From Paris to Stalingrad, the Nazis systematically plundered all manner of art and antiquities. But the first and most valuable treasures they looted were the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. In "Hitler's Holy Relics, "bestselling author Sidney Kirkpatrick tells the riveting and never-before-told true story of how an American college professor turned Army sleuth recovered these cherished symbols of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich before they could become a rallying point in the creation of a Fourth and equally unholy Reich.
Anticipating the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler had ordered a top-secret bunker carved deep into the bedrock beneath Nurnberg castle. Inside the well-guarded chamber was a specially constructed vault that held the plundered treasures Hitler valued the most: the Spear of Destiny (reputed to have been used to pierce Christ's side while he was on the cross) and the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, ancient artifacts steeped in medieval mysticism and coveted by world rulers from Charlemagne to Napoleon. But as Allied bombers rained devastation upon Nurnberg and the U.S. Seventh Army prepared to invade the city Hitler called "the soul of the Nazi Party," five of the most precious relics, all central to the coronation ceremony of a would-be Holy Roman Emperor, vanished from the vault. Who took them? And why? The mystery remained unsolved for months after the war's end, until the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-born art historian on leave from U.C. Berkeley, to hunt down the missing treasures.
To accomplish his mission, Horn must revisit the now-rubble-strewn landscape of his youth and delve into the ancient legends and arcane mysticism surrounding the antiquities that Hitler had looted in his quest for world domination. Horn searches for clues in the burnt remains of Himmler's private castle and follows the trail of neo-Nazi "Teutonic Knights" charged with protecting a vast hidden fortune in plundered gold and other treasure. Along the way, Horn has to confront his own demons: how members of his family and former academic colleagues subverted scholarly research to help legitimize Hitler's theories of Aryan supremacy and the Master Race. What Horn discovers on his investigative odyssey is so explosive that his final report will remain secret for decades.
Drawing on unpublished interrogation and intelligence reports, as well as on diaries, letters, journals, and interviews in the United States and Germany, Kirkpatrick tells this riveting and disturbing story with cinematic detail and reveals-- for the first time--how a failed Vienna art student, obsessed with the occult and dreams of his own grandeur, nearly succeeded in creating a Holy Reich rooted in a twisted reinvention of medieval and Church history.

Patron Saints: Collecting Stanley Spencer is a revealing new exhibition at the renowned Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham - Spencer's spiritual home and major source of inspiration. The exhibition draws together a spectacular collection of loans, including The Centurion's Servant (Tate); Love on the Moor (Fitzwilliam); John Donne Arriving in Heaven, (Fitzwilliam) and one work not seen in the public domain in over 50 years. The exhibition and catalogue examine the often complex relationships between Spencer and his patrons and what drove them to collect his work. Spencer was a single-minded genius, but the influence of his patrons on his painting is far greater than has hitherto been realised. At the turn of the century, collecting art was no longer the preserve of the aristocracy and the upper classes, but Spencer's art appealed to a broad spectrum of art lovers, fellow artists, businessmen and politicians. Many of his patrons lived in Cookham, where he lived and found artistic inspiration, and many of his paintings were influenced by his spiritual feelings for that place. His idiosyncratic and deeply personal approach gave him a wide and enduring appeal, and he was patronised by some of the most important cultural figures and taste-makers of that time. Curator Amanda Bradley comments, "Behind Stanley Spencer, one of the greatest Modern British artists, were a group of individuals who enabled his very existence - both artistically and emotionally. They were not wildly rich, but they were powerful, cultivated, intellectual and artistic. Some bought on spec, others were true patrons, giving him the freedom to fulfil his artistic genius. Most fostered long-lived relationships with the artist, influencing his life and work more than has hitherto been realised. These were the patron saints." Patron Saints: Collecting Stanley Spencer explores the emergence of Spencer as an artistic personality, looking at those who helped him and why he - and his popularity - was a product of the zeitgeist (first half of the twentieth century) characterised by social and economic anxiety.

A draughtsman of remarkable ability, matching even his mentor Augustus John, Henry Lamb (1883-1960) was a founder-member of the Camden Town Group, exhibiting at their inaugural exhibition in 1911. He was a powerful and original War artist, and an engaging and sensitive portrait painter, whose group portraits in particular are as successful as those by any British painter of the age. To date unfairly eclipsed by the glamorous and culturally infl uential circle around him, Lamb is now probably best known through these fi gures and his many compelling portraits of them, amongst them Lady Ottoline Morrell, Evelyn Waugh and Lytton Strachey, whose monumental full-length portrait by Lamb in Tate Britain is probably the artist's best-known work. Lamb abandoned a promising medical career in Manchester to pursue his training as an artist at the London art school run by William Orpen and Augustus John. He found inspiration in the rural simplicity of Brittany, and a later visit to Ireland inspired his great genre painting Fisherfolk, Gola Island of 1913 - not seen in public since the last major retrospective in 1984. Following active service during the First World War as an army medical offi cer (for which he was awarded a Military Cross), he contributed two of the greatest artworks to the proposed National Hall of Remembrance a year after armistice in 1919. Following a productive period in Poole after the War, where he produced some evocative townscapes of its streets and skylines, he eventually settled in Coombs Bissett near Salisbury. Here he established a reputation as a sought-after portrait painter, executing a constant stream of landscapes, still lives, genre pictures and fi ne domestic subjects. Accompanying an exhibition at Salisbury Museum in 2018 and Poole Museum in 2019, Henry Lamb: Out of the Shadows will focus on over 50 works by the artist from across his career. As well as loans from major national collections, the group will include signifi cant works from private collections, including a substantial archive from the artist's family and a number of re-discovered masterpieces. The catalogue will also feature an introductory essay by Lamb's cousin, the writer Thomas Pakenham who knew the artist well.

The horror of the First World War brought out a characteristic response in a group of English artists, who resorted to black humour. Among these, John Hassall, a pioneering British illustrator and creator of the influential 'Skegness is so bracing' poster, holds a special place. Early in the war, he hit on the idea of drawing a parody of the Bayeux Tapestry to satirize German aggression and add to the growing genre of war propaganda. Taking the scheme of the famous tapestry which celebrates William the Conqueror's invasion of England, Hassall uses thirty pictorial panels to tell the story of Kaiser Wilhem II's invasion of Luxembourg and Belgium. In mock-archaic language he narrates the progress of the German army, never missing an opportunity to lampoon 'bad' behaviour: 'Wilhelm giveth orders for frightfulness.' The caricatured Germans loot homes, make gas from Limburg cheese and sauerkraut, drink copious amounts of wine and shamefully march through Luxembourg with 'women and children in front.' With comic inventiveness Hassall adapts the borders of the original to illustrate the stereotypical objects with which the English then associated their enemy: they are decorated with schnitzel, sausages, pilsner, wine corks and wild boar. Drawn with Hassall's distinctive flat colour and striking outlines, Ye Berlyn Tapestrie is a fascinating historical example of war-induced farce, produced by a highly talented artist who could not then have known that the war was set to last for another two years. Together with an introduction which sets out the historical background of its creation, every page of this rarely seen publication is reproduced here in a fold-out concertina, just like the original, to resemble the style of the Bayeux Tapestry.

In this study 'Art, Poetry and WW1, by Edward Lucue-Smith of writing, poetry and painting In the Centenary Year of the outbreak of the First World War the author considers the historical impact on the general psyche of the calamitous events, reflected in the expression of poets and visual artists. The volume includes Eric Kennington, CRW Nevinson, John Singer Sargent, William Orpen, Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash; and writers Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and T.S. Eliot. In Europe the painters: Otto Dix, Max Beckman, Franz Marc, Gino Severini, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ludwig Meidner. He establishes a continuity to the theme with reference to works by Velazquez, Watteau, Goya and others, in their treatment of the spectacle of battle and the horrors of human conflict.

Dutch painter Piet Mondrian died in New York City in 1944, but his work and legacy have been far from static since then. From market pressures to personal relationships and scholarly agendas, posthumous factors have repeatedly transformed our understanding of his oeuvre. In "The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian", Nancy J. Troy explores the controversial circumstances under which our conception of the artist's work has been shaped since his death, an account that describes money-driven interventions and personal and professional rivalries in forthright detail. Troy reveals how collectors, curators, scholars, dealers and the painter's heirs all played roles in fashioning Mondrian's legacy, each with a different reason for seeing the artist through a particular lens. She shows that our appreciation of his work is influenced by how it has been conserved, copied, displayed, and publicized, and she looks at the popular appeal of Mondrian's instantly recognizable style in fashion, graphic design, and a vast array of consumer commodities. Ultimately, Troy argues that we miss the evolving significance of Mondrian's work if we examine it without regard for the interplay of canonical art and popular culture. A fascinating investigation into Mondrian's afterlife, this book casts new light on how every artist's legacy is constructed as it circulates through the art world and becomes assimilated into the larger realm of visual experience.

This book marks the centenary of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain by critically re-examining the established interpretation of the work. It introduces a new methodological approach to art-historical practice rooted in a revised understanding of Lacan, Freud and Slavoj Zizek. In weaving an alternative narrative, Kilroy shows us that not only has Fountain been fundamentally misunderstood but that this very misunderstanding is central to the work's significance. The author brings together Duchamp's own statements to argue Fountain's verdict was strategically stage-managed by the artist in order to expose the underlying logic of its reception, what he terms 'The Creative Act.' This book will be of interest to a broad range of readers, including art historians, psychoanalysts, scholars and art enthusiasts interested in visual culture and ideological critique.

Poised at the start of the 21st century, we can see clearly that the previous century was marked by momentous changes in the field of design. Aesthetics entered into everyday life with often staggering results. Our homes and workplaces turned into veritable galleries of style and innovation. From furniture to graphics, it's all here-the work of artists who have shaped and re-created the modern world with a dizzying variety of materials. From the organic to the geometric, from Art Deco, through to Pop and High-Tech, this book contains all the great names-Harry Bertoia, De Stijl, Dieter Rams, Philippe Starck, Charles and Ray Eames, to name only a very few. This essential book is a comprehensive journey through the shapes and colors, forms and functions of design history in the 20th century. An A-Z of designers and design schools, which builds into a complete picture of contemporary living. Lavishly illustrated, this is design in the fullest sense. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

After Egon Schiele (1890-1918) freed himself from the shadow of his mentor and role model Gustav Klimt, he had just ten years to inscribe his signature style into the annals of modernity before the Spanish flu claimed his life. Being a child prodigy quite aware of his own genius and a passionate provocateur, this didn't prove to be too big a challenge. His haggard, overstretched figures, extreme depiction of sexuality and self-portraits, in which he staged himself with emaciated facial expressions bordering between brilliance and madness, had none of the decorative quality of Klimt's hymns of love, sexuality and yearning devotion. Instead, Schiele's work spoke of a brutal honesty, one that would upset and irreversibly change Viennese society. Although his works were later defamed as "degenerate" and for a time were almost forgotten altogether, they influenced generations of artists-from Gunter Brus and Francis Bacon to Tracey Emin. Today, his then misunderstood oeuvre continues to fetch exorbitant prices on the international art market. This monograph, first published in an XL edition, is now available in a slightly abridged, more compact edition to celebrate TASCHEN's 40th anniversary and features the paintings and drawings that retrace the fertile last decade of Schiele's life. These works are accompanied by essays introducing his life and oeuvre, situating the Austrian master in the context of European Expressionism and charting his extraordinary legacy. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

This publication offers for the first time an inter-disciplinary and comparative perspective on Futurism in a variety of countries and artistic media. 20 scholars discuss how the movement shaped the concept of a cultural avant-garde and how it influenced the development of modernist art and literature around the world.

A leading figure of the postwar avant-garde, Danish artist Asger Jorn has long been recognized for his founding contributions to the Cobra and Situationist International movements - yet art historical scholarship on Jorn has been sparse, particularly in English. This study corrects that imbalance, offering a synthetic account of the essential phases of this prolific artist's career. It addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and his collaborations with various artists' groups from the 1940s through the mid-1960s. Situating Jorn's work in an international, post-Second World War context, Karen Kurczynski reframes our understanding of the 1950s, away from the Abstract-Expressionist focus on individual expression, toward a more open-ended conception of art as a public engagement with contemporary culture and politics. Kurczynski engages with issues of interest to twenty-first-century artists and scholars, highlighting Jorn's proposition that the sensory address of art and its complex relationship to popular media can have a direct social impact. Perhaps most significantly, this study foregrounds Jorn's assertion that creativity is crucial to subjectivity itself in our increasingly mediated 'Society of the Spectacle.'

Exploring the ways in which painting, applied design and illustration intertwined over the course of the accomplished career of Paul Nash (1889-1946), this book provides a new perspective on one of the most gifted and celebrated English artists of the twentieth century. Skilfully navigating the diversity of Nash's design output, which drew in illustration, book jackets, posters, set design, pattern papers, fabrics, glass, ceramics and photography, in the context of Nash's painting and wider pre-occupations, James King presents an artist who strove to resolve his artistic vision. With Nash's work informed by seismic shifts within the visual arts during his lifetime - from the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement on the one hand, to Surrealism and Abstraction on the other - this fascinating book reveals the considerable gifts that allowed Nash to create a wholly original vision in turn.

'Ravilious in Pictures: The War Paintings' celebrates and commemorates the wartime career of Eric Ravilious, who died on active service in Iceland at the age of 39. One of a series of books, it creates a vivid portrait both of the artist himself and of life in wartime Britain.