Art history

Three perspectives (philosophical, sociological and artist's word) on the meaning of the avant-garde, and its relationship to the counter-culture.

A critical investigation into the material heritage and entangled histories of Western encyclopedic museums.

An multidisciplinary approach of the war by its traces.

The Colour Journal is a lavish publication that explores colour in art and photography. It has been conceived as a collection of six volumes, each devoted to a single colour: blue, red, yellow, green, white and black. The Blue Issue contains, over more than 400 pages, about twenty contributions by international art historians, writers, anthropologists, philosophers, critics, artists and photographers that start from the colour blue.

The book "Movements of Air" reprints the breathtaking pictures of Étienne-Jules Marey, that he took between 1899 and 1901 during his scientific experiments with moving air and smoke, and complements them with two essays of Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni. 

Forms of Abstraction engages with abstraction not as a formal option in art, or as an airy theoretical speculation, but as an operational force that has redesigned our world, and continues to do so.

The first monograph of the painter Nicolas Ionesco, born in 1919 in Bucharest, active all his life in Paris, who occupied a prominent place in the art of the 1950s before being forgotten because of the direction he had taken his work: an opportunity to reconsider everything anew.

A thorough investigation that renews the understanding of Japonism from the French art of the nineteenth century, avoiding the temptation of orientalist exoticism while reversing the logic of influence, with an abundant also entirely renewed iconographic corpus.

An investigation into the origins of artistic creation, more than 40,000 years ago (a film by Pascal Goblot, with Daniel Buren and a group of specialists in prehistoric art, philosophers, anthropologists and archaeologists, narrated by Virginie Ledoyen).

A transnational and transhistorical investigation carried out in the heart of museum and artistic practices between France and Senegal in the 1950s to 1970s, inviting us to decentralize our views in order to consider the globalized history of art of these years in a new light.

An exploration of the artistic myth of Michelangelo, which questions the multiple and contradictory uses of the past and the notions of reception, filiation and tradition that are revealed.

An essay by Guillaume Belhomme on the singularly modern work of the painter Eugène Carrière (1849-1906), accompanied by a piece by Japanese saxophonist Harutaka Mochizuki, inspired by the master's paintings.

An analysis of the failed experiment of an exhibition of the Situationists that ought to have taken place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1959, and of the Situationist International's ambivalent relationship with the format of the exhibition, the museum and the institution.

The English translation of Zdanevich's Dadaist autobiographical lecture in Paris in 1922, where he adopts the name Iliazda. In this entertaining lecture, the achievements of the avant-garde is presented as a combination of zaum, polymorphous sexuality, aleatory forms and scatological interpretation of culture.

Special deluxe edition with an original photogravure by Cerith Wyn Evans.

The first English translation of Karel Teige's The Marketplace of Art in two volumes includes a critical introduction, inquiries, and extensive commentaries. Originally published in the Czech language in 1936, The Marketplace of Art is the summation of Teige's artistic, political, and theoretical work.

A reevaluationof Surrealism since 1940: a large-scale, groundbreaking work covering seven decades, questioning the discourses, narratives, and debates on the poetic, political, and artistic commitments of the movement, in the context of the deep social and cultural mutations of the world of the second half of the 20th century.

Philosopher Éric Alliez rethinks Marcel Duchamp's legacy in relation to contemporary art and the image, psychoanalysis and gender.

The first French edition of the theoretical dialogue of the Italian architect and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), one of the most radical texts in the history of modern architectural theory.

The hypothesis of a renewal of the world's habitability, questioning the links between ecofeminism and artistic practices, but also another relationship, more collaborative than separative, to the living world.

The fascinating story of Jack Goldstein, the beginnings of CalArts, and some of the illustrious fellows who, in the 1970s and 1980s, led the transition from conceptual art to the Pictures Generation, paints an uncompromising picture of the art world then and now.

The first study devoted to the American ecological art movement.

A comprehensive survey of visual studies and visual culture, from its origins in art history to the current perspectives opened by new technologies, virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

The various dimensions of the landscape—mental, cultural and ideological, real and pictorial—in the emblematic works of Poussin, Le Lorrain, Bourdon and their contemporaries of the 17th century.

A feminist approach to broaden and challenge traditional art historical definitions of institutional critique.

The portfolio of the exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, the first major retrospective in France on the filmmaker and biologist specializing in underwater fauna Jean Painlevé (1902-1989), considered one of the founding fathers of scientific cinema and a source of inspiration for the avant-gardes and the surrealist movement.

A history of the museum of modern art, exhibitions and discourses on art and its public in the 20th century, from the trajectory of Jean Cassou (1897-1986), writer, resistance fighter, art critic, poet and chief curator of thenational museum for modern art of France from 1945 to 1965.

An investigation into how the discovery of "India" disrupted Western mimesis between 1800 and 1850, thereby contributing to artistic modernity.

"Stories of Paper" traces the history of paper as a thousand-year-old material used from antiquity to the present day, and provides an original perspective on the history of graphic arts.

Reevaluating the scholarly knowledge about Dada and its legacy, this publication reconstructs how Dada was (re)invented in the 1950s and the 1960s, especially by the Dada protagonists themselves, and asks to what extent Dada's impulses are still relevant regarding current aesthetic, literary and cultural analyses.

An essay to account for the architectonics of Aby Warburg (1866-1929) by resituating his work within his project of general anthropology of expression: Lara Bonneau shows, from a text as little known as it is important, that the invention of iconology, which made the art historian famous, was underpinned by an ontology drawing on various sources, philosophical, psychological and biological as well as historical.

The little-known history of a major cultural encounter: a study of the reception of Chinese painting in the West and its artistic resonances, which underwent profound changes between the 19th century and the 1930s.

The Art history reconsidered as a scientific discipline and form of discourse in the twentieth century, through a critical analysis of the work of Charles Sterling.

Modernism/Murderism brings together, for the first time in English, a forgotten debate on Modern Art that took place in the pages of India's Gujarati-language literary periodical Kumar between 1959 and 1964.

Documents on Raphael is not only a rediscovery project carried out on the five hundredth anniversary of Raphael's death, but above all an operation of re-visioning.

Attempting to explore the transdisciplinary aspects of artistic practice, this book revisits a tipping point in art history: the invention of preconceptual and minimal art forms by George Brecht, a chemical engineer and artist.

The images of exile, escape, wandering and exclusion in art history, from classical painting to the most contemporary production.

The first comparative study of artistic culture in Europe under Soviet influence following the Yalta Accords, tracing the complex relationship between art and politics and the tensions between the avant-garde and traditional practices on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The unexplored interactions between hypnosis, music and medicine in the 19th century, between the world of science and the world of art.

The Louvre invites itself to Reunion Island: a dialogue between the collections of the island's five museums and those of the Department of Graphic Arts.

A dialogue between the philosopher and the art historian around the encounter.

An original multidisciplinary study of the text-image pair in its political dimension, from the militancy of the early twentieth century to the struggles for "visibility" of minorities.

The essential place of writing in the work of Josef Albers (1888-1976), one of the most important artists, painters and educators of the 20th century.

A critical and nuanced overview of the figures of the sleeping in the art and thought of the Renaissance, a source of inspiration for artists—Mantegna, Dürer, Brughel, Michelangelo or Tintoretto—as well as theologians, doctors and philosophers (from Aristotle to Zwingli, via Augustine and Montaigne), beyond the negative definition and the traditional condemnation of inactivity and unconciousness.

The history of Arabic calligraphy.

Artistic production as a tool of political and diplomatic influence during the Cold War.