A group of Japanese architects calling themselves "Metabolists" first appeared together in 1960 at the World Design Conference in Tokyo. This impressive illustrated volume is the first to focus on the Metabolists's built designs for housing, which they regarded as living organisms, not static monuments. Inspired by Le Corbusier's concept of artificial land, their housing encouraged individual and collective forces to collaborate in the creation of the living environment. They produced buildings made of modular, flexible, and dynamic units that can be randomly expanded, redesigned, and adjusted to meet every expectation. This gives all of the buildings a special charm: not only are they fascinating in themselves, but they also provoke us to completely rediscover and rethink how housing is created.
A Essen, le musée Folkwang rend hommage aux artistes autodidactes avec une exposition qui met en regard les oeuvres de 13 artistes dits « naïfs » : Henri Rousseau, André Bauchant, Séraphine Louis, Martin Ramirez, Miroslav Tichy, William Edmondso, Morris Hirshfield, Adalbert Trillhaase - entre autres - avec celles des plus grands noms de l'art moderne : Gauguin, Nolde, Léger, Delaunay, Picasso, Brancusi et Ernst. Le catalogue reproduit plus de 200 oeuvres et propose un essai qui éclaire le travail de chaque artiste (2/10/15 - 10/01/16).
This book brings together a unique selection of works to explore the art of 20th century Japanese printmaking.
While the classic landscapes of Hokusai and Hiroshige and the beautiful women's paintings of Utamaro have gained widespread recognition, Japanese printmaking of the 20th century has received quite little attention so far. Since the 1990s, however, museums and private collectors have shown a growing interest in Shin Hanga ("New Prints"): balanced designs printed on luxurious paper, with the finest pigments, and available only in small editions.
Shin Hanga prints differ from their traditional predecessors not so much in subject matter as in imagery. While the classically depicted women were stylized and idealized, their newer counterparts are based on real models that are individually recognizable and full of emotion. The modern landscapes, on the other hand, are impressionistic rather than figurative, and use a range of color shades to achieve very atmospheric results.
The ethics and aesthetics of ruins are a crucial element in the history of civilisations: it symbolises the presence of the past, but at the same time embodies the potential for future developments. In fact, a ruin is never neutral: caught between nature and culture, suspended between catastrophe and reconstruction, it is immersed in the flow of time while suggesting eternity. In order to give an idea of the historical complexity of the concept, the book which was created and edited by Dimitri Ozerkov will range thematically over centuries, focusing on salient points: from the first mythologies of destruction, the effect of divine wrath (Deucalion and Pyrrha, Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorra, etc.) to the "iconoclastic terrorism" of Palmyra, while also including ancient Egypt, Greco-Roman antiquity, the "instauratio Romae", the "ruine du Louvre", and twentieth-century destructions by war and the ruins of the Twin Towers.
