Cultural History

Cooler and harder than glass, but softer than a diamond: rock crystal has always been regarded as an unusual material. Countless legends have grown up around its origins and its remarkable strengths. At the latest since Antiquity, rock crystal has played an important part as a remedy, for fortune-telling, in the Church and at courtly banquets. Breathtaking artworks have been assembled in this publication.

The significance of the street is complex: it is a place of representation, self-dramatisation and communication, of resistance and protest. In this lavishly illustrated volume we encounter the bandwidth of this highly topical subject and its implementation in painting, graphics, photography, film, performance and installation during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Sculpture is just a word, an English word, which elicits an image in the mind’s eye. Sculpture is a European idea. In China, on the other hand, statues, stele, and other figural objects were made for millennia without being thought of as Sculpture. There was no Sculpture in China. "Imagining Sculpture" is the story of this something that did not exist.

Important artists of Hungarian Classical Modernism lived and worked temporarily on the banks of the Spree and were present in the Berlin avant-garde. The publication presents a brilliant overview of the close links between the culture of the Weimar Republic and the creative forces of Hungary, which ended with the seizure of power by the National Socialists.

Johann Gottfried Schadow’s "Princess group" has gone down in the annals of art history. As the first statue of two female historical personalities it testifies to the innovation, enormous artistry and productivity of sculpture workshops in the 19th century – a symbol of the important sculpture of German Classicism.

In 1991, the town of Pulheim initiated the Stommeln Synagogue art project, a permanent process of examination of this historically significant location. Since then it has continued to make a contribution to a culture of remembrance. A wide-ranging overview of remarkable works is being assembled on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the synagogue.

How and why did painters centre sensory experience, enchanting emotions and cultural landscapes in South Asia? "A Splendid Land" is the first book to address this question through dazzling paintings made over a period of two hundred years that extends from Mughal to colonial India. The works have never been published or exhibited in the United States.

Kabul was once famous for being a city of blossoming gardens. Today our perception of the Afghan capital is dominated by images of suffering and destruction. Considering Kabul’s gardens as part of its cultural heritage, Afghan and non-Afghan artists reflect on a different Kabul, without ignoring the crises of the past and present.

With the help of scholars, historians and artists, and through a range of diverse media, this book sets out to follow in the footsteps of Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) retracing his movements during the famous Hijrah ‘migration’, from Makkah to the oasis town of Yathrib, soon to become Madinat an-Nabi, the “City of the Prophet”.

Kubra Khademi (b. 1989) lives in Paris and focuses in her work on her life as a woman and a person with direct experience as a refugee. This makes it both political and highly topical. Multi-faceted themes pervade her art, including her function as a mouthpiece and as an element in the fight for the fundamental rights of women, as well as artistic work in exile and in a Muslim society.