art

Published in 1989 by Trio, Secrets of Ancient Gold is a translation of Christiane Eluère’s Secrets de l’or Antique. Rich in color and black-and-white photographs and illustrations, Secrets is an accessible introduction which delves into the history of art created in gold, the artists who worked with it, and the methods they used. A French historian specializing in Celtic metalwork, Eluère currently works for the Museum of National Antiquities in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

This stunning book is the first comprehensive publication on the internationally renowned Cuban American artist Teresita Fernández. The idea of wayfinding—moving from place to place or even getting lost—is critical to understanding this artist’s body of work, which revolves around themes of landscape, the night sky, and other environments. "We have a tendency to think of landscape as something outside ourselves, and that’s a notion that I want to invert," Fernández states.

Gold Rush: Contemporary Art Made From, With or About Gold is an exhibition catalogue published to accompany the exhibit of the same title, which was featured at Kunsthalle Nürnburg (October 18, 2012 to January 13, 2013) and at Villa Merkel, Galerien der Stadt Esslingen am Neckar (February 17 to April 14, 2013), in Germany. The show explored the appearance of gold in the recent works of 18 international artists, including Joseph Beuys, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Daniel Knorr, Kris Martin, Jonathan Monk, and Claudia Wieser.

This exhibition catalog explores the 2010 monumental work Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, created by internationally acclaimed contemporary Chinese artist and social activist Ai Weiwei. The work is a reimagining of a Qing dynasty zodiac water-clock system at the Old Summer Palace near Beijing, which was looted in 1850 during the Second Opium War. Ai reinterpreted the original fountainheads in a gold series and a bronze series, as his first monumental public art installation.

Whether romantic farces in black-and-white or western epics in Technicolor, movies from Hollywood's golden age were introduced to the world by entrancing posters. The Lost Artwork of Hollywood is a tribute to the illustrators and artists who created posters and other promotional materials to spark the imagination of the public. Focusing on movies of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the book contains over 100 images from film promotional materials, many of them full-page reproductions.

Les Arts au Moyen Age et a l'Epoque de la Renaissance (The Arts in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance) features chromolithographic plates and over 400 woodcuts. What truly makes this edition stand out is its elaborate use of gilt stamping. The red book cover is dotted and outlined with gold script, matching the bow-like design on the spine. Instead of the typical marbled paper, the book's inside covers feature a zig-zag pattern of black and gold lines, with designs of flowers, tassels, and letters in contrasting colors.

Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie...Imagine those blackbirds popping out at you! The Pop-Up Mother Goose includes surprises on every page. Author Harold Lentz was a commercial artist who delved into the world of book publication in the 1930s, when he designed a series of colorful fairy tales, incorporating imaginative drawings and paper engineering. Lentz and his publisher were the first to coin the term "pop-up" to describe their surprising design. Produced and sold during the Great Depression, these imaginative books provided readers a joyful distraction.

One of the best-known artists of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet, and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Picasso is often remembered for his cubist paintings, but he continued to experiment with new styles and materials throughout his life. During the 1950s and 1960s, Picasso commissioned Francois Hugo, great-grandson of French writer Victor Hugo, to execute a series of plates, dishes, and medallions in gold and silver. The plates were modeled after Picasso’s original ceramics designs.

"The skull is out of this world, celestial almost. I tend to see it as a glorious intense victory over death," writes art historian Rudi Fuchs in this creative guide to the making of British artist Damien Hirst’s sculpture For the Love of God, a platinum cast of an 18th-century skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds and produced at a cost of £14 million. The catalog is a companion publication to the 2007 exhibition “Damien Hirst: Beyond Belief,” at London’s White Cube, where the skull made its debut.

Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, sculptor, draughtsman, and printmaker. At the age of 79, Braque turned his attention to jewelry. He teamed up with master jeweler Baron Heger de Löwenfeld to turn 110 gouache maquettes into intricately textured gold sculptures inlaid with precious stones. The collection, inspired by Greek mythology, incorporates themes of flight and metamorphosis. The two artists worked so closely together that Braque referred to De Löwenfeld as the “continuation of my hand.”

Liza Lou, an American artist and winner of a 2002 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, is known for her large-scale sculptures and environments made from glass beads. Lou’s brightly colored sculptures create tension between the sparkling beauty of their surfaces and their frequently dark themes, suggesting that America’s polished, projected image belies the nation’s underlying turmoil.

Lawrence Weiner is a conceptual artist who has used language as his primary medium since 1968, when he concluded that viewers could experience the same effect from reading a verbal description of his work as they could from viewing the work itself. Since that point, he has been best-known for his word sculptures—short poems and witticisms applied to walls in plain lettering, always translated into the language of the country in which they are shown. In 1995, the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp commissioned Weiner to create a work for its permanent collection.

Whether through direct influences or broader affinities, African, Pre-Columbian, and Indigenous American objects undoubtedly informed the practice of Western artists throughout the 20th century. This catalog, from the inaugural show at New York’s Pace Primitive Gallery, juxtaposes body objects from African, Pre-Columbian, and Indigenous American cultures with jewelry by Alexander Calder, Ernest Trova, Louise Nevelson, and Pablo Picasso.

The works of Lucas Samaras can be understood through one unifying principle: the artist’s “natural instinct for subversion.” Rather than springing from an urge to rebel, however, Samaras’ originality and nonconformity are centered in treating art as a mutable subject. Samaras spent two years crafting gold jewelry, modeling them first in chicken wire, then casting them in solid 22-karat gold.

In 2001, British artist Jeremy Deller received a residency from the CCAC Wattis Institute in San Francisco. He applied his honorarium toward a used Jeep and five acres of land in the Mojave Desert for $2000, thereby staking his own claim upon the Golden State. His fellowship resulted in an unorthodox but compelling guidebook tracing California’s history from the 19th century mining boom to the post-dot-com recession, as found along its dusty highways and in its roadside museums.

The “objects” of American artist Man Ray’s affection were small, limited-edition sculptures.

Joseph H. Hirshhorn, founding donor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, was an avid collector and supporter of Picasso. The two became friends after being introduced by photographer Edward Steichen. The Hirshorn Library’s copy of Picasso, by art critic Jean Cassou, is inscribed in ink by Picasso on the half-title, “Pour Joe Hirshhorn, son ami Picasso, le 25-7-69,” and includes a full-page original Picasso sketch of a bearded man with curly hair and a wavy hat.

Joseph H. Hirshhorn, founding donor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, was an avid collector and supporter of Picasso. The two became friends after being introduced by photographer Edward Steichen. The original dark purple cloth publisher's binding of this monograph is embossed with a gold gilt facsimile of Picasso’s signature.

Joseph H. Hirshhorn, founding donor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, was an avid collector and supporter of Pablo Picasso. The two became friends after being introduced by photographer Edward Steichen.

Embroidery is an important art in China with examples found from as early as the Zhou Dynasty (1027–221 B.C.). One of the most well-known pieces of Chinese embroidery is a 10th century A.D. textile piece discovered in the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang. There are also fine pieces from the Song dynasty. Traditional embroidery is still practiced in many areas of China. The Chinese government has designated four schools of Chinese embroidery as Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The late-16th century was the golden age of Japanese screen painting, both literally and figuratively. The Momoyama period (1573-1615) was also an age of monumental architecture, with feudal lords building forts and castles of a size unprecedented in Japan. The great masters of the art of screen painting who were called upon to decorate the interiors of these large buildings filled them with screens of bold and innovative aesthetics, some with gold leaf covering their entire surfaces. Japan had a well-established tradition of incorporating gold leaf into art and decorative work.

The British Punitive Expedition against the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 spawned an outpouring of curiosity about this African kingdom, its stunning bronze sculpture (confiscated booty), and its tyrannical king. H. Long Roth’s Great Benin is one of the classic pieces of literature written about Benin. It is not a product of direct observation—the author never traveled in West Africa—but rather of careful research on eyewitness accounts and museum collections.

This charming binder served as the exhibition catalog for Man Ray’s second show at the Hanover Gallery in London (April-May 1969). The exhibition featured mid-career painting and sculpture from the 1940s and 50s, with clear stylistic references to Man Ray’s peers, such as De Chirico, Picabia, and Kandinsky. The metal ring binder is polished aluminum, silk-screened in bright red. The yellow-bordered pages include an essay by Man Ray, 17 illustrations (7 in full color), and a checklist.

Los Angeles-based video artist Doug Aitken is known for his multi-screen environments projected onto iconic buildings, including the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum in 2012. In the spring of 2007, Aitken premiered the video projection Sleepwalkers on seven facades of the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan. Four years later, Aitken partnered with Princeton Architectural Press and DFA Records to create a multimedia artist’s box based on Sleepwalkers.

Although black—the color that contains all colors—has been American sculptor Louise Nevelson’s signature color, the artist began incorporating white and gold into her work in the 1960s. This announcement for an exhibition of sculptures by Nevelson at The Pace Gallery, New York, October 23-November 28, 1992, reflects her limited palette. Reproductions of her assemblage sculptures are presented in three die-cut printed pop-ups, printed in silver and gold. Nevelson herself is pictured in a silver-printed portrait on the front cover. The entire elegant presentation is ribbon-tied.

This catalog was published in conjunction with the two-part exhibition “Paul McCarthy's Low Life Slow Life,” curated by the artist, which took place at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts on the San Francisco campus of California College of the Arts from 2008-2009. Packaged as a recreation of a vintage Tide detergent box circa 1973, this publication was designed by McCarthy to serve as an extension of the show and as an artwork in itself.

"'Yumechigae.' According to the dictionary, this means: A charm to divert misfortune after experiencing a nightmare." Thus opens the essay to this exquisite exhibition catalog for a solo show of Japanese artist Tabaimo’s work at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in the summer of 2003. Tabaimo is a contemporary Japanese artist whose immersive video installations evoke Japanese woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e), manga, and anime to express the anxieties underpinning Japanese society in an age of globalization.