Off the Shelf
Apollo’s selection of recently published books on art, architecture and the history of collecting
Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes
Claire Wilcox Bloomsbury, £7.99 ISBN 9781526614384
Wilcox, a senior curator of fashion at the V&A, gives us a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum that ranges from frocks by Fortuny to collections of cabinet cards. Interspersed with these vignettes are more personal memories of clothes she has worn at significant moments in her life.
Temple of Science: The Pre-Raphaelites and Oxford University Museum of Natural History
John Holmes Bodleian, £35
ISBN 9781851245567
Ruskin may have disapproved of some of the practical aspects of a building inspired by his writings, but John Holmes here makes the case for the museum as a Gesamtkunstwerk of the Gothic Revival.
Early Colour Printing: German Renaissance Woodcuts at the British Museum
Elizabeth Savage Paul Holberton, £50 ISBN 9781911300755
Reproducing in exquisite detail every early modern German colour print held at the British Museum, this major study examines the evolution of the new technology through artworks, missals, icons – and even wallpapers.
The Great Mongol Shahnameh
Robert Hillenbrand
Yale University Press, £150 ISBN 9781898113836
The miniatures painted in The Great Mongol Shahnameh, an illustrated manuscript of Firdausi’s epic Persian poem, were dispersed in the th century to museum collections around the world. This monograph reunites them for the first time alongside analysis by Hillenbrand.
Young Poland: The Polish Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890–1918
Julia Griffin and Andrzej Szczerski (eds.) Lund Humphries, £40
ISBN 9781848224537
Young Poland was a modernist movement that emerged in the s out of a desire to develop a national style. This book argues that the country’s particular revival of crafts shared stylistic and ideological links with the British Arts and Crafts movement.
Brutal Aesthetics
Hal Foster
Princeton University Press, £34 ISBN 9780691202600
Based on his Andrew W. Mellon lectures from , Hal Foster’s latest book considers how painters and sculptors such as Jean Dubuffet, Asger Jorn and Eduardo Paolozzi responded to the challenge of making art in the post-war period by embracing a positive form of ‘barbarism’.