Books published by Skira

Alphonse Mucha was an extraordinarily prolific and versatile artist who made his mark in the diverse fields of design - including posters, jewellery, interior decoration, theatre, packaging and product designs - as well as in painting, book illustration, sculpture and photography. He is one of the best-known Czech artists to wide international audiences today and rose to international fame in fin-de- siècle Paris with his elegant designs for theatre posters for Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous French actress of the time, and decorative panels ( panneaux décoratifs ) featuring gracefully posed women. For those posters Mucha created a distinctive style - "le style Mucha" - characterised by harmonious compositions, sinuous forms, organic lines and a muted palette, which became synonymous with the newly emerging decorative style of the time - Art Nouveau. By the time of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, Mucha had become a leading figure in this decorative art movement, who defined the look of the era. The catalogue explores the development of Mucha's career and overall achievements as a multifaceted and visionary artist. It is divided into six sections, highlighting Mucha's personality as Bohemian; picture maker for people; cosmopolitan; mystic; patriot and philosopher.

From their forms to their movements, Cartier watches are unique. They are an enduring combination of the unexpected and the classical. This book chronicles Cartier's constant quest for excellence in the manufacture of complicated watches.

Matteo Civaschi , art-director and graphic designer, created Shortology with 16 books published across the world.

How connected are fashion designers to the body they design for today? Is there truly a way for the body to be trained in order to serve fashion? How can you manoeuvre emotion through your work? Each era has its dominant themes and fashion readily reflects them. Fashion as a reflection of society is also a privileged lens to see things more consciously. The necessity to sharpen the focus on the interlinked trilogy of the body, the mind, and politics is what has seamlessly been questioned in this provocative series of interviews. Curator, author, journalist, photographer and costume designer Filep Motwary releases his latest book ideated by Polimoda, THEOREM[A]: The Body, Emotion + Politics in Fashion. Formatted as a series of interviews with select contemporary fashion key figures, the book investigates the dressed body as a political statement, focusing on the linked trilogy of the mind, body and politics. In his provocative series of interviews, Motwary spoke with participants chosen for their professional integrity, their body of work and vast knowledge of historical and contemporary fashion, among other factors. Interviews were conducted with Hussein Chalayan, Jean Paul Gaultier, Pamela Golbin, Iris van Herpen, Harold Koda, Michèle Lamy, Thierry-Maxime Loriot, Antonio Mancinelli, Suzy Menkes, Violeta Sanchez, Valerie Steele, Jun Takahashi, Olivier Theyskens, Viktor & Rolf and Nick Knight. The interviews each explore the essence and perception of the body, poetic emotion and politics, touching specifically on the issues and controversies surrounding the current state of fashion.

Italian tailoring is a tradition of excellence in our country. In fact, clothes, especially men's tailoring, are veritable works of art, which conceal within the secrets and history of the city in which they are made. They are the product of a long tailoring tradition created from elegance and taste, where even the slightest detail is given the greatest care and attention. In fact, made-to-measure garments and shoes entail painstaking measuring and a transformation of these measurements into a perfect object, thanks to the skilled craftsmanship of tailors and of refined textiles. Detailed mastery for a unique, immediately recognizable style. This publication presents 28 historic tailor shops in Italy and their key protagonists (from Donnadio to Musella Dembech, Liverano&Liverano to Sartoria Napoletana, Rubinacci and Attolini to Caraceni, Ciardi and Pirozzi) in a complete guide across Italy, from north to south, in search of the haute tailoring and tailors who have shaped the world-famous Italian style.

The book features works from the Golda and Meyer Marks Cobra Collection, the largest CoBrA art collection in America. The NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale collection of Cobra art includes more than 1,600 works and is the largest museum collection in the United States, thanks in large part to Golda and Meyer Marks donating their collection from 1978 until their deaths in 1998 and 1991, respectively. Cobra art was born as an art collective in 1948 in reaction to the devastation of World War II and named for its artists' home cities (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam). Cobra art is raw, vital, spontaneous, and filled with dynamic abstract and semi-abstract forms. Its artists worked together and often collaboratively before going their separate ways in 1951, to achieve a new means of expression that challenged traditions and the constraints on artistic expression they had experienced during World War II. The movement greatly influenced the development of European modern art as well as contemporary art in America and Europe. The study of the Cobra art movement has led to a greater understanding of how acts of resistance and political movements continue to influence current events. This monograph of the museum's Cobra collection includes text by renowned experts in the field, 150 illustrations and detailed entries on 29 artists.

Danilo Eccher has been Director of GAM Galleria civica d'arte moderna e contemporanea of Turin since 2009.

The ever recurring motif in author's art is the dolls mask, factory made and entirely standardized. In this title, she uses it as a symbol of mans need for disguise, of the restraints each of us has to impose upon our individuality in order to exist and to function socially.

Seen as a great artist in Colombia, elsewhere Bursztyn has remained relatively unknown. The publication is a comprehensive survey on pioneering art practice of Bursztyn and seeks to reflect on and animate new tendencies in research on Feliza Bursztyn and her vibrant body of work. It features texts by prominent writers, researchers and curators - Julia Buenaventura, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Camilo Leyva, Daniel Muzyczuk, Lucas Ospina, Sylvia Suárez, Gina McDaniel Tarver, Lynn Zelevansky - and rarely published archive materials. The publication inaugurates the Muzeum Susch and Skira Editore's series dedicated to re-discovering women artists overlooked by the main canons of art history. A pioneer in kinetic sculpture, Feliza Bursztyn (1933, Bogota-1982, Paris) created wrecked metal sculptures with ghostlike yet comical humanoid traits that addressed the social effects caused by the aggressive modernization of Colombian society. Composed of industrial junk, often motor-animated, these works perform a theater of dystopian industrial hybrids. Bursztyn's immersive installations are characterized by their disconcerting mechanical sound produced by the frenetic vibration of the sculptures, as well as by occasional music scores accompanying the pieces. The artist's works and sculptural mise-en-scènes enact sites of aesthetic resistance and antithetical political investment, creating a unique experience that raises awareness on the situation and the perception of women in a male-dominated society and reveal the troublesome face of modernity.

In this new collection, the internationally exhibited and award-winning documentary and fine art photographer, David Lurie returns to the terrain of the city, but this time with a specific visual agenda in mind which he shapes with the eye for a carefully composed frame of both a documentarist and a fine artist. Lurie¿s new collection strikes at the very heart of the dilemma of unequal access to the technological means of production ¿ the digital sphere, usually reached via the ubiquitous smartphone. With his aesthetic eye, skilful sense of composition, lighting and colour and, most importantly, a keen sense of the topicality and socio-political importance of what is contained within his frames, in his new project Lurie visually dramatizes the explosion of cheap and available camera technology built into smartphones, which has coincided with a corresponding explosion of the platforms on which their images can be seen ¿ social media. This seemingly extreme democratisation of image making in fact also disempowers, by turning the data inherent in all images ¿ locations, faces, frequency of images, likes and dislikes ¿ into monetisable information to be harvested and deployed by social media corporations. Street photography started out as a means to document and thereby understand new ways of living that rapid urbanisation and industrial work and leisure practices had brought about. As a medium, street photography focused on popular culture and the working classes as a result. The novelty of having one¿s lifestyle and values disseminated photographically is a mainstay of the street photography idiom ¿ one that is now overshadowed by the ubiquity of its post-capitalist, self-initiated forms. This very ubiquity conceals the ideology behind a variable and radically unequal access to digital culture, still very much organised along class and racial lines.

Published to mark the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001, Fulvio Roiter: High-Rise New York celebrates the city and people of New York. Consisting of over 60 colour photographs taken during 1984-1998 by the internationally-acclaimed Italian photographer Fulvio Roiter (1926-2016), they illustrate the traits of beauty, strength, resilience and hope with a sense of poignant immediacy and timeless elegance. They recall a New York that once was, its instantly recognizable skyline irreparably and arbitrarily altered by the tragic set of events that unfolded just a few years afterwards. They collectively present a New York City over an imaginary 24-hour period, key historical events such as the immigration surge of the late 19th century and the 9/11 attacks subtly woven into the volume's poetic narrative with sensitivity and respect. As New York emerges from yet another life-changing experience caused by the Covid-19 global pandemic, Roiter's intimate portrait of New York and its inhabitants stands as a stoic reminder of life after death, of light after darkness.

The extraordinary jewelry creations by the famous Maison from its beginnings to the present day. This book presents the legendary jewelry and precious objects of Van Cleef & Arpels, and how they relate to time, nature and love. Time is a fundamental element for both creativity and craftsmanship. Time gives objects their shape; defines their style; determines their function, social utility, and the choice of materials and techniques; indicates origin; hones taste; and reveals context. Time is interpreted through eight values inspired by Italo Calvino's Lezioni Americane, or Six Memos for the Next Millennium, to honor the iconic pieces created by Van Cleef & Arpels over the years, from Art Deco masterpieces to the illustrious Zip necklace, gravity-defying Mystery Set, or celebrated Minaudières-some of the most important innovations in the history of 20th century jewelry-making. Nature plays an equally important role for Van Cleef & Arpels as an ever-present source of inspiration and tribute, embodied in unique gems and timeless masterpieces drawing on flora and fauna. Van Cleef & Arpels is founded on love, the most powerful energy in the world. Each object is handcrafted with love, and Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry has sealed some of the century's most legendary love stories.In a brilliant historical and critical essay, illuminated by a stunning iconographic selection of jewelry, precious objects and archive materials, this work describes the Maison's eternal values of time, nature and love.

A vase is never merely a container. As Georges Braque once said, "the vase gives form to emptiness": ever since the earliest human civilizations, this object has had a purpose that is greater than its function and it perennially seeks experimentation in shape and expression. The 1,000 vases presented in this book are an eloquent demonstration of this. They come from 35 different countries and more than 80% have been made by women or independent designers and artists born between 1988 and 1993, each of whom was invited to create a free interpretation of the same archetype, resulting in a spectrum of the infinite creativity inspired by the many possible versions of a single item. Made from an enormous range of materials (ceramic, terracotta, porcelain, metal, wood, glass, as well as natural fibers, industrial waste and recycled plastic), using techniques both ancient and ultra-modern (3D printing) and belonging to different categories (from amphora to jar, jug to carafe), almost all sit on the borderline that simultaneously unites and separates art, design and craftsmanship.

In the eighth decade of her life, Mira Lehr is in her studio creating work daily. Her work can be found in many public and private collections. Born in pre feminist times, well educated at Vassar, majoring in art history and philosophy, Mira might have been one of the countless female artists whose art became subservient to the expectations of women in the 1950's. However, Mira did it all. She married, raised a family and continued with her artistic training studying with leading figures of the time such as Motherwell and Hoffman. Mira has spent the last 40 years living in Miami. She was responsible for bringing many well-known artists to lecture and inspire and emboldened other women artists in cities like Miami. In 1969, Mira was selected by Buckminster Fuller to participate in the World Game Project. The agenda was to investigate scenarios for making human life sustainable on the planet. This sparked a new direction for Mira and she found her voice. Lehr notes, "I got the feeling we are meant to survive and to survive well." Mira Lehr believes in nature. She believes in its beauty, its force, its strength, its vulnerability and its need for ecology. It is said that art is visual philosophy. Mira Lehr understands this and takes us on a beautiful journey through the longevity of her work interspersed with notable essays and interviews. In 1995, the first book on Mira Lehr, Arc of Nature, was published. This new book, which is Mira's first international monograph, includes this 1995 book and then her subsequent years of her artistic practice.

The photography of German artist Hans Georg Berger has always focused on investigating identity, whether personal or cultural; here it is represented through 145 fine quality black and white photographs, printed using the silver gelatin process on baryta paper, starting with the negatives from the artist's Berlin archive. The title "Discipline and Senses" brings together in a single theme the artist's profound intellectual experiences and the studies he carried out over the course of almost fifty years, from the 1970s to today. Berger's approach is based on the ethical, not just aesthetic, centrality of the subject of the photograph. It is a remarkable and probably unique journey into great contemporary photography.

Ahmed Morsi: A Dialogic Imagination discusses the places, people, texts, ideas, and materials that have shaped the unique practice of the New York-based Egyptian artist Ahmed Morsi. A painter, poet, printmaker, and critic, Morsi has created a diverse body of work abundant in mythic beauty. After coming of age in the 1940s as part of the Alexandria School, a movement led by free thinkers and artists that marked the city's emergence as a postwar Mediterranean cultural entrepot, Morsi spent time in Baghdad, where he benefited from the city's vibrant literary renaissance of the 1960s, as an art critic and translator, before settling in Cairo, and eventually immigrating to New York in the mid-1970s. In Cairo, Morsi helped lead the journal, Galerie 68, which became the voice of the Egyptian avant-garde, while experimenting with theatrical set design and artist's books. This volume highlights the rich interplay between Morsi's poetry and paintings and emphasizes the way his multivalent practice conducts a dialogue with the wider world.