History of Art & Design Books

To Maori, the governing principle of mauri brings to all objects the power and prescience of a living spirit. Objects that are hand-crafted from wood, stone, shell, bone or pounamu are imbued with life by their creators. Conveying the mauri of an object through photography requires an exceptional ta...

A fascinating and varied survey of contemporary street art prints and stencil graffiti art. Graffiti has evolved into a rich and democratic form of visual expression that is now most often labelled 'street art'. As it matures, street art has moved indoors; galleries now exhibit and sell limited-e...

The British Museum holds the largest Maori collections outside New Zealand, including some items of major artistic and cultural significance. This important book will contain a substantial introduction including a history of the study of Maori material culture in Britain and New Zealand and a histor...

Contrary to popular opinion, New Zealand Fashion didn't begin in the late 1990s when four designers were sent to the London catwalks and created a stir with their stylish dark garments. Its history is in fact a long and rich one, and no one tells it better than the team of Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, Cla...

For early Maori, art was inseparable from daily life, whether it was the pattern on a sculpted spade handle or the magnificently carved prow of a war canoe. Julie Paama-Pengelly traces the evolution of art and design in historic Maori culture and brings that art to life, focusing on four major disci...

Botticelli's poetic delicacy created a magical world in which allegory and idealism are reflected. Each book in this series features a literary introduction and thoroughly researched essay followed by a section devoted to a detailed description of a selection of the artist's masterpieces. An ext...

This stunning book presents a photographic survey that traverses the concepts and values of tradtional M-ori weaving through to innovative, contemporary weaving practice. The evocative photos and text reveal the spiritual significance of weaving within Maori culture. Accolades Shortlisted for ...

Charles F. Goldie (1870-1947) is one of New Zealand's best known artists, with mystique surrounding his work. His fame has been fed by newspaper reports documenting record-shattering prices, thefts, vandalism and forgeries. The book explores Goldie's career, his early still life paintings, his time ...

Len Lye (1901 - 1980) is one of New Zealand's most celebrated, influential and inspirational artists who continues to be recognised internationally as a pioneer film maker, kinetic sculptor, poet, writer and painter. The world centre for Len Lye is the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery where his collectio...

A new edition of this iconic book includes new larger format and photographs rescanned from Marti Friedlander's originals. It is an indepth photographic study of the ancient art of moko.

In 2008 the famous painter Don Binney completed a suite of 24 absolutely charming coloured pencil drawings of Auckland's West Coast, from Huia to Te Henga (Bethells). They are evocative of the coast so many New Zealanders love and they are magnificent works in themselves. They are accompanied by tex...

'Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the start of his epic exploration of the power, and whole point, of art. 'The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. ...

This beautiful book reveals and illuminates New Zealand's vast national art collection. 400 artworks in full colour, many never reproduced before. The book spans the entire collection, from early European prints to contemporary acquisitions. International artworks by Rembrandt van Rijn, Albrecht...

The art of the video game has come a long way in the past 25 years. Once upon a time, the person responsible for a game's aesthetics was a solitary programmer - often presenting characters and landscapes as little more than bits of code and coloured pixels. Nowadays, entire teams of artists work tog...

Anyone can learn to make a plaited kete, one of the oldest and most popular of Maori art forms, from the leaves of New Zealand flax (phormium tenax). Te Mahi Kete gives detailed, step-by-step instructions, illustrated with numerous line drawings and black-and-white photographs, for preparing the fla...

1642? Yes, we have an art history that dates back that far, to the engravings made during Tasman's voyage that depict the first contact between European and Maori. In this tautly, provocatively and passionately argued history, leading art commentator Hamish Keith takes readers on a fascinating and i...

Heinrich Wolfflin was a pioneering critic who introduced new and rigorous methods of formal analysis into the study of art. Classic Art, first published in 1899, is itself a classic that has exercised a profound influence on the way people have looked at and thought about art. As an appraisal of the...

Why would a very smart New York investment banker pay twelve million dollars for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock's drip painting No.5 1948 sell for $140 million? And why does a leather jacket with silver chain attached, tossed in a corner and titled 'No...

A painting can take you to many places. It can take you around the world, or it can take you around the country, city or neighbourhood you live in. It can also transport you back into the distant past of myths, legends and ancient history - or it can take you way into the future. Since Maori first d...

Grahame Sydney is regarded as one of New Zealand's major artists. He is best known for his magnificent landscapes of Central Otago, many of which hang in public and private collections throughout New Zealand and the western world. His paintings have been gifted to Nelson Mandela, bought by Elton Joh...

The single best collection of photographs of Banksy's street work. Period. You Are An Acceptable Level of Threat concentrates on this singular artist's iconic imagery, spanning the late '90s up until the end of 2011. The locations are from around the world (predominantly the UK, US and Europe), and ...

Skinner is a self-taught artist from Sacramento, California who has meticulously crafted a balance of extraordinary mural work, mighty powerful wall-to-wall installations and a prolific commercial career. Influenced by 80s pop culture, human struggle, myths and violence, dungeons and dragons, and th...

This beautiful art book features Shigenori Soejima's best work from the various Persona games, including other projects such as "Stella Deus" and "Momoiro Taisen Pairon", and an exclusive interview with the artist himself.

In 1870, Albert Bierstadt painted one of the most novel subjects of his career: Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast. The canvas resulted from newly reawakened interest in a region the artist had visited only briefly seven years before. Although Bierstadt claimed to have painted "a portrait of the place...

The Te Papa Art Diary has become a classic, with fans the length and breadth of the country. This year, curator William McAloon, editor of Art at Te Papa, chose the artworks that appear in the diary, including works by Pat Hanly, Doris Lusk, Ralph Hotere, Michael Smither and Seraphine Pick. This yea...

Since the collapse of the iron curtain, Prague has become one of Europe's - and the world's - most popular tourist destinations. As in London, Paris, and Rome, visitors flock to the gorgeous buildings and monuments that grace the streets of Prague, entranced by structures ranging from Gothic and bar...

This book is a rare and fascinating picture of contemporary New Zealand artists in their studios. It provides new insights into the practical aspects of how artists embark on their creative processes. The 24 painters and sculptors were chosen by well-known writer and art commentator Richard Wolfe an...

The Land of the Long White Cloud is now the land of White Cloud Worlds. There, leading edge fantasy meets the utter brilliance and technical skill of a unique group of New Zealand based artists, whose works are influencing our popular culture - through movies like Lord of the Rings, Avatar and Distr...

The graceful, evocative haiku featured here were composed by the renowned Japanese haiku masters of the past four hundred years, including Matsuo Bash, Taniguchi Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. The deceptively simple poemsrendered in English with Japanese calligraphies and transliterationsare paired with...

'When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is'. Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbors living in splendor on the Cote d'Azur. But behind Chagall's role as a pioneer of modern art lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness...

Te Mata: The Ethnological Portrait is an important new addition to the analysis of portraiture in a New Zealand context, authored by leading colonial art historian Roger Blackley. Based on an exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington in 2008, this publication offers a fas...

In the first book of its kind, author Jenny Haworth shows World War II through the eyes of five of New Zealand's commissioned war artists - Peter McIntyre, Austen Deans, Russell Clark, Allan Barns-Graham and John McIndoe. Stationed to the areas where New Zealand soldiers were fighting in the Mediter...

In the autumn of 1502 three giants of the Renaissance period - Cesare Borgia, Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli - set out on one of the most treacherous military campaigns of the period. Cesare Borgia was a ferocious military leader whose name was synonymous with brutality and whose reputati...

This textbook is a compilation of the author's more than 35 years of teaching and excavation experience in the field of Aegean Bronze Age art history and archaeology. It is geared toward an audience of undergraduate and graduate students as an introduction to the Bronze Age art objects and architect...

Millions of artists worldwide explore fantasy worlds through their art, and many more fans of fantasy genres enjoy the imaginative visions they come up with. Whether inspired by myth, literature, religion or history, these images can astound, amaze and provoke, and offer visions into new and strange...

This revolutionary guide puts at stitchers' fingertips everything they need to learn the craft of applique. Kayte Terry, crafter extraordinare, shows how to master decorative stitches, create original templates, find inspiration in the everyday, and much much more. Best of all, we've formatted the b...

Internationally, art fairs are becoming one of the highlights of the serious art collector's year. Audiences see them as a supercharged environment for sampling the latest and dealers love the business they do. Indeed, some say about 25 percent of their sales happen at their stalls at the fairs. But...

In our recent history never have there been more artists, more dealer galleries or more auction houses. Art is the new commerce, collecting the new passion. Warwick Brown published 100 New Zealand Artists and Another 100 New Zealand Artists in the early 1990s to great acclaim and now he's back with ...

The arts of the Maori are among the most alluring and sophisticated of the Pacific peoples. They developed their skills through centuries of endeavour and craft experimentation, expressing religious and artistic ideas in wood, stone, bone, shell and other materials. In particular, their carving and ...

This exceptional book highlights over 120 taonga tuku iho (ancestral Maori treasures) from Te Papa's collections. Rich images of these precious objects, are accompanied by stories from the artists who created the taonga, the people who used them in daily life, and their living descendants. Items inc...