Eliseo Mattiacci: Sculpture in Action in Rome is a fresh examination of the developments in Mattiacci's sculpture from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, dates that embrace the two decades he spent living and working in Italy's vibrant capital. New research by the contributors to this book reveal how the exceptional constellation of studios, galleries and institutional spaces as well as the architectural and landscape settings Rome offered were the crucial factor in Mattiacci's rapid sophistication as an artist. In the mid-1960s the city was already a major centre for art, literature, theatre and cinema, and the setting for numerous avant-garde performative 'actions' and 'happenings'. The Piazza del Popolo district was crowded with bars and galleries, and Mattiacci soon became warmly acquainted with various gallerists and artists, including the Arte Povera practitioners Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali. In this challenging and competitive environment Mattiacci sought to establish his own distinctive exploratory style, investigating materials, forms, sounds, presentations and actions in endlessly novel and inventive ways. The extraordinary Tubo, the long flexible yellow coil of metallic tubing that could be endlessly rearranged and even carried out of a gallery into the streets by files of admirers, was first exhibited in 1967, and made his name. The following year he staged Lavori in corso, a trio of very popular performances, in the Circo Massimo, which involved spinning huge umbrellas in imitation of the Earth's rotations and revolutions. Percorso, in 1969, was Mattiacci again in action, this time driving a noisy roadroller into and around a gallery. In the 1970s - a difficult decade of political violence in Italy - Mattiacci continued to explore both outwardly and inwardly. He was increasingly fascinated by archaeology, antique alphabets and non-literate cultures, notably the USA's First Peoples, and he created actions and presentations that ranged from exhibitions of x-rays of his own inner organs to appearances encased in 'bandaging' and plaster. In 1981 he first showed the admired Roma, a collection of 50 large sinuous metal shapes inspired by the volutes of classical and Baroque architecture, once again an artwork that is endlessly rearrangeable, indoors or out. Sculpture in Action is the beautifully illustrated account of Mattiacci's artistic creativity in those decades.

The publication Beneath the Skin provides an overview of the last ten years of work by the Swiss artist Corina Staubli (b. 1959). It shows the altercation in the tension between exterior and interior worlds and the ambivalence of beauty, the beguiling, the sinister and even the unfathomable. With diverse media - be it porcelain, latex, painting or digital collage - the artist directs a dialogue of opposing sides. The question she always poses is 'how does the clandestine and the unconscious reveal itself in something that is manifest' - and, vice versa, 'how does the external view reveal the internal view'? The book itself is sure to arouse intrigue, as it features a nylon sculpture on the cover! Text in English and German.

Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum In Race ExpertsLinda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina Hoffman in the Races of Mankind series created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protege of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Mestrovic, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. Nonetheless, the Field Museum commissioned her to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum's new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist. Hoffman's Races of Mankind exhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and lay ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate into her artistic model of race not only racial science but also popular ideas that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates the Races of Mankind exhibit at the juncture of these different forms of expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them. Race Experts is a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences.

This book, the first comprehensive interdisciplinary account of Michelangelo's work as a sculptor in bronze, is the outcome of extensive original research undertaken over several years by academics at the University of Cambridge together with a team of international experts, directed by Dr Victoria Avery, a leading authority on the history, art and technology of bronze casting in Renaissance Italy. The catalyst for this innovative project was the attribution to Michelangelo of the Rothschild bronzes - two extraordinary bronze groups of nude men on fantastical panthers - prior to their display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2015. First proposed by the distinguished Michelangelo scholar Professor Paul Joannides and validated by the wide-ranging research published here, the attribution to Michelangelo has now gained widespread acceptance. As part of this pioneering project, Professor Peter Abrahams, the eminent clinical anatomist specialising in dissection, has carried out the first ever in-depth scientific analysis of the anatomy of Michelangelo's nude figures. Abrahams' findings have uncovered hitherto unrecognised features of Michelangelo's unparalleled mastery of the structure and workings of the human body that give the gesture and the motion of his figures their unique expressive force. Enigmatic and visually-striking masterpieces, the Rothschild bronzes are the focus of this multi-authored, interdisciplinary volume that contains ground-breaking contributions by leading experts in the fields of art history, anatomy, conservation science, bronze casting and the history of collecting.