A strikingly original exploration of the profound impact of World War II on how we understand the art that survived it By the end of World War II an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books had been seized from their owners by Nazi forces; many were destroyed. The artworks and cultural artifacts that survived have traumatic, layered histories. This book traces the biographies of these objects--including paintings, sculpture, and Judaica--their rescue in the aftermath of the war, and their afterlives in museums and private collections and in our cultural understanding. In examining how this history affects the way we view these works, scholars discuss the moral and aesthetic implications of maintaining the association between the works and their place within the brutality of the Holocaust--or, conversely, the implications of ignoring this history. Afterlives offers a thought-provoking investigation of the unique ability of art and artifacts to bear witness to historical events. With rarely seen archival photographs and with contributions by the contemporary artists Maria Eichhorn, Hadar Gad, Dor Guez, and Lisa Oppenheim, this catalogue illuminates the study of a difficult and still-urgent subject, with many parallels to today's crises of art in war.

This collection of approximately fourteen hundred objects is a comprehensive compilation of most forms of Wedgwood's ware from the eighteenth century, and such rare pieces as the figure of Britannia, a medallion bearing the portrait of Sir William Hamilton and inscribed by Thomas Bentley, and a cream-ware cream cullier can be found in no other museum.

More than two hundred spectacular photographs, sensual, luminous, frenzied, true, from 1955 to the present, that catch and define the energy, intoxication, rebellion, and magic of rock and roll; the first book to explore the photographs and the photographers who captured rock’s message of freedom and personal reinvention—and to examine the effect of their pictures on the musicians, the fans, and the culture itself. The only music photographers whose names are well known are those who themselves have become celebrities. But many of the images that have shaped our consciousness and desire were made by photographers whose names are unfamiliar. Here are Elvis in 1956—not yet mythic but beautiful, tender, vulnerable, sexy, photographed by Alfred Wertheimer . . . Bob Dylan and his girlfriend on a snowy Greenwich Village street, by Don Hunstein . . . John Lennon in a sleeveless New York City T-shirt, by Bob Gruen . . . Jimi Hendrix, by Gered Mankowitz, a photograph that became a poster and was hung on the walls of millions of bedrooms and college dorms . . . For the first time, the work of these talented men and women is brought into the pantheon; we see the musicians they photographed and how the images gave rock and roll its visual identity. To bring together these images, Gail Buckland, acclaimed photographic editor, curator, and scholar, looked through the archives of one hundred photographers, selecting pictures not on the basis of the usual suspects, but on the power of the images themselves, often picking an image a photographer didn’t even remember he or she had taken. Buckland writes about the photographers, their influences, their relationships with their subjects, how they took the images, how they saw what they saw and captured what they captured: the spirit and essence of rock. A revelation of an art form whose iconic images changed the world as we knew it.

Drawn from Birmingham Museums Trust's incomparable collection of Victorian art and design, this exhibition will explore how three generations of young, rebellious artists and designers, such as Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, revolutionized the visual arts in Britain, engaging with and challenging the new industrial world around them.

This book explores the fascinating subject of 'lover's eyes', hand-painted miniatures of single human eyes, set in jewelery and given as tokens of affection.

"This book places historic Alabama pottery-making into a national and international context and describes the technologies that distinguish Alabama potters from the rest of the Southeast. It explains how a blending and borrowing among cultural groups that settled the state nurtured its rich regional traditions. In addition to providing a detailed discussion of pottery types, clays, glazes, slips, and firing methods, the book presents a geographic survey of the state's pottery regions with a comprehensive list of Alabama potters - a valuable resource for collectors, scholars, and curators."--BOOK JACKET.

Vietnam created the most sophisticated ceramics in Southeast Asia. Though they borrowed from China, Vietnamese potters explored their own indigenous tastes and developed their own production techniques. Blessed with the smooth gray-white clays of the Red River Valley, they created pieces that are amazingly light and thin-walled, with skillfully painted, incised, and carved decoration. Two particularly popular decorative themes were dragons (from whom the Vietnamese believed they were descended) and lotuses (considered archetypal symbols of Buddhist purity, because the flower emerges unsullied from the mud). Through a series of judicious purchases that began in the 1970s, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, has created an extraordinary collection of Vietnamese ceramic art. Essays by three noted experts introduce the collection. John Stevenson, co-author of Vietnamese Ceramics: A Separate Tradition, describes the evolution of Vietnamese ceramics and the contexts in which they were produced, and analyzes their aesthetic attraction. The Museum's senior curator, Donald A. Wood, explains the rich symbolism of decorative motifs found on Vietnamese ceramics. Independent scholar Philippe Truong, of Paris and Saigon, assesses the current state of the field.

The Chokwe, the most famous and artistically prolific ethnic group in Angola, command a rich visual world, as this exhibition catalog illustrates using artworks carefully selected from prominent private and museum collections in the United States, Europe, Canada, and South America. One hundred and fifty of the finest masterpieces of the Chokwe are displayed here in vibrant color, as well as works from neighboring groups resident in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, to include masks, chief's and ancestral figures, thrones, scepters, divination tools, and ceramic figures.