University of Chicago Press: New Titles from 'Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess'

Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution

Alfreda Murck — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In August 1968, the Pakistani foreign minister visited Beijing and presented Chairman Mao Zedong with a crate of mangoes as a diplomatic gesture. The next day, Mao sent the mangoes to the “Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong though Propaganda Teams,” who had been stationed at Quinghua University to put down warring factions of Red Guards ten days previously. The message of this gift was to dismiss the Student Red Guards, who had been leaders of the proletarian movement in China, and in their stead to install workers as the permanent guardians of China’s education system. During the following weeks, the mangoes were distributed to several factories, where they were treated as though they were religious relics. The golden mango was thus a powerful emblem of the power and respect accorded to the proletariat under Mao’s rule.

Mao’s Gold Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution is the catalog for an exhibition of the same title at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich, which explores the golden mangoes’ reverberations throughout Chinese culture for years to come. Included texts focus on the historical narrative of the golden mangoes’ rise to fame; first-person accounts of both students and factory workers; an examination the National Day Parade in 1968, which used the symbol of the mangoes prominently; a critical essay on the 1976 film The Song of the Mango; and an in-depth comparative study of working conditions in China from the late 1960s and today.

Alberto Giacometti

Ernst Scheidegger — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess, Alberto Giacometti:Traces of a Friendshipis being published in a revised and expanded edition, which includes over forty previously unpublished photographs, an intimate new chapter, and amended captions.

Alberto Giacometti (1901–66) is inarguably one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century. Immensely gifted and prolific, Giacometti gave physical expression to his twin obsessions of the human form and the alienation of modern life. Because of his canonical position in the history of art and the reams of scholarship produced about him, Giacometti remains to many the elusive master artist, distant and remote on the Olympus of creative endeavor.

Ernst Scheidegger, a friend of the sculptor, knew a very different Giacometti. Scheidegger accompanied him to his studio, ate and drank with him, and relaxed with him in his family home. Alberto Giacometti: Traces of a Friendship is a document of this intimate life of Giacometti, consisting of photographs that Scheidegger made over the course of two decades. Scheidegger welcomes readers into Giacometti’s studio and house in Maloja, Switzerland, allowing them rare access to the most closely held aspects of the artist’s life. Sketching in his studio, having a cup of coffee, his works in progress, his art in installation views, even his sleeping cats—Scheidegger captures the essence of the artist's working life in images that are artful in their own right.

André Thomkins - Lackskins

Stephan Kunz; Dagmar Streckel — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

André Thomkins (1930–85) was a renowned draftsman, painter, and word artist who combined a classic mastery of artistic media with a sense of whimsy and experimentation influenced by both surrealism and Dadaism. In the 1950s, Thomkins created what he called “Lackskins” by applying gloss paint to water. In a method similar to marbling paper, Thomkins would then use paper to pick up the abstract pattern of the paint on the surface of the water. He discovered this new approach to painting after he observed that glossy paint left a film of color on the surface of the water as he washed his paintbrushes. With great care and genuine curiosity Thomkins manipulated the color on the top of the water and created what he described as “something planetary, very light, and fluctuating.” Each piece combines the calculation of a watchful artist with the spontaneity of water in motion, resulting in works that are intoxicating but distant, colorful but unknowable. These pieces foreshadowed the later chromatic abstract paintings of younger generations.

Published to coincide with a exhibition of the Lackskins in the Bundner Kunstmuseum Chur, André Thomkins–Lackskins is the first comprehensive presentation of these works. Stylish and well-crafted, the book includes images of the Lackskins along with scholarship on Thomkins contributed by art historians. Thomkins’s own writing on the process and theory behind the Lackskins is also collected in this volume.

On Common Ground

Meret Wandeler; Ulrich Görlich — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

On Common Ground presents a history of spatial development in post-war Switzerland through 250 images. The authors draw on a vast collection of photographs found in archives of all sorts: local government offices, building companies, local and national newspapers, publishers of postcards, cultural heritage societies and amateur photographers.This carefully assembled volume looks specifically at the town of Schlieren, which today is a suburb of Zürich, and Upper Engadine, the world famous mountain resort near St. Moritz in the Canton of Grisons. Tracing the rise of the suburb, On Common Ground arranges images of each location in more or less chronological sequence—the top of each page shows Schlieren, while Upper Engadine is shown on the bottom, allowing for an easy visual comparison between the two regions. This unique study offers a novel way to understand the urban transformation of Switzerland since WW II, and by extension the modern rise of suburbs in central Europe. Two essays are provided in order to contextualize the photographs within Swiss history and the socio-economic developments during the second half of the twentieth century.

Ferdinand Hodler: Catalogue raisonné der Gemälde

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) is arguably the foremost Swiss artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ignoring artistic conventions of his time he created a vast oeuvre of impressive landscapes and portraits, monumental paintings of historic scenes and symbolistic and allegorical figures, and also of drawings and sketches. Hodler gained some recognition outside Switzerland already at his time, but a number of recent international publications and exhibitions as well as raising prices for his works in auctions indicate that Hodler has definitely become an important and highly renowned figure in art history.

Although Hodler's work has been widely published in recent years, a catalogue raisonné of his work has been lacking. This gap is being closed now by the Swiss Institute for Art Reasearch (SIK-ISEA) in Zurich. The result of years of scholarly work is going to be published in four parts until 2016.