Cultural History

Louis Alphonse Poitevin was an outstanding inventor, chemist, engineer, scientist, artist and photographer. This publication provides a unique opportunity to cast a wide-ranging gaze at the life and work of the famous pioneer of photography on the basis of a large number of photographs and the results of the latest research.

Starting with Helmar Lerski’s outstanding photo series "Metamorphosis through Light" from 1935/36, the magnificent volume "Faces – The Power of the Human Visage" presents portraits from the era of the Weimar Republic. The photographs taken by the photographers of the 1920s and 1930s achieved a radical renewal of portrait photography.

"The Art of Orientation" explores the mosque through 125 artefacts from across the Islamic world. It employs an original and contemporary approach by incorporating essays by leading Arab and international authors, which provide a fresh interpretation of the cultural history behind the shown objects by interweaving concepts, histories and ideas.

“I was thrilled”, was Andy Warhol’s enthusiastic reaction to the pictures of Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944). Many of the elements of her work inspired his Pop Art. During Stettheimer’s life her sensuous and ironic paintings with their numerous figures were valued highly by artists and curators, although the general public remained largely unaware of their merits. Only after her death did her close friend Marcel Duchamp organise a retrospective in the Museum of ...

Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred examines a fascinating tradition long overlooked by art historians – stone surfaces used to create stunning portraits, mythological scenes, and sacred images. Written by an international team of scholars, the catalogue reveals the significance of these paintings, their complex meanings, and their technical virtuosity.

The Dresden artist Max Uhlig (*1937) created one of the greatest window cycles of contemporary art for the Gothic Church of Saint John in Magdeburg. Vines and coloured foliage together with lines in expressive rhythms which are a revelation in their incisiveness, fill a window area of some 350 square metres with colours and immerse the interior of the church in light.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is one of the outstanding representatives of the New Building. He achieved legendary fame as the director of the Bauhaus in Berlin and as a teacher at the IIT in Chicago. The pavilion built at the World Exhibition in Barcelona in 1929 and the Haus Tugendhat in Brno, completed one year later, became incunabula of Modernism.

How can you paint colour? That is the question which the Munich artist Isabelle Dyckerhoff asks herself anew before every picture. The material presence of colour, its expressive power and spatial effect are characteristic for her works on canvas and paper, which are presented together in this volume for book lovers.

The Bauhaus master Johannes Itten is one of the prominent protagonists of early Modernism in twentieth-century art. Few people are aware of the close links between his beginnings as an artist and his experience of landscape and nature in the town of Thun and Lake Thun.

The book synthesizes research in history, fashion, art and visual culture to reassess the hair story of peoples of African descent. Long a fraught topic for African Americans and others in the diaspora, Black hair is here addressed by artists, barbers and activists in both its historical perceptions and its ramifications for self and society today.