History of Japanese Art after 1945 is a compilation of essays that surveys the development of art in Japan since WWII. The original Japanese work, which has become essential reading for those with an interest in modern contemporary Japanese art and is a foundational resource for students and researchers, spans the 150 years from the 1850s to the 2010s. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific period and written by a specialist on the subject matter.

For this English edition, overseen by Art Pl...

In the 19th century an African possession cult called zār arrived in Egypt and became hugely popular. Jewellery formed an integral part of this cult, and silver pendants with images of spirits started to appear in the early 20th century. And there is more: zār also used beaded jewellery as well as a wide range of other jewels.

Currently, jewellery items with spirit images are sought-after collectors’ items, present in collections of both private collectors and museums. These collections a...

Male bonds were omnipresent in nineteenth-century European artistic scenes, impacting the creation, presentation, and reception of art in decisive ways. Men’s lives and careers bore the marks of their relations with other men. Yet, such male bonds are seldom acknowledged for what they are: gendered and historically determined social constructs. This volume shines a critical light on male homosociality in the arts of the long nineteenth century by combining art history with the insights of g...

In Anarchy of the Body, art historian KuroDalaiJee (a.k.a. Kuroda Raiji) sheds light on vital pieces of postwar Japanese avant-garde history by contextualizing the social, cultural, and political trajectories of artists across Japan in the 1960s. A culmination of years of research, Anarchy of the Body draws on an extensive breadth of source material to reveal how the practice of performance by individual artists and art groups during this period formed a legacy of resistance against instituti...

Rather than centring on the well-known collections in Western European and North American museums, Collecting Asian Art turn to museum collections of Asian art in Central Europe which emerged from the late 19th century onwards. Highlighting the dimensions of Central European connectedness, this volume explores how these collections evolved and changed under changing cultural and political conditions from the pre-World War I to the post-World War II periods. With a primary focus on collections...

What happens when two art forms – the literary and the visual arts – come together? For its bicentenary, the Mauritshuis asked 200 writers to draw inspiration from the museum’s collection. The crème de la crème of today's literary community, from at home and abroad, participated in this remarkable book. One writer; one work of art from the Mauritshuis; 200 words per contribution – never before have so many authors appeared together in a single publication. To name just a few of the ...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer turns his eye to the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age Twenty years ago, Benjamin Moser followed a love affair to an ancient Dutch town. In order to make sense of this new place, he threw himself into the Dutch museums. Soon, he found himself unearthing the strange, inspiring and sometimes terrifying stories of the artists who shaped one of the most luminous moments in the history of human creativity, the Dutch Golden Age.

As he explored the hidden wor...