Art

A major new history of how African nations, starting in the 1960s, sought to reclaim the art looted by Western colonial powers

For decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen during the colonial era and placed in Western museums. In Africa's Struggle for Its Art, Bénédicte Savoy brings to light this largely unknown but deeply important history. One of the world's foremost experts on restitution and cultural heritage, Savoy investigates extensive, previously unpublished sources to reveal that the roots of the struggle extend much further back than prominent recent debates indicate, and that these efforts were covered up by myriad opponents.

Shortly after 1960, when eighteen former colonies in Africa gained independence, a movement to pursue repatriation was spearheaded by African intellectual and political classes. Savoy looks at pivotal events, including the watershed speech delivered at the UN General Assembly by Zaire's president, Mobutu Sese Seko, which started the debate regarding restitution of colonial-era assets and resulted in the first UN resolution on the subject. She examines how German museums tried to withhold information about their inventory and how the British Parliament failed to pass a proposed amendment to the British Museum Act, which protected the country's collections. Savoy concludes in the mid-1980s, when African nations enacted the first laws focusing on the protection of their cultural heritage.

Making the case for why restitution is essential to any future relationship between African countries and the West, Africa's Struggle for Its Art will shape conversations around these crucial issues for years to come.

Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary readers to fine art as few critics have. An early champion of forgotten and overlooked women artists, he has also celebrated the pioneering work of African American, LGBTQ+, and other long-marginalized creators. Sotheby's Institute of Art has called him, simply, "the art critic."

Now, in Art Is Life, Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points--from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today--Saltz traces how visionary artists have both documented and challenged the culture. Art Is Life offers Saltz's eye-opening appraisals of trailblazers like Kara Walker, David Wojnarowicz, Hilma af Klint, and Jasper Johns; provocateurs like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Marina Abramovic; and visionaries like Jackson Pollock, Bill Traylor, and Willem de Kooning. Saltz celebrates landmarks like the Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, writes searchingly about disturbing moments such as the Ankara gallery assassination, and offers surprising takes on figures from Thomas Kinkade to Kim Kardashian. And he shares stories of his own haunted childhood, his time as a "failed artist," and his epiphanies upon beholding work by Botticelli, Delacroix, and the cave painters of Niaux.

With his signature blend of candor and conviction, Jerry Saltz argues in Art Is Life for the importance of the fearless artist--reminding us that art is a kind of channeled voice of human experience, a necessary window onto our times. The result is an openhearted and irresistibly readable appraisal by one of our most important cultural observers.

Artisan craft is quickly evolving to combine handwork with machine technology, providing unlimited possibilities for customization. By enabling designers to construct one-o furniture pieces for galleries, exhibitions, and clients, this synthesis of art, design, and technology has created a wealth of collectible pieces.

This complete overview of contemporary studio furniture celebrates the achievements of an international selection of designers producing works of artistic expression that sit as comfortably in museums as they do in domestic settings. Featuring more than 100 designers across disciplines, the heavily illustrated volume includes Thomas Barger, Campana Brothers, Jenna Goldberg, Wendell Castle, Wendy Maruyama, and many more. The images also showcase the homes and studios of makers and collectors, showing how these objects create highly unique and personal environments.

Judith Gura made a hugely important contribution to publications on design over a career spanning several decades and this is her final book. Organized by object type and maker, Artisan Design is essential reading for all design connoisseurs, collectors, and anyone interested in bespoke furniture design.

Banksy is the world's most discussed artist of recent decades, and this seminal collection features hundreds of works including Girl with Balloon, Pulp Fiction, Love Is in the Air, Barcode, and Monkey Queen. It also includes scores of paintings, serigraphs, stencils, and installation objects as well as a selection of memorabilia--many of which have never been published previously. Created with the cooperation of Pest Control, the group that manages all things Banksy, this is as official and authorized as any Banksy publication could be.

Banksy is the world's greatest practitioner of street art. His work has always been political, involving pointed critiques of inequality, injustice, consumerism, and the establishment, yet no one knows his identity. He is an exemplary case of fame and notoriety built upon absence and anonymity. His relationship with the art market is also complex: marked by mocking hostility while being one of the most marketable and most collected contemporary artists.

The African diaspora--a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism--has generated a wide array of artistic achievements, from blues and reggae to the paintings of the pioneering American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and the music videos of Solange. This study concentrates on how these works, often created during times of major social upheaval and transformation, use Black culture both as a subject and as context. From musings on "the souls of black folk" in late-nineteenth-century art to questions of racial and cultural identities in performance, media, and computer-assisted arts in the twenty-first century, this book examines the philosophical and social forces that have shaped Black presence in modern and contemporary visual culture.

Renowned art historian Richard J. Powell presents Black art drawn from across the African diaspora, with examples from the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. Black Art features artworks executed in a broad range of media, including film, photography, performance art, conceptual art, advertising, and sculpture.

Now updated and expanded, this new edition helps to better understand how the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been a transformative moment in which previous assumptions about race and identity have been irrevocably altered, with art providing a useful lens through which to think about these compelling issues.

"Darkness is not empty," writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity--and witness the humanity of others--in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience--not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don't.

Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole's writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: "Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning."

Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence's art world, he was commissioned by a member of the city's powerful Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate visual homage to that "divine" poet.

This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the drawings vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous Botticelli himself was forgotten.

The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli's Dante drawings brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli's metaphorical rise from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of eagle-eyed connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the early twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous story of Botticelli's Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation.

A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, Botticelli's Secret shows not only how the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticelli's art helped bring it about--and, most important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.

The Sigg Collection is recognized as the most important and comprehensive collection of Chinese art today. It was acquired by M+, a new museum of visual culture in Hong Kong, in 2012 from the Swiss businessman, diplomat, and art collector Uli Sigg. The collection consists of 1,510 works of contemporary Chinese art, dating from the 1970s to the present and ranging across all media. It offers a unique insight into the remarkable flowering of experimental artistic practices in China during this time--a period of unprecedented social and economic change in the country that saw artists devise new, sometimes radical, approaches to artmaking, formulating new connections between art and society, and developing ground-breaking conceptual methodologies.

Published to coincide with the presentation of the M+ Sigg Collection at the opening of the M+ building, Chinese Art Since 1970 features more than 600 works by more than 300 artists represented in the collection, among them Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, and Geng Jianyi. After introductory essays by Pi Li and Uli Sigg, an illustrated chronology spanning the years 1972 to 2020 highlights important social events, exhibitions, and artistic movements to establish a context for the discussion of the featured artists and their work that follows. Punctuating this discussion are contributions from renowned art historians, curators, and critics together with in-depth explanations of key concepts and events, from Cynical Realism to the seminal exhibition China/Avant-Garde. Through the medium of the world's pre-eminent collection of contemporary Chinese art, this volume offers an unparalleled introduction to one of the most culturally dynamic periods in modern Chinese history.

Based on the critically acclaimed video series of the same name, Cocktails with a Curator is a collection of lively and informative essays. Paintings, sculpture, furniture, and porcelain--from medieval times through the glorious Renaissance to the early twentieth century--are discussed for their exemplary status. The creators are some of the greatest artists and include Rembrandt, Vermeer, Whistler, Manet, Velázquez, and Veronese, and the stories (of both artists and subjects) are tantalizing. Cocktails, with recipes, are thematically paired with the works: a Jaded Countess (absinthe, vodka, lemon juice, and simple syrup) with Ingres's portrait Comtesse d'Haussonville; a classic Pimm's Cup with Gainsborough's depiction of English beauty Grace Dalrymple Elliott; and a Bloody Mary (named after the last Catholic regnant queen of England) with Holbein's painting of Sir Thomas More, who opposed the Reformation of Mary's father, Henry VIII. The perfect addition to any art connoisseur's library, this book is an innovative and intoxicating way to enjoy the treasures of a world-renowned art collection.