Arts and Culture

All across the Americas, from the 16th century onwards, enslaved Africans escaped their captors and struck out on their own. These runaways, having found their freedom, established their own communities or joined with indigenous peoples to forge new identities. Cimarron, borrowing a Spanish-American term for these fugitive former slaves, is a new series of photographic portraits of their descend

People who saw the first moving pictures at the end of the nineteenth century were delighted by a new art that communicated without words – yet they were also alarmed to be witnessing events in a strange, mute, spectral realm, where the laws of time and space were suspended and magical transformations could occur. Some early commentators hailed cinema as a blessing and praised it for resurrecting

Virgin by Design is the official publication volume celebrating 50 years of daring innovation and creativity at Virgin, presenting the stories, the people and the work that went into the building and shaping of a much-loved and globally respected brand. More than a retrospective, it gets to the heart of the values that make the Virgin brand so unique, communicating how those values resonate with p

A major retrospective of the life and work of Coco Chanel.

Taking as his subject icons of consumerism and American popular culture, Derek Boshier made his name in the 1960s as one of the key proponents of British Pop Art, along with contemporaries David Hockney, Peter Blake and Pauline Boty. Since then, his output has been exceptionally diverse, including collage, book design, set design and illustration, as well as photography, film and sculpture.Rethink

The first major publication on the life and work of America’s celebrated mid-century modern graphic designer. Rudolph de Harak (1924–2002) is one of the most influential modern graphic designers of the mid-20th century. This beautifully produced, comprehensive monograph is the first and only major publication devoted to this fascinating and significant figure and provides an in-depth account

The first substantial book on the French Neo-Romantics, a cosmopolitan group working in 1920s Paris who turned against modernist abstraction in favour of a new form of figurative painting. In 1926, the Galerie Druet in Paris made waves presenting a group of young painters who had spurned modernist abstraction and returned to a form of figurative painting. For most of them this was the first t

New Zealand-born Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947) arrived in London in 1901 and, by the 1920s, had become a leading British modernist, exhibiting frequently with avant-garde artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. This book explores Hodgkins as a traveller across cultures and landscapes – teaching and discovering the cubists in Paris, absorbing the landscape and light of Ibiza

This landmark publication presents, for the first time ever, 500 of the very best and previously unpublished graphic works by cinema’s master of film. Created in collaboration with RGALI – the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts – this book traces Eisenstein’s extraordinary life and career through the distinctive yet evolving styles of his drawings, from early childhood sketches to set an

The Haggadot commissioned by wealthy patrons in the Middle Ages are among the most beautifully decorated Hebrew manuscripts, and The ‘Brother’ Haggadah – so-called because of its close relationship to The Rylands Haggadah in the collection of the John Rylands Library, Manchester – is one of the finest of these to have survived. Created by Sephardi – or southern – artists and scribes in Catalonia i

The art of Makoto Azuma uses flowers and plants as its starting point, but juxtaposes their timeless yet transient beauty with an incredibly diverse range of striking settings. In a series of sculptures, installations and interactive events, he delights in blurring the boundaries between nature and artifice. Azuma founded the floral atelier Jardins des Fleurs in 2002, taking commissions from pri

The most comprehensive, practical, and beautiful directory of type, organized by type category - Serif, Sans Serif, Display, and Script - and covering all styles throughout history. Type Directory offers over 1,800 examples of the best in type design, spanning almost 600 years of design history. From classics such as Garamond, Baskerville, Futura, and Helvetica, to more idiosyncratic recent crea

Accompanying a major exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, showing from November 2016 to April 2017, this book provides a fresh evaluation of Emma Hamilton’s artistic undertakings, cultural achievements and legacy. From humble origins, Emma Hamilton (1765–1815) rose to national and international fame as a model, performer, trendsetter and interpreter of neoclassical fashion. Yet, the host of

The book behind Anton Corbijn’s film Squaring the Circle (the story of Hipgnosis) Founded in 1968 by Aubrey “Po” Powell, Storm Thorgerson and Peter Christopherson, graphic design firm Hipgnosis gained a legendary status by transforming the look of album art through their designs for AC/DC, Black Sabbath, The Police, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Syd Barrett, and The Who. In t

Prototyping is an essential part of the designer’s repertoire. Designers prototype their projects to test them, structurally, aesthetically, technically. Whether the prototype works or not is not the point: prototyping is the revelatory process through which the designer gains insight. There are three reasons why contemporary prototyping techniques are transforming the way architects design and bu

Santiago Calatrava first made a name for himself in the late 1980s with delicately designed structures in Zürich that seem to grow out of the earth. He went on to create a series of highly innovative, iconic bridges across Europe, and in recent years he has drawn attention for such large-scale projects as the City of Arts and Sciences in his birth town, Valencia; the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de J

A career-spanning, slipcased monograph in two volumes presenting the work of one of Asia's most thoughtful and innovative architects. With rising populations around the world and the pressures of looming climatic catastrophe, the work of Vo Trong Nghia is a call for architecture to transform itself from a source of pollution to a reason for hope. Nor is this idea anecdotal: the World Green Bu