Marie Laurberg – författare

Kusama's delicate drawings both illustrate and interpret Hans Christian Andersen's tale

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid” (1839), a story about a girl from the sea who followed her dreams and suffered a disastrous fate on land, is known all over the world (particularly in its animated incarnation). But the familiar story is brought to new life in this gorgeous edition, a collaboration between the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and artist Yayoi Kusama.

Paired with Hans Christian Andersen’s original text, the densely patterned, undulating line drawings of Kusama’s Love Forever series (2004–7) conjure up storms in the roiling waves of the ocean, the Little Mermaid’s vast underwater kingdom and her longing to live in the human world. Kusama’s fertile, endlessly repeating forms are an ideal match for the poetic and disturbing universe evoked in the fairy tale; the result is a true collaboration. Kusama’s drawings both illustrate and interpret Andersen’s story, bringing it to terrifying life, and Andersen’s words lend narrative content to Kusama’s landscapes of unblinking eyes, curling tendrils and disembodied profiles.

Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) first left Japan at the age of 28, landing in late 1950s New York. Her oeuvre, now spanning more than 50 years, includes painting, performance, installations and environments, sculpture, film, fashion, design and literary work. She was recently named the world’s most popular artist, based on annual figures reported by The Art Newspaper for global museum attendance in 2014.

Myths of the moon in the arts and sciences, 50 years after the first manned landing

The moon has long furnished humankind with an artistic icon, an image of longing and object of scientific inquiry. Encompassing art, film, literature, architecture, design, natural history and historical objects, and published on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing (July 20, 1969), The Moon surveys the iconography of the moon, from Romantic landscape paintings to space-age art. It takes the 1969 landing as a thematic fulcrum and a culmination of the deep-rooted cultural conceptions invested in the space race in the 1960s, from David Bowie to Disney.

The book also accounts for the science of the moon throughout the ages, from Galileo to NASA, addressing the many lunar myths that have existed throughout time. Also explored here is moonlight, an important theme in the Romantic nocturnal landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, J.C. Dahl and Carl Julius von Leypold. Another powerful artistic genealogy is associated with science fiction, a genre that has on occasion influenced space programs: Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865), for instance, famously inspired NASA's Apollo programs. Film pioneers such as Georges Méliès and Fritz Lang created cinematic lunar voyages, and in the 1930s, surrealist artists such as Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst explored the moonlit landscape as psychological allegory. Later, during the Cold War, superpowers on both sides of the Iron Curtain worked closely with artists to orchestrate and interpret the space race: Robert Rauschenberg, for example, was one of eight artists invited by NASA to witness Apollo 11, while artists in the Soviet Union played a central role in building the cult of the cosmonaut.

The Moon looks at all these lunar themes and myths, in a thrilling and inspirational gathering for anyone who has felt the moon's pull on their imagination.