Ashmolean Museum Books

Description: The book will coincide with the first Ashmolean NOW exhibition in Gallery 8, opening in July 2023. The Ashmolean NOW Program features exciting works by prominent early to mid-career artists based in the UK, seeking to attract new audiences interested in contemporary art. Artists who have established international reputations and emerging artists whose international status is anticipated with a strong degree of confidence are approached pro-actively. In addition to exhibiting their existing works, all artists are invited to create at least one new work as a response to the museum and/or its collections. This first exhibition presents two linked solo shows: paintings/drawings by Flora Yukhnovich, and paintings/drawings by Daniel Crews-Chubb. The double-sided style of the book will mirror the exhibition concept, while presenting itself as a unique, well designed object that has a life beyond the exhibition. Ashmolean Museum Ashmolean NOW: Daniel Crews-Chubb x Flora Yukhnovich - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807583

Description: This book looks at bronze through the remarkable collections of European bronze sculptures in the Ashmolean Museum of the University of Oxford. Largely thanks to the generosity of Charles Drury Edward Fortnum (1820-1899), the Ashmolean houses one of the world's great collections of Renaissance and Baroque small bronzes. The book provides a survey of the collection and an overview of the development of small bronze sculpture during a period of six centuries running from c.1200 to around 1800, although most of the works illustrated here were made within the shorter time frame of c.1450-1650. Any such survey is inevitably shaped by the strengths of the collection, which is conditioned by Fortnum's taste, notwithstanding later acquisitions that have broadened its scope. He especially loved earlier Italian bronzes and so-called utensils | ?? objects such as inkstands, candlesticks, salt-cellars, mirrors and seals | ?? that are functional as well as beautiful. Fortnum was less interested in sculpture from the later 1500s onwards although, as this selection shows, he acquired some very interesting bronzes from the 17th and 18th centuries that deserve to be better known. Ashmolean Museum The Beauty of Bronze - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807613

Description: This book is an edited record of the papers given at the two-day symposium 'Italian Maiolica and Europe' held in Oxford on 22 and 23 September 2017. It is, in effect, a celebration of his long service in the Ashmolean Museum as the Keeper of Western Art. Museum collections develop their great strengths in one of two ways: through gifts of private collections and through the knowledge and enthusiasm of curators. The Ashmolean's renowned and important collection of Italian Maiolica owes its foundation to the former and the bequest of C.D.E. Fortnum. But it has grown and developed in remarkable ways over the last three decades thanks to the energy and expertise of Professor Timothy Wilson. During his 27 years as Keeper of Western Art, Tim was responsible for a truly extraordinary range and number of important acquisitions across the fine and decorative arts. As one of the world's leading scholars of Italian Maiolica, it was only natural that he would continue to build on Fortnum's legacy. Ashmolean Museum Maiolica in Italy and Beyond - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807477

Description: Oxford has a special place in the history of Pre-Raphaelitism. Thomas Combe (superintendent of the Clarendon Press) encouraged John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt at a crucial early stage of their careers, and his collection became the nucleus of the Ashmolean collection of works by the Brotherhood and their associates. Two young undergraduates, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, saw the Combe collection and became enthusiastic converts to the movement. With Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1857 they undertook the decoration of the debating chamber (now the Old Library) of the Oxford Union. The group's champion John Ruskin also studied in Oxford, where he oversaw the design of the University Museum of Natural History and established the Ruskin School of Drawing. Jane Burden, future wife of Morris and muse (probably also lover) of Rossetti, was a local girl, first spotted at the theatre in Oxford. Oxford's key role in the movement has made it a magnet for important bequests and acquisitions, most recently of Burne-Jones's illustrated letters and paintbrushes. The collection of watercolours and drawings includes a wide variety of appealing works, from Hunt's first drawing on the back of a tiny envelope for The Light of the World (Keble College), to large, elaborate chalk drawings of Jane Morris by Rossetti. It is especially rich in portraits, which throw an intimate light on the friendships and love affairs of the artists, and in landscapes which reflect Ruskin's advice to 'go to nature'. More than just an exhibition catalogue, this book is a showcase of the Ashmolean's incredible collection, and demonstrates the enormous range of Pre-Raphaelite drawing techniques and media, including pencil, pen and ink, chalk, watercolour, bodycolour and metallic paints. It will include designs for stained glass and furniture, as well as preparatory drawings for some of the well-known paintings in the collection. Ashmolean Museum Pre-Raphaelite Drawings and Watercolours - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807439

Description: Religion has always been a fundamental force for constructing identity, from antiquity to the contemporary world. The transformation of ancient cults into faith systems, which we recognise now as major world religions, took place in the first millennium AD, in the period we call 'Late Antiquity'. Our argument is that the creative impetus for both the emergence, and much of the visual distinctiveness of the world religions came in contexts of cultural encounter. Bridging the traditional divide between classical, Asian, Islamic and Western history, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue highlights religious and artistic creativity at points of contact and cultural borders between late antique civilisations. This catalogue features the creation of specific visual languages that belong to five major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. The imagery still used by these belief systems today is evidence for the development of distinct religious identities in Late Antiquity. Emblematic visual forms like the figure of Buddha and Christ, or Islamic aniconism, only evolved in dialogue with a variety of coexisting visualisations of the sacred. As late antique believers appropriated some competing models and rejected others, they created compelling and long-lived representations of faith, but also revealed their indebtedness to a multitude of contemporaneous religious ideas and images. Ashmolean Museum Imagining the Divine - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807187

Description: This well-designed publication features new photographs by London-based artist Bettina von Zwehl (b. 1971 in Munich). Following her graduation from the Royal College of Art in 1999, von Zwehl has completed high-profile residencies and had solo exhibitions at museums around the world, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Freud Museum, Holburne Museum, and the New York Historical Society Museum. During a residency in Oxford, von Zwehl researched the Ashmolean's founding collections and the many narratives embedded within the historical objects. This served as inspiration for a unique Wunderkammer book and exhibition that seamlessly transition between still-life, portraiture, monumental and miniature elements, as well as non-art objects and specimens from natural history collections. The artist's aim is to rekindle wonder and curiosity as critical tools for exploring new ideas and unique practices, expanding the boundaries of the photographic medium. Ashmolean Museum Ashmolean NOW: Bettina von Zwehl - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807637

Description: Pio Abad's artistic practice is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, encompassing drawing, painting, textiles, installation and text, mines alternative or repressed historical events and offers counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies and people. Deeply informed by unfolding events in the Philippines, where the artist was born and raised, his work emanates from a family narrative woven into the nation's story. Abad's parents were at the forefront of the anti-dictatorship struggle in the Philippines during the 1970s and 80s and it is the need to remember this history that has shaped the foundations of his work. This beautifully designed book accompanies the Ashmolean Museum's second exhibition of its new Ashmolean NOW series, featuring the work of Pio Abad. Abad's artistic practice is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, which includes drawing, painting, installation, textiles and text, mines alternative or repressed historical events, offering counternarratives. Abad's new works link narratives found in the Museum's collections and Oxford with his personal life in the UK and Philippines, where the artist was born and raised. The book features a new text by Abad and contributions by art historical experts including Dan Hicks. Ashmolean Museum Ashmolean NOW: Pio Abad - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807606

Description: This major retrospective catalogue is the first institutional show focusing on the visual works of art by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke. The majority of the paintings, drawings and digital works were specifically made for Yorke's internationally celebrated band Radiohead, formed in Oxford in 1985. This features iconic artworks from the 1980s until today, relating to Radiohead albums, their covers and promotional band images, as well as sketchbooks and rare materials from their archives that have never before been published. It offers fresh views on the art of album covers, exploring the complex relationship between visual art and music. Radiohead was formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1985. The collaboration with the artist Stanley Donwood began in 1994 when the band was developing their second album, The Bends, which was released on 13th March, 1995. 2025 is therefore the 40-year anniversary of the band and the 30-year anniversary of the release of The Bends. The catalogue's focus is upon the art produced by both Stanley Donwood and the band's lead vocalist, Thom Yorke presented chronologically. Radiohead's popularity has never waned and they have a strong core following and new fans (many of who are the children of 'original' fans). The high-quality reproductions are complemented by exclusive interviews with the artists, and essays by Alex Farquharson, Nico Kos Earle, Benjamin Myers, James Putnam and Jennifer Ramkalawon. A major retrospective will be held at the Ashmolean Museum from August 2025 to January 2026. Ashmolean Museum This Is What You Get - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807668

Description: Contrary to the monochrome vision of Queen Victoria's mourning dresses and the coal-polluted streets of Charles Dickens' London, Victorian Britain was, in fact, a period of new and vivid colours. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the Victorians' perception of colour and, over the course of the second half of the 19th century, it became the key signifier of modern life. Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design charts the Victorians' new attitudes to colour through a multi-disciplinary exploration of culture, technology, art and literature. The catalogue explores key 'chromatic' moments that inspired Victorian artists and writers to think anew about the materiality of colour. Rebelling against the bleakness of the industrial present, these figures learned from the sacred colours of the past, the sumptuous colours of the Middle East and Japan and looked forward towards the decadent colours that defined the end of the century. .

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ISBN: 9781910807576

Description: This is the very best of Antwerp and the best from here in Oxford. | ?? The Oxford Times Weekend This entertaining exhibition of the 16th- and 17th-century drawings from the Low Countries has energy to spare. | ?? The Telegraph This catalogue will accompany the Bruegel to Rubens exhibition held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford between 23 March and 23 June 2024. Through a selection of over 100 world-class drawings created by Flemish artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an insightful and comprehensive overview will be given into how these drawn sheets were used as part of artistic practice, within or beyond the artist's studio. By revealing the drawings' function, rather than on their attribution or iconography, these sheets will become more fully understood through the eyes of contemporary readers. Identifying how and why these sheets were created will render these artworks more accessible to a wider audience. The three main essays will each deal with one of the principal functions of drawings at the time: studies (copies and sketches), designs for other artworks (paintings, prints, tapestries, metalwork, stained glass, sculpture and architecture), and finally the independent drawings. Each essay will discuss the relevant works within their functional context and compared with other related objects. Introductory chapters will focus on what precisely can be considered a drawing, including its materials, media and techniques, in addition to an attempt to explain the notion of Flanders and Flemish art. Emphasis will be placed throughout the catalogue on how Flemish artists collaborated in creating the most astonishing artworks of their time, unveiling their networks and friendships, as well as their travels across Europe, revealing their international importance. The exhibition is a partnership with the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp and will bring together for the first time the most stunning drawings from both the Ashmolean and the Plantin-Moretus collections, in addition to further loans from renowned Antwerp and Oxford institutions like the Rubenshuis and Christ Church Picture Gallery. Many of the sheets coming from Antwerp are registered on the Flemish Government's Masterpieces List and will not be shown again for the next five to ten years to protect them from fading. Prominent artists featured in this catalogue include Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacques Jordaens, among many others. Highlights will include a sketchbook in which a young Rubens has copied Holbein's Dance of Death woodcuts, intricate pen and ink drawings by Pieter Bruegel, meticulously drawn miniatures by Joris Hoefnagel, portrait studies by Anthony van Dyck, and a rare survival of a friendship album containing numerous drawings and poems dedicated to its owner. Two recently discovered sheets by Rubens will also be included, a design for a book-illustration on optics and an anatomical study of three legs.

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ISBN: 9781910807590

Description: In December 2020, spirits were low. The first tentative visitors had only just made it back through the doors of the Ashmolean after months of isolation, only for another lockdown to come crashing into view. The galleries went dark for a second time in a year. There's something uncanny about standing in the Museum when it's empty of visitors. You can sense a million human stories all around you, clamouring to be told to. no-one. So, we had to change tack. If we couldn't get people into the building, we could get the stories out. I started calling around curators, asking for their most uplifting tales in the collections. From bedrooms and garden sheds and kitchen tables, the Ashmolean team started recording themselves, sharing stories of joy and resilience to help keep us all going through the dark winter months of quarantine. The result was a podcast, Museum Secrets, which you can find on the Ashmolean's website. This book contains the highlights. These are stories you won't find on the labels. These are stories of the human experiences hidden in the Museum's cases and frames. They are stories that cheered us up when we needed it most, and I hope will continue to do so. .

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ISBN: 9781910807569

Description: The art of Samuel Palmer is essentially a discovery of the 20th century. Although he exhibited widely during his lifetime, and found buyers for some of his watercolours and etchings, it was not until the retrospective exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1926 that the general public were able to enter the uniquely personal world of Palmer's early years at Shoreham. Since then, his influence on a generation of English painters including Nash, Sutherland, John Piper, and F.L. Griggs, the publications of Geoffrey Grigson, Raymond Lister and others, have made him one of the most popular of English artists. The collection of paintings, drawings, watercolours, and etchings by Samuel Palmer in the Ashmolean Museum is the most important in the world. It is especially rich in the early works of the Shoreham period, from c. 1824 to 1835, notably the haunting self portrait and the unique group of six sepia drawings of 1825, which represent the 'visionary landscape' at its most intense. Ashmolean Museum The Works of Samuel Palmer - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807460

Description: This creative collaboration between artist Naoko Matsubara and poet Penny Boxall celebrates in words and colours the beauty and variety of the human hand. The series of dynamic woodcuts at the heart of this book was initially inspired by the artist's wonder at the busy hand movements of her baby son and grew into a wider celebration of hands in all their extraordinary variety - hands engaged in music, sport, prayer, or creative acts. The woodcuts convey a sense of joy and energy, whether exploring the symbolism of gestures, playing with form and colour, or expressing a mood or emotion. Penny Boxall's new poems were specially written to accompany the woodcuts. In their clarity and playfulness, their range of mood and their deceptive simplicity, they form a remarkable creative synergy with the art works. During the coronavirus pandemic the subject of hands - and the idea of touch or its absence - has taken on a new significance. Many of the images in the series have taken on powerful new meanings: healing hands, hands finding ways to occupy hours of furlough, or hands clapping in support of those working to keep us safe. We are particularly delighted that this elegant book has been designed by Yoshiki Waterhouse, Naoko Matsubara's son, whose baby hands were the original inspiration for the series. Ashmolean Museum In Praise of Hands - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807446

Description: In 2019 Ali Kazim, one of the most exciting contemporary artists working in Pakistan today, became the first South Asian artist-in-residence at the Ashmolean Museum. Drawing inspiration from the objects in the Eastern Art collections, and their contextual history, he saw his time in the Museum as an opportunity to reimagine the objects in his own work and practise. Thus, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue will focus mainly on Kazim's engagement with the Ashmolean collections and the works created between 2019 and 2021. Widely exhibited and collected internationally (including the British Museum, V&A, Metropolitan Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, etc.), Kazim lives and works in Pakistan. The exhibition and book provide the Museum an opportunity to engage wider diverse audiences, while also presenting the works of a contemporary multidisciplinary artist who reflects and draws strength from the Ashmolean collections.

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ISBN: 9781910807514

Description: The Ashmolean is fortunate in having the finest collection of Indian art in Britain outside London, one which includes many works of great beauty and expressive power. For this we are indebted above all to the generosity, knowledge and taste of our benefactors and donors from the 17th century to the present. This book offers a short account of how the collection developed and a selection of some of its more outstanding or interesting works of art. While it is written mainly for the general reader and museum visitor, it includes many fine objects or pictures, some of them unpublished, that should interest specialist scholars and students. Since 1987, the Ashmolean has made many significant new acquisitions of Indian art and these are highlighted in this collection. As the book's title implies, it also ventures beyond the bounds of the Indian subcontinent by including works from Afghanistan and Central Asian Silk Road sites as well as many from Nepal, Tibet and Southeast Asia. From the early centuries AD, Indian trading links with these diverse regions of Asia led to a widespread cultural diffusion and regional adoptions of Buddhism and Hinduism along with their related arts. Local reinterpretations of such Indic subjects, themes and styles then grew into flourishing and enduring artistic traditions which are also part of the story of this book. The selection of works ends around 1900. By the 16th century and the early modern period in India, growing European interventions and Western artistic influences under Mughal rule saw a significant shift in sensibility and the practice of more secular and naturalistic forms of court art such as portraiture. By the late 19th century, fundamental cultural changes under British rule and the advent of new technologies brought about a gradual decline in many of India's traditional arts. Ashmolean Museum Art of India and Beyond - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807507

Description: I couldn't think of a better place to have a dialogue about art today and what it can be - Jeff Koons Curated by Koons himself, together with guest curator Norman Rosenthal, this show features seventeen important works, fourteen of which have never been exhibited in the UK before. They span the artist's entire career and his most well-known series, including Equilibrium, Statuary, Banality, Antiquity and his recent Gazing Ball sculptures and paintings. This exhibition will provoke a conversation between his creations and the history of art and ideas with which his work engages. Jeff Koons burst onto the contemporary art scene in the 1980s. He has been described as the most famous, important, subversive, controversial and expensive artist in the world. From his earliest works Koons has explored the 'ready-made' and 'appropriated image', using unadulterated found objects and creating painstaking replicas of ancient sculptures and Old Master paintings which almost defy belief in their craftsmanship and precision. Throughout his career Koons has pushed at the boundaries of contemporary art practice, stretching the limits of what is possible. This publication accompanies an exhibiton, running from February to June, 2019 at the Ashmolean. Koons will be in conversation with Martin Kemp at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, in May 2019. Contents: Director's Foreword; interview with Jeff Koons (by Xa Sturgis); Jeff Koons and the Sheen and Shine of Time (Sir Norman Rosenthal); catalogue entries; Jeff Koon biography.

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ISBN: 9781910807293

Description: As some American artists began to eliminate people and remove extraneous details from their compositions, they often employed neat, orderly brushwork or close-up, unemotional photography. Artists as diverse as Patrick Henry Bruce, John Covert, Georgia O' Keeffe, Paul Strand and Arthur Dove navigated European and American avant-garde circles, picking and choosing new ideas and methods. Inspiration ranged from cubism and machine parts to new technologies, and they found ways to bring order to the modern world through extreme simplification. For them, abstraction involved absence and presence - the evacuation of human beings but also the desire to depict something that would not otherwise be visible or to render visible unseen natural processes like the passage of time, sound waves, or weather patterns. Their artworks provide a new context for the precisionist works in the subsequent sections and point to modern ideas about what art could be. How does a crisp painting technique relate to an aesthetic of absence?. Ashmolean Museum America's Cool Modernism - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk

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ISBN: 9781910807217