Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Boeken

"Can’t the dream be used in solving the fundamental problems of life?" asked André Breton, in the First Surrealist Manifesto . For the Surrealists, dreams were the ultimate site of possibility, the realm in which the artist and writer might be liberated from his or her rationality, moral judgment and taste. This beautifully designed volume offers, for the first time, a thorough account of the centrality of dreams to the Surrealist project. It includes paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and photographs by Jean Arp, Brassaï, Victor Brauner, André Breton, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, René Magritte, André Masson, Dora Maar, Paul Nougé, Karel Teige and Yves Tanguy, among others. A special section on "Those Who Paved the Way (of Dreams)" includes works by J.J. Grandville, Odilon Redon and Henri Rousseau. Critical texts by Dawn Ades and Geroges Sebbag examine the history and philosophy of dreams within the Surrealist movement.

<i>Vogue: Like a Painting</i> is a lavish celebration of the intersection between the worlds of fashion photography and European art historical tradition. Compiling 67 carefully selected images from the <i>Vogue</i> archive, the volume explores fashion photographs of the last eight decades that take their inspiration from classical painting--those images that have become only marginally related to selling clothes (or perhaps all the better at it for their painterly invocations). Sometimes explicitly--we see direct homages to Vermeer and Hopper, for example--and sometimes more subtly, these images culled from <i>Vogue's</i> pages reference Spanish painting from the Golden Age, Dutch portraiture, Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite paintings and various schools contained in European royal collections. Traces of Constable, Zurbaran and Sorolla can be found within this volume, which brings together names from classic photography and those from more recent generations: Irving Penn, Erwin Blumenfeld, Horst P. Horst, Annie Leibovitz, Tim Walker, Paolo Roversi, Steven Klein, David Sims, Erwin Olaf, Mario Testino, Michael Thompson and Peter Lindbegh, to name a few. While some of these photographs are about direct mimicry, others are similar to painting only in technical approach--and some simply share the goal of revering women rather than sexualizing or objectifying them. With a gorgeous tipped-on cover and text by Lucy Davies, editor at <i>The Telegraph</i>, <i>Vogue: Like a Painting</i> is a volume produced as beautifully as its photographic contents.