Long anticipated and hugely welcome, Paul Holberton's A History of Arcadia is a close and thorough examination of a great number of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature and drama in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German and English, and of a wide range of visual imagery, ending just before 1800. The book analyses the development of pastoral as a means of representing human happiness on this earth in the requited wooing of girl and boy, to whose feelings early modern pastoral gives voice. This tremendous book is an iconographic study of Renaissance and Baroque pastoral and related subject matter, with an important chapter on the 18th century, both in the visual arts, where pastoral is very poorly understood, and in words and performance, about which many false preconceptions prevail. The study begins with Virgil's use of Theocritus and an analysis of what basis Virgil provided for Renaissance pastoral and what, by contrast, stemmed from the medieval pastourelle. Pastoral developed notably in the Venetian High Renaissance. Its texts incorporated Petrarchist and Neoplatonic ideas of love, of which this book charts the development and evolution with unprecedented precision, considering also the female nude in art. There is a novel and polemical discussion of the development of landscape subjects in art, from Giorgione to Claude. The contributions of the most influential or representative authors - Petrarch, Sannazaro, Montemayor, Tasso, Guarino, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Honoré d’Urfé, Cornelis de Hooft, Shakespeare and lastly Salomon Gessner - are considered beside many interesting more minor ones - Arsocchi, Bernardim Ribeiro, Clément Marot, Cieco d’Adria, John Fletcher, Fontenelle - and the verses of madrigals. There is a chapter on 'Being Rural' - what we can say about the reality of life in the country in the early modern period. There is a chapter on 'Et in Arcadia Ego' that introduces new evidence for the dating of Poussin’s famous work by reference to a neglected work by Sébastien Bourdon in Yale; another on a pastoral composition by Rubens that has not been considered as such. There is an important and bold discussion of self-projection ('metachronic' representation) by monarchs and courtiers across Europe in the 17th century, both within pastoral and without, which illuminates profound differences between Protestant and Catholic culture. Coming from the study of earlier periods, the author is able to throw new light on the Rococo - figures such as John Gay, Watteau, Gessner and Gainsborough - and to explain the termination of pastoral writing and art with the embrace of modernity in form and means of expression. All texts are given in the original language and all translated into English, while the visuals are beautifully reproduced: the book is also an anthology.

Long anticipated and hugely welcome, Paul Holberton's A History of Arcadia is a close and thorough examination of a great number of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature and drama in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German and English, and of a wide range of visual imagery, ending just before 1800. The book analyses the development of pastoral as a means of representing human happiness on this earth in the requited wooing of girl and boy, to whose feelings early modern pastoral gives voice. This tremendous book is an iconographic study of Renaissance and Baroque pastoral and related subject matter, with an important chapter on the 18th century, both in the visual arts, where pastoral is very poorly understood, and in words and performance, about which many false preconceptions prevail. The study begins with Virgil's use of Theocritus and an analysis of what basis Virgil provided for Renaissance pastoral and what, by contrast, stemmed from the medieval pastourelle. Pastoral developed notably in the Venetian High Renaissance. Its texts incorporated Petrarchist and Neoplatonic ideas of love, of which this book charts the development and evolution with unprecedented precision, considering also the female nude in art. There is a novel and polemical discussion of the development of landscape subjects in art, from Giorgione to Claude. The contributions of the most influential or representative authors - Petrarch, Sannazaro, Montemayor, Tasso, Guarino, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Honoré d’Urfé, Cornelis de Hooft, Shakespeare and lastly Salomon Gessner - are considered beside many interesting more minor ones - Arsocchi, Bernardim Ribeiro, Clément Marot, Cieco d’Adria, John Fletcher, Fontenelle - and the verses of madrigals. There is a chapter on 'Being Rural' - what we can say about the reality of life in the country in the early modern period. There is a chapter on 'Et in Arcadia Ego' that introduces new evidence for the dating of Poussin’s famous work by reference to a neglected work by Sébastien Bourdon in Yale; another on a pastoral composition by Rubens that has not been considered as such. There is an important and bold discussion of self-projection (‘metachronic’ representation) by monarchs and courtiers across Europe in the 17th century, both within pastoral and without, which illuminates profound differences between Protestant and Catholic culture. Coming from the study of earlier periods, the author is able to throw new light on the Rococo - figures such as John Gay, Watteau, Gessner and Gainsborough - and to explain the termination of pastoral writing and art with the embrace of modernity in form and means of expression. All texts are given in the original language and all translated into English, while the visuals are beautifully reproduced: the book is also an anthology.

In the 19th-century paradigm of architectural organicism, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Advances in scientific race theory enabled designers to think of 'race' and 'style' as manifestations of natural law: just as biological processes seemed to inherently regulate the racial characters that made humans a perfect fit for their geographical contexts, architectural characters became a rational product of design. Parallels between racial and architectural characters provided a rationalist model of design that fashioned some of the most influential national building styles of the past, from the pioneering concepts of French structural rationalism and German tectonic theory to the nationalist associations of the Chicago Style, the Prairie Style, and the International Style. In Building Character, Charles Davis traces the racial charge of the architectural writings of five modern theorists – Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Lescaze – to highlight the social, political, and historical significance of the spatial, structural, and ornamental elements of modern architectural styles.

Tony Birks was a prolific writer on art, particularly in British studio ceramics. This is the first publication to bring together his writings in a single volume. During the 1970s studio ceramic grew dramatically as a force on the international art scene. In Britain and America particularly, but also across Europe, practice flourished and powerful thinkers sought to define and describe what was happening. It was a dynamic and a controversial time, in which the nature of pottery showed itself capable of radical change. In the decades that followed this outburst, ceramic consolidated into a complex aesthetic and cultural discourse. Tony Birks was at the heart of this new wave of activity. A consummate writer and an artist himself, he supported what had happened in previous decades to generate a Modern ceramic art, and he championed the new generation blossoming around him. His publications provided crucial support to a discipline barely served by mainstream art history and criticism. He wrote monographs on major established figures, but he also had an extraordinarily perceptive eye for new talent, which served to bring attention to vibrant young artists. A number of these went on to become leading forces on the international scene. This book gathers together for the first time a comprehensive selection of Tony Birks's writing. A number of the essays are about the nature of ceramic practice, but the majority are about individual practitioners, among them are Bernard Leach, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Claudi Casanovas, Tony Hepburn, Andrew Lord, Ruth Duckworth and Takeshi Yasuda. Taken as a whole, the book is a window on the world of ceramic art at a crucial time in its growth - the issues and the personalities - opened for us by one of its most significant critical voices. The book also includes a catalogue of the ceramic works owned by Tony Birks that were gifted to the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia.

Ingenuity in the Making explores the myriad ways in which ingenuity shaped the experience, discourse and conceptualization of materials and their manipulation in early modern Europe. Contributions range widely across the arts and sciences, examining objects and texts, professions and performances, concepts and practices. The book considers subjects such as spirited matter, the conceits of nature, and crafty devices, investigating the ways in which wit acted in and upon the material world through skill and technique. Contributors ask how ingenuity informed the “maker’s knowledge” tradition, where the perilous borderline between the genius of invention and disingenuous fraud was drawn, and what were the ambitions of material ingenuity in a rapidly globalizing world.

Performance/Art explores the phenomenology of skilled performance, ranging from athletics to the performing arts, including music, dance and acting. Gallagher reviews a variety of studies concerning different degrees of mindful awareness operative in performance, and builds on the concept of a meshed architecture, suggesting ways to make it more complex and dynamic. He draws on ideas from enactivist embodied cognition about how different types of movement can be meaningful and intelligent and can scaffold learning and problem solving. He also explicates the notion of an empathic mindfulness in performance and develops the idea of a double attunement to explain aesthetic experience in performance, distinguishing the latter from aesthetic experience in the observer/ audience perspective.

This stunning catalogue presents for the first time an outstanding group of modern drawings by European and American masters, assembled by the late Howard Karshan and his wife, Linda, who recently presented the works to The Courtauld. Accompanying their exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, the catalogue features drawings by renowned artists including Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Sam Francis, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz. The Karshan gift is a significant addition to The Courtauld’s collection. The works demonstrate Howard and Linda Karshan's sensibility for the expressive power and rich variety of drawing as an art form. The drawings are characterised by innovative mark-making and distinctive use of line. Examples range from radical watercolours by Cézanne and highly expressive finger drawings in ink by Louis Soutter, to abstract compositions made by Henri Michaux whilst experimenting with Mescalin to explore the subconscious, and on to works by Twombly that further broadened the possibilities of draughtsmanship. The 25 drawings of the Karshan gift will be shown at The Courtauld Gallery when it reopens in late 2021, following a major transformation project. This catalogue will include an interview with Linda Karshan, two essays and a fully illustrated catalogue with detailed entries on each work.

Rhythm and Geometry: Constructivist art in Britain since 1951 celebrates the dynamic abstract and constructed art made and exhibited in Britain over a seventy-year period. Including constructed reliefs and sculpture, kinetic and participatory art, painting and printmaking, the publication explains the dialogue and collaboration between artists working in radical ways across the generations to continually reinvent Constructivist art. Rhythm and Geometry is drawn from the collection at the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia. Featured artists include Robert Adams, Rana Begum, Charles Biederman, Lygia Clark, Natalie Dower, Stephen Gilbert, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin, Victor Pasmore, Jean Spencer, Takis, Victor Vasarely, Mary Webb, Stephen Willats, Gillian Wise and Li Yuan-Chia.

Maryam Ashrafi is a social documentary photographer who believes in long term projects, she chooses to stay behind the front lines and observe the daily lives of combatants, which includes a lot of waiting around. She is above all involved in documenting the everyday life on the Kurdish front. Her work puts a face on a widely commented war which remains, from afar, perceived mainly by the West in terms of the number of refugees. Maryam documents the war in her own way, stressing its complexities and the actual building of a new social model based on equality where women occupy the same roles as men, which is remarkable in this area of the world. This is why, over the years, she has returned to the same places, from Kobane to Tabqa, to show the unique power of the resilience of the population and the will to live and change.«The struggle of the Kurdish people and their fight for freedom and fundamental rights have not come to an end, and therefore this book cannot portray all of their journeys, nor shall I stop documenting what is still to come. Yet I believe, as a witness, I owe it to history and to those I have met for sharing some of these images in this book to show part of their journey to freedom and equality», Maryam believes.The book is built on the chronology of the events as documented by Maryam Ashrafi, to understand the evolution of the conflict and its consequences on the populations and their living environment. Photographer James Nachtwey once made a point about such war photographs shown in museums, or in a book; it is "a space for reflection on the universality of the dramas that humanity is going through in its entirety". During her travels, Maryam Ashrafi has created a body of images which highlight very important topics as they are an immediate consequence of war, from the sheer destruction to the refugee camps, as they evoke the foundations of the culture and the identity of the Kurdish people - the ceremonies in honour of martyrs, dances around fires, New Year celebrations etc. Finally, Maryam Ashrafi’s work is also about empathy and about invisible wounds; it is obvious that one could not witness a conflict without being caught up in the daily suffering, especially children and women. Maryam finds emotions and feelings, in simple gestures, smiles and dances, these moments of intimacy. The presence of the photographer is forgotten, there remains only the reality of their fight and the resilience of a people. In these moments, she captures expressions that speak so much more than long speeches.Let’s listen to them in the midst of ruins, dancing amid bullets.

Sickert: The Theatre of Life explores the human side of Walter Sickert's art. Among the sources of inspiration which sustained him over a long career, none won him so much acclaim and infamy as the human face and body. After a short period as an actor, he spent his life fashioning new identities for himself and his sitters. This fully-illustrated book provides an overview of Sickert's figurative work, from theatre subjects in the 1880s, through Camden Town period nudes, concluding with visionary late works including photo-based paintings and his controversial 'English Echoes'. The publication features essays by leading specialists on Sickert's work. Richard Shone has written an introduction and catalogue entries which provide new information about the artist's friends and sitters. Wendy Baron has contributed a memoir about her 'life with Sickert' and a scholarly article about a newly-discovered painting by the artist. Also included are first-hand accounts of Sickert written by Basil Jonzen and Duncan Grant.

In 2010, when photographer Krista Elrick began traversing John James Audubon country in search of the birds the nineteenth-century American naturalist observed, painted, and wrote about, she encountered scarcely a sighting. Instead, she found the lushly forested watersheds and waterways that Audubon had passionately described in his journals vastly altered with many of the bird species extinct and their supporting habitat all but disappeared. Industrial buildings, parking lots, and strip malls had overtaken much of the area, edging out the natural world. It was a country no more. With a vintage Hasselblad film camera in hand, Elrick traveled more than 45,000 miles over ten years, following in the footsteps of Audubon as she sought clues to what had happened to these places and to the animals and peoples who once lived there. Starting at his home in Mill Grove near Philadelphia, she retraced Audubon’s many journeys to the bluffs of Cincinnati overlooking the Ohio River, to the key port town of Henderson, Kentucky, to the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the burgeoning frontier towns of Natchez in Mississippi and St. Francisville and New Orleans in Louisiana, then back east to Charleston in South Carolina and St. Augustine and Key West in Florida on the Atlantic Coast, and on to far West and the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers and, on a final journey, to Audubon’s gravesite in the Trinity Church Cemetery in New York City. What a journey. Audubon’s approach to painting birds was unique. He would kill however many birds he needed, brought them back to a studio or a room where he was lodging, constructed scenes with backdrops from a variety of locales, and rendered them in the paintings we revere today. Elrick responds to that approach by creating collages of her own, integrating the black-and-white images she made of the places Audubon and she traveled through with historic bank notes, period maps, and other ephemera that yield fascinating insights into the landscapes of Audubon today. And we see the changes and resulting effects on the natural world and its species as well as on the lives of the Native Americans and African Americans who once occupied the areas during Audubon’s day. In her research Elrick also discovered - as his biographers have - that Audubon himself was something of an enigma, a fabulist who told enchanting yet often conflicting stories about his own history and identity and what he saw in the field. Elrick’s book offers us a fascinating compendium that gives us a fresh and provocative perspective on Audubon - the man and the artist - his times and enduring legacy.

Bill Woodrow (b.1948) and Richard Deacon (b.1949) have been making sculpture together since 1990. This new book is the first to showcase the work made over this thirty-year period. They have created over sixty works altogether which they call 'shared sculptures', highlighting the important equality of authorship and responsibility at stake for both these artists. Their shared sculptures exist as five main bodies of work, which have been variously shown in exhibitions in Britain and abroad: 'Only the Lonely' (1993), 'monuments' (1999), 'Lead Astray' (2004), 'On the Rocks' (2008) and 'Don't Start' (2016). Their recent body of work, 'We Thought About It A Lot' (2021), has seen them working on paper to explore their ideas together. This new book provides a rich visual account of these works, showing new and original photographs of them individually and in their exhibition contexts. It also includes studio photographs, images of the preview cards that they have designed for exhibitions over the years and reproduces one of their earlier fax exchanges. The publication features an introductory essay by the art historian and curator Jon Wood and is released to coincide with the artists' latest two-person exhibition, 'We Thought About It A Lot, and other shared drawings' at Ikon, Birmingham, in autumn 2021.

This volume brings together data collected from both previously published surveys and new data collected using satellite imagery on the architecture and construction of over 2,400 rural structures in nine different regions of Tripolitania and dating between the 1st c. BC and the 7th c. AD. This first part contextualises the material within the historical background of Tripolitania, previous investigations and methodological foundations, the evidence for pre-Roman architectures and settlement, and the chronology of rural settlement during the period under study based on ceramic evidence. The second part presents quantitative and qualitative analyses of the physical characteristics first of Roman military structures, and then of the main group of buildings under investigation: unfortified and fortified farm buildings. The ways in which different spaces may have been utilised and the spatial relationships between the settlement groups formed by these buildings provide insight into how and why different types of buildings developed in the countryside during between the 1st c.

This book offers an incomparable spectacle, that of an intimate face-to-face with the animal, here treated as a subject in its own right, on an equal footing with man, and it encourages us to take the time to contemplate it, to better question our relationship to the wild world and our place in it. And if the photographer has long since chosen black and white, it is to better play with the incomparable light of Africa, its singular purity that gives the feeling of being in direct contact with the material, without filter. Laurent Baheux's approach is not that of a naturalist or ethology-loving photographer, he does not seek to describe behavior or to unravel the mystery of a sensitive area of the animal that has remained unknown until now. What he finds with African elephants is the feeling of a rediscovered plenitude, of wonder at the world, of a rebirth, of a reconnection with the living. Far from the crowds and the urban world, it is in the heart of African national parks that he experiences the deep meaning of life, and that he offers himself the luxury of slowness, essential when he is 'is about letting the animal approach. The elephant obliges man to humility. We are nothing compared to his power and his intelligence. It is he who decides on the meeting, or, on the contrary, who imposes his distance. We are only "tolerated guests", as Laurent Baheux reminds us. The elephant is not a predator and it is the man who threatens its existence today, competing with it for the control of a territory which is shrinking more and more every day. The pressure of human activities, the demographic growth are the dangers which endanger its survival. As an extension of his militant commitment and his anti-speciesist discourse which seeks to break down the psychological barriers linked to the categorization of animals – wild, farmed, domesticated – according to their degree of utility or their "nuisance" power, Laurent Baheux provides new proof of the need to save elephants and protect their environment, not just because they populate our collective subconscious, from illustrated children's books to the travel stories of early explorers, but because they are closely linked to the balance of our planet and that they refer us, like mirrors, to our own finitude, ineluctable, we who resemble them so much, so strong and so fragile at the same time. "Courage is the reverse, the armed arm of wonder. [...] Where many, cynical or disillusioned have retreated, [Laurent Baheux] has this power to rely on the beauty of things, to believe in it and to be enraged at seeing it mistreated. He has that faith."

In 2020, the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett celebrates its 300th anniversary. Founded in 1720 by Augustus the Strong as a museum specializing in works on paper, the collection – now with over half a million works, from the Middle Ages to the present day – has always acquired contemporary art alongside recognised masterpieces. The collection – which includes exceptional works by Jan van Eyck, Dürer, Verrocchio, Grünewald, Cranach, Holbein, Rembrandt, Caspar David Friedrich, Ludwig Richter, Toulouse Lautrec, Mondrian, Hermann Glöckner, Gerhard Altenbourg, A. R. Penck, Georg Baselitz and Evelyn Richter – began in the 18th century with drawings, miniatures and prints, before photography was added in 1898 as the promising future means of reproduction. The people in charge of the collection always had a keen eye for the art of their contemporaries and often demonstrated particular foresight in their acquisitions. Many of the works that were contemporary and still unknown at the time of their acquisition are now considered special treasures and rank equally with those that had been added to the collection as masterpieces. Exemplary are freshly printed etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, which were little known at the time, and were bought in the 18th century. And towards the end of the 19th century, the then director Max Lehrs promoted artists directly, such as Max Klinger and Käthe Kollwitz.Today, the Kupferstich-Kabinett occupies an outstanding international position thanks to the high quality and abundance of works. However, the collection is often hidden from the public. Works on paper in particular require special protection and, due to their fragility and extreme sensitivity to light, they can only rarely leave the safety of the depot. The anniversary gives reason to air many masterpieces of the collection, and offers the opportunity to look into both the past and into the future, and to anchor the Kupferstich-Kabinett with its seemingly inexhaustible holdings as a lively, innovative and democratic place in the public consciousness – as a place where creativity and knowledge, critical thinking and aesthetic pleasure can be experienced.The exhibition of 84 masterpieces, which opens in Dresden in April 2020, will then travel to New York in October 2020, where they will be presented in the prominent, international context of The Morgan Library & Museum.