Wallonia—the southern region of Belgium—boasts an extraordinarily rich cultural heritage. This book presents the first comprehensive overview of Walloon culture, exploring in particular the roles that literature, music, and art have played in establishing a sense of Walloon identity from prehistory to the present.
Lavishly illustrated with over four hundred reproductions of manuscripts, photographs, maps, and other works of art, this volume offers a magnificent exploration of Walloon culture.

A Cultural History of Wallonia

Arts & Photography

Mercatorfonds

Wim Delvoye (b. 1965) is known for his inventive and often controversial projects, and his work has been exhibited around the world. One of a generation of Belgian artists who have revolutionized contemporary art, Delvoye explores the body and its functions, producing art that combines the attractive and the repulsive, and addresses themes including religion and politics. One of his most famous works is Cloaca, a digestion machine; another significant project involves tattooed live pigs.
Coinciding with Delvoye's exhibition as guest of honor at the Louvre, Wim Delvoye Introspective is the culmination of close collaboration between the artist and distinguished scholars and critics. This publication presents a complete overview of works by the artist, demonstrating the range of media, technique, and thought-provoking subjects that defines his art.

Wim Delvoye Introspective

Dannatt, Adrian

Marcadé, Bernard

Duquenne, Olivier

Swauwaert, Dirk

Verschaffel, Bart

History & Criticism

The beeldenstorm, or the Iconoclastic Fury, that raged throughout the Low Countries in 1566 is a key concept in Netherlandish history. This popular uprising, which was partially grafted on Protestant ideas, has traditionally and unquestioningly been considered a turning point in the history of the Low Countries. It is all the more striking, therefore, that this occurrence has received scant attention in art history and that there has been little interest in the development of painting just after the beeldenstorm and before the advent of the great Baroque masters.
Featuring previously unpublished materials, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm investigates how the esteemed painters of the period—including Adriaen Thomasz Key, Maarten de Vos, Frans Pourbus the Elder, and Michiel Coxcie—sought a new visual idiom. This study explains why this period of Netherlandish history should be considered an important turning point in the broader context of art history. It demonstrates that the era's paintings represent a subtle but nonetheless important reinterpretation of the traditional, religious iconography and style, which served as the starting point of Netherlandish Baroque style.

Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm: Experiments in Decorum, 1566-1585

Jonckheere, Koenraad

The so-called Djenné statuary emerged circa A.D. 700 and flourished until 1750. The terracotta statues were manufactured by various groups inhabiting the Inland Niger Delta region of present-day Mali, centered around the ancient urban center of Djenné-Jeno. These terracotta sculptures, more than 300 of which are published in this book for the first time, express a remarkable range of physical conditions and human emotions, providing the largest corpus of ancient sacred gestures of any civilization in Sub-Saharan Africa. Djenné-Jeno investigates this important and mainly unpublished corpus of terracotta statuary of one of the Mande art styles of West Africa, and traces potential connections between regions in West Africa whose artistic styles were previously thought to have developed independently. Generously illustrated with hundreds of color images, this book represents a significant contribution to the study of an art form virtually unknown until a few decades ago.

Djenné-Jeno: 1000 Years of Terracotta Statuary in Mali

De Grunne, Bernard

Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) was a Flemish Baroque painter whose work has largely been overshadowed by his contemporaries Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Providing new insight on the artist as well as art historical context for his works, Jacob Jordaens and Antiquity emphasizes his strategic intelligence with respect to imagery and the art market and challenges the common characterization of Jordaens as a bourgeois artist of genre scenes.
Jordaens's work is examined as an example of classical culture being introduced into the commercial and intellectual life of Antwerp. He was an artist with an unusual talent for conveying imagery from classical literature, ranging from Satyr and Peasant to Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man. Focusing on the theme of antiquity, this volume features eighty paintings, drawings, tapestries, and sculptures from private collections and major museums, including the Museo Nacional del Prado in Spain and the Statens Museum for Kunst in Denmark.

Jordaens and the Antique

The expansive collection of the Triton Foundation (located in the Netherlands) contains approximately 250 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from more than 170 artists. The core of the collection consists of Western art dating from 1870 to 1970. Many important movements and artists from this century of creative production are represented, and the collection as a whole offers a fascinating overview of artistic developments from Impressionism to modern art.Avant-gardes, 1870–1970 features the diverse and celebrated artists of the Triton Collection, including works by Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud, Roy Lichtenstein, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and Andy Warhol. A checklist of artists' works as well as technical descriptions, basic literature, origins, and exhibitions for each work make the publication a useful reference tool.

Avant-gardes, 1870 to the Present: The Collection of the Triton Foundation

Van Heugten, Sjraar

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is one of the most prominent choreographers in contemporary dance. Her 1982 debut with Fase immediately attracted the attention of the international dance scene; since then De Keersmaeker and her company, Rosas, have created an impressive series of choreographic works that have been described as "pure writing with movement in time and space."
This book explores four of Rosas' early works: Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena's Aria, and Bartók. In addition to sketches, notes, and photographs, it features four DVDs that include interviews with De Keersmaeker, as well as dance demonstrations and extensive video clips from each of the four works.

A Choreographer s Score: Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena's Aria, Bartók

De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa

Cvejic, Bojana

Performing Arts

Giuseppe Penone's work is characterized by the beauty of its form and materials as well as the existential questions it raises. Associated with the Arte Povera movement and focusing as much on the creative process as on the work itself, the artist identifies himself with the river, the breath, and, more abstractly, movement and life. His works have been exhibited around the world, including his famous l'Arbre des voyelles (1999) in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. In 2013, Penone will be exhibiting as Guest of Honour in the Chateau de Versailles.
Combining historical, scientific, and poetic approaches, this handsome volume is structured around seven key themes in Penone's work: breath, eyes, skin, heart, blood, memory, and speech. Giuseppe Penone includes documentation of the artist's sculptures, drawings, photographs, and writings, and provides a fascinating overview of one of today's major international artists.

Giuseppe Penone: Forty Years of Creation

René Magritte (1898–1967) was a surrealist artist whose thought-provoking works used ordinary objects to challenge how viewers perceived reality. His extensive oeuvre was documented in a comprehensive five-volume project, led by distinguished art critic and writer David Sylvester. In the years that followed the publication of the final volume in 1997, numerous works purporting to be by Magritte appeared on the art market. Under the auspices of the Fondation Magritte, a committee was established to verify the authenticity of newly discovered works as well as those previously recorded as "whereabouts unknown" or listed as appendix items in the original volumes of the René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné.
René Magritte: Newly Discovered Works includes color illustrations of 130 previously unpublished or unknown works authenticated by the committee between September 2000 and March 2010. Like its predecessors, this volume is the culmination of years of research, which synthesizes new discoveries about the artworks and details of the life of Magritte himself. Accompanying text and comparative documentation provide a wealth of complementary information, including the circumstances of a work's discovery, references to letters, quotations in their original languages, and citations from previous volumes.

René Magritte: Newly Discovered Works: Catalogue Raisonné Volume VI: Oil Paintings, Gouaches, Drawings

Hieronymus Cock (1518-1570) was an Antwerp painter and printmaker. Together with his wife, he was one of the first to establish a publishing house for prints. From 1548 their firm “At the Sign of the Four Winds” issued hundreds of important etchings and engravings. Prints after frescoes and paintings by Italian artists Raphael and Bronzino, the first series of classical ruins, antique sculpture, as well as designs by such Northern artists as Maarten van Heemskerck and Frans Floris were distributed all over Europe and helped to spread Renaissance ideals of beauty. It was Cock who spotted the talent of Pieter Bruegel, an artist who would eventually supply Cock with more than sixty designs for prints.

Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print

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