Cultural History

"A Model Workshop" explores the understudied impact of Margaret Lowengrund (1902–1957) – a visionary leader, organiser and critic within the mid-twentieth century printmaking community – and the vibrant New York print workshop/gallery she founded, "The Contemporaries".

The circus presents a deliberate staging of attractive illusions, hard struggle, success and failure as part of human existence. The volume assembles works by international contemporary artists who make use of the motif of the circus in order to examine current social circumstances and to question cultural and political structures.

At the end of the 19th century the term “Secession” stood for the artistic beginnings of modernism. Art was surging forward towards freedom. Avant-garde artists showed their new creative works in the exhibitions of the Secession. In doing so they introduced innovative art movements to the public and helped Impressionism and Symbolism, for example, to achieve a breakthrough in the German-speaking region.

This lavishly illustrated publication presents essays that offer groundbreaking re-interpretations of American art through the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ impressive historical and modern collections. Texts by leading scholars focus on the significant contributions made by Black, women, and LGBTQ+ artists whose careers were nurtured at PAFA.

The creation of transnational art has become a matter of course in our globalised world. But what did the art produced by migrants in East Germany look like? The publication throws light on topics such as the cultural diplomacy of the GDR and its effects, the working conditions of contract workers and the taboo subject of racism.

Frida Kahlo has become an icon of art with her powerfully expressive work. Her pictures not only reflect a view of herself, her fears, the biography of her illness, her passions and her joie de vivre; they also take up subjects which were regarded by society as taboo. As a pioneer of the feminist movement, this Mexican artist serves women the world over as a figure of identification.

"Making and Meaning" features select works from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center of Vassar College, located in Poughkeepsie, New York. Through illustrated essays and entriesas well as poetry and a timeline, this book reveals the profound richness of a collection extending from antiquity to the present day.

Photographers Luigi Fieni and Kenneth Parker document the cultural revival of Tibetan Mustang “the hidden kingdom” of the Himalayas. A restoration project of its sacred temple murals directed by Luigi Fieni over more than 20 years has reawakened Buddhist traditions. Included is Mustang’s extraordinary landscape as well as the Lobas’ spiritual and secular way of life.

The contributions that have been assembled in this volume present the story of queer lives – from the first emancipation movements around the turn of the (last) century via attempts at self-empowerment in the Weimar Republic to the destruction of queer subcultures under the National Socialist regime and the continued discrimination of LGBTIQ* persons in the postwar period.

"Monuments and Myths" is the first publication to examine the intersecting careers of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, the leading American sculptors of the Gilded Age. With rich new thinking and stunning photographs, this catalogue examines the role of America’s most iconic public sculptures in the complex negotiation of national identity.