Photography

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.

The private art collection of the Hilti Art Foundation includes over 200 top-quality paintings, sculptures and photographs from Classical Modernism to the present day. Volume 2 of the two-part catalogue of the collection presents 120 selected works from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day, from Josef Albers to Thomas Struth.

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.

Charles Bukowski, the dirty old man of American literature whose poems and prose are closely interwoven with his life – how does one go about portraying a person like that? In 1985, the young photographer Abe Frajndlich took on this challenge. We can say this much: it was not a job that could be accomplished in one shot. The Shooting presents a photographer’s attempt to zero in on a legend.

Mary Bauermeister (*1934) is regarded as the “mother” of the Fluxus movement. During the 1960s she set out from the United States and conquered the art world with her lens boxes and stone spirals. Her works are represented in many major museums including MoMa and the  Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. This magnificent volume presents her artistic, enchanted studio not far from Cologne.

The political collages of John Heartfield (1891–1968) have earned him a reputation as one of the most innovative graphic artists of the Weimar Republic. His photomontages and book covers based on collages which had their origins in Berlin’s Dada scene were directed against Fascism and made him internationally famous. Their explosive power has lost none of its impact.

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), painter, photographer, Bauhaus teacher and founder of the “New Bauhaus” and the “School of Design” in Chicago, is one of the most important artist personalities of the modern age. As one of the first artists to work in multiple media, who practised painting, sculpture, photography, film and design as equally valid art genres, he set standards which are still relevant today.

The publication provides an overview of the fascinating work of the contemporary Dutch artist Juul Kraijer. Her monumental drawings, photographs, sculptures and video works sound out and dissolve the boundaries of the human body and show hybrid creatures between animal and human. 

Hopetoun House, on the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh, is the seat of the Marquess of Linlithgow. The lavishly illustrated book presents the architecture (initially designed by Sir William Bruce in the 1690s and greatly extended by William Adam and his sons from the 1720s), sumptuously decorated rooms and art collection, as well as the landscape and gardens.

Frida Kahlo was just one of them: between 1930 and the 1960s many more women artists contributed to the Surrealist movement than has hitherto been assumed. The male Surrealists surrounding André Breton mostly saw them only as partners or models, but this volume shows how much more these women artists had to offer.