration he draws from filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Luis Buñuel.
The bilingual (Spanish and English) book also features a new conversation between Almodóvar and film journalist Rachel Handler, an introduction by Tilda Swinton, a preface by curator Jenny He, texts by curator J. Raúl Guzmán and Agustín Almodóvar, and a richly illustrated filmography. As bold and beautiful as Almodóvar's films themselves, Pedro Almodóvar: Installation/Instalación captures the dynamic female characters, tantalizing stories, colorful humor and depth of emotion that exemplify this Academy Award-winning director's career.
In winter 2018, Gregg Bordowitz performed a three-part lecture series at the New Museum as part of Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. Each evening, he explored an avatar of masculinity that was formative to him as he came of age as an outer-borough child of Jewish immigrants, then as an artist-activist in Manhattan at the dawn of the AIDS crisis: the rock star, the rabbi and the comedian. He merged personal and political history, ribald humor and social criticism, performer and persona.Some Styles of Masculinity is a self-portrait and an essay on upheaval and plague, based on transcripts of the eponymous series, which Bordowitz has reimagined for the page. He asserts that gender cant be separated from ethnicity, sexuality, class or nationality, and he connects these aspects of himself through personal anecdotes as well as reflections on whiteness, diaspora, comedy and Jewish mysticism. Some Styles of Masculinity evokes David Antins talk poems, Maggie Nelsons autotheory, David Frances How to Survive a Plague and Wayne Koestenbaums casually erudite criticism. This book is a winding, intimate, urgent, freewheeling account of thinking and enduring in difficult times.Gregg Bordowitz (born 1964) is the author of Glenn Ligon: Untitled (I Am a Man) (2018), General Idea: Imagevirus (Afterall Books, 2010) and The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003 (2004). He was an early participant in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), where he cofounded several video collectives.
«Wool pictures» from a Brazilian folk artist known for her intricate and figurative tapestries.
Brazilian artist Madalena Santos Reinbolt (1919-77) was known for her «wool pictures,» intricately embroidered tapestries evoking scenes and characters from her agropastoral past in the countryside of Bahia. This volume accompanies her posthumous solo show at MASP.
The Canadians réinvente de manière ludique et affectueuse l'un des livres de photographie les plus vénérés du XXe siècle, The Americans de Robert Frank. Les images sont tirées des archives imprimées du Globe and Mail, qui contiennent plus de 500 000 tirages, dont 24 000 ont été donnés au nouvel Institut canadien de la photographie, situé au Musée des beaux-arts du Canada.
The first ever overview of Pfeiffer's lively artistic output across mediums from the 1960s to the present, from A to Z
Inspired by the illustrated alphabets found in abecedariums, this new book on Walter Pfeiffer (born 1946) presents playful and illuminating insights into the Swiss artist's practice from A to Z, annotated by Pfeiffer himself. The book also features new texts reflecting on five decades of Pfeiffer's artistic output from an international group of curators, critics and writers. At once a meticulously crafted artist's book and a comprehensive monograph, Walter Pfeiffer demonstrates the artist's sustained commitment to exquisite, innovative publications.
This book is part of Swiss Institute's newly redesigned SI Series. Each book in the SI Series adds context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts.
This book was published in conjunction with Pacific
One of Canada's most renowned artists, interdisciplinary Cree artist Kent Monkman challenges the art historical narrative of settler cultures that colonized First Peoples from North America. He incorporates influences from the canon of European and Euro-American painting, reframing historical, contemporary and speculative future Indigenous experiences. Taking inspiration from Western artists such as George Catlin, as well as from the Old Masters, Monkman's monumental history paintings feature white colonizers in violent conflict with Indigenous people. The depictions range from early colonial encounters to modern and contemporary clashes between Indigenous communities and uniformed police or clergy. In borrowing the visual language of his oppressors, Monkman reclaims the narrative written by Western art history about the brutalization and cultural genocide carried out against Indigenous North American communities.
History is Painted by the Victors accompanies the artist's first major exhibition in the United States. The catalog gathers rich analysis of Monkman's art from prominent scholars, expanding our understanding of his oeuvre and offering new insight via queer theory, historical and contemporary contexts, visual analysis and lived experience.
This book was published in conjunction with Denver Art Museum; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Nouvel opus dans la collection 2000 Words, éditér par la fondation DESTE pour l'art contemporain : il s'agit ici d'une monoraphie générale sur Maurizio Cattelan, la grande star de l'art contemporain subversif.
L'artiste américain James Lee Byars (1932-1997) combinait des motifs issus des cultures orientales, comme le théâtre Nô et le bouddhisme zen, avec les idéologies propres à la philosophie occidentale. Publié à l'occasion de l'exposition organisée au Pirelli HangarBicocca de Milan, ce catalogue présente une large sélection d'oeuvres emblématiques mêlant formes géométriques et matériaux précieux comme le marbre, le velours, le bois précieux et la feuille d'or. Il explore la pratique de l'artiste sous différents angles à travers les contributions de la chercheuse Sarah Kislingbury, des commissaires Jordan Carter et Alexandra Munroe et de l'historien de l'art Shinobu Sakagami.
The first publication in English on the career of Czech graphic designer and typographer Clara Istlerová
Clara Istlerová (born 1944) was one of few female designers in the male-dominated field of Czech typography. Born into an artistic family, she studied under Frantisek Muzika at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. Working entirely in analog processes, she created the design for one of the most influential books on Czech architecture, Svácha, Rostislav: From Modernity to Functionalism (1985). Offering a vivid portrayal of an era where design was a tangible, labor-intensive endeavor carried out in close collaboration with typesetters and printers, A Life Among Letters unveils the artistic landscape of former Czechoslovakia through the lens of a trailblazing designer. It features an intimate interview with Istlerová conducted by Anezka Minaríková, accompanied by work from Istlerová's personal archive and a description of her creative process in her own words.
Presenting the richness of Tibetan Buddhist imagery, this magnificent collection explores key concepts and figures in Tibetan Buddhist artwork.
For centuries, Tibetan Buddhists have engaged with artworks as objects of veneration, guides for meditation, and tools for teaching. The awakened mind of the Buddha is embodied in the forms of Tibetan Buddhist visual culture.
Jack Shear is a photographer and president of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.
