Snoeck Publishers – förlag

The exhibition Picasso-Perpignan: The Inner Circle, 1953-1955 celebrates the reopening of the newly extended and renovated Musée de l'Art Hyacinthe Rigaud. The mansion, which houses the museum, was for Picasso the setting for a new period in his life. He was at the height of his glory, courted from all sides. While he rested in Perpignan, he tended to spend his time at bullfights and parties rather than work in the studio prepared for him by Jacques de Lazerne in his mansion. This exhibition corresponds to a personal, aesthetic break for Picasso, who then faced up to the great masters. His break-up with Françoise Gilot in 1953 and the beginning of his relationship with Jacqueline deeply affected the artist, who needed the healthy breaks he took in Perpignan with his friends, the Lazernes. The exhibition chronicles the relationship between Perpignan and Picasso in 1953, 1954 and 1955 through major works, documents and photographs of the artist in the city, many of them previously unseen.

In the wake of its 30th anniversary, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Saint‐Etienne Métropole wishes to publish a large‐scale retrospective catalogue, intended to offer a fresh look at its collection. This substantial work is in line with the two previous catalogues, published on the occasion of the 10th and 20th anniversaries of MAMC +. Aimed at a large audience, it aims to become the institution's new reference work. It will also be sent to the museum's many partners and collaborators (artists, curators, curators, art critics and historians, journalists, institutional and political leaders). The MAMC + wishes to approach the collection through its strong axes, constituting markers of the museum's identity, such as American art or post‐war German art. But it also intends to make visible groups that are less well known: the Symbolist collection, the collection of primitive art by Victor Brauner, the photographic collection of Raul Hausmann or the collection of contemporary drawings, will thus be the subject of substantial developments. The book will also be punctuated by short focuses intended to deepen certain aspects of the collection.

Text in English and French.

Since 2011, fotofever has advocated contemporary photography through annual events, providing a platform to elevate new talents and promote the joy of collecting, supporting artists in their lifetime.

This accompanying exhibition catalogue presents the 8th edition of this annual event held at Carrousel du Louvre. More than 200 artists, 100 galleries and publishers from 20 countries across Europe, America and Asia, present the latest landscape of contemporary photography. And for the 180th anniversary of the invention of photography, fotofever unveils the boldness and creativity of the French scene.

Text in English and French.

Lecoanet Hemant is a fashion house founded in 1981 by Didier Lecoanet (Chaumont, 1955) and Hemant Sagar (New Delhi, 1957). Didier Lecoanet, in charge of creation, took courses at the Boederer Academy of Arts, the Ecole Camondo and perfected his training thanks to an internship at Lanvin. Hemant Sagar, who manages the house, took courses in a German school of patronage and fashion design, before working in a major ready-to-wear company, from design to sales.

They opened a boutique on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré in 1981. Lecoanet Hemant was admitted to the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture in 1984. They created 33 haute couture collections between 1984 and 2000. The Lecoanet Hemant style, inspired by the structure of the Indian sari and multiple variants intended for active and elegant women, was crowned with the Dé d'Or in 1994. Reconnecting with the origins of Hemant Sagar, the Lecoanet Hemant house moved to India in 2002, further developing its loan -à-porter and reserving the creation of haute couture models for a private clientele. Didier Lecoanet and Hemant Sagar are the owners of the creations of the house "Lecoanet Hemant". They also own the art direction rights of their models.

Text in English and French.

Since the first festival in 1989, the message has been one of quality - quality visual news reports conveying information, as seen through the eyes of photojournalists, offering their essential contribution. Everyone who appreciates photography and reporting comes to the festival, a major event in the photography calendar. Every year in Perpignan the festival attracts large crowds with more than 220,000 visitors to the exhibitions. For 33 years, Visa pour l'Image-Perpignan has been following developments and changes in both the politics and the economy of photojournalism and the press industry, and has supported professional photojournalists by providing them with the opportunity to show their work to a wide range of people.

Now, more than ever before, we can see just how important the festival is, acting as an advocate for photojournalists whose job is to provide news and information, to offer insights and issue warnings, while working in conditions with no real security, whether for physical safety or for employment/income.

The catalogue presents the program of the 2022 festival, with an eight-page feature on each exhibition and photographer.

Text in English and French.

Often celebrated as a kind of genius trained in the “school of life” who managed to produce a singular body of work despite a lack of professional training, the autodidact questions and challenges our conceptions of art. Entitled The Self‐taught Riddle, the new exhibition presented at the MAMC + in Saint‐Étienne aims to revisit this idealising vision of the figure of the self‐taught artist in the history of contemporary art in an attempt to grasp what actually happens when artists learn by themselves. The exhibition assembles over 200 works by self‐taught artists from a wide range of backgrounds who implement, emblematically, different modes of constructing knowledge autonomously. It also features the works of a few professional artists who decided to start from scratch and launch themselves into the unknown. It seeks to identify the intentions, processes and gestures that lead – consciously, intuitively, or unconsciously – to aesthetic innovation and to obtain, sometimes retrospectively, to a prominent place in the history of art.

Text in English and French.

The parental home of photographer Karin Borghouts was destroyed by a fire. Despite the feelings of sorrow, chaos and irreversibility, Borghouts was fascinated by the beauty that had left the destruction. Her intuitive decision to record the charred interior at that time has led to a series of captive and moving images.

Text in English, French and Dutch.

This lavishly presented book is dedicated to the Lecoanet fashion label, founded in 1981 by Didier Lecoanet and Hemant Sagar. The label initially was based in Rue du Faubourg Saint‐Honoré, Paris and focussed only on haute couture designs. However, the label has transitioned the focus to ready‐to‐wear and has moved their base to Gurugram, India. Hemant and Lecoanet met in Paris, France, at the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. Both of them were learning Haute Couture at that time and decided to launch something together. They started a store in Paris and were one amongst only 24 Haute Couture Houses. They eventually became a part of the Haute Couture Club and also joined Syndicat as a member. They presented their collections in various international events and later decided to move to India to launch two new brands namely GENES and Ayurganic.

Photographer Jeffrey Van Daele is an internationally renowned nature and animal photographer. This striking and intimate duotone report on African wildlife not only shows us wild animals in their habitat, but also warns that they need this place to survive.

Text in English, French and Dutch.

The first international exhibition of 2022 for Louvre Abu Dhabi tells the story of Versailles as a central diplomatic instrument that solidified the prowess of the French royal court and served as the stage for its fascination with various civilisations in a rapidly globalising world. Objects from the palace on show range from wallpapers and porcelain to Chinese and Japanese lacquerware.

The exhibition has been curated by Hélène Delalex, Curator, Furniture and Decorative Arts, and Bertrand Rondot, Chief Curator, Furniture and Decorative Arts, at the musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.

End of 2020. Brussels. A city without people. The scenery of everyday life is deserted. Escape from everyone. The tracks are still visible. People walk shyly through the streets and want to get to their final destination as quickly as possible. A few wander through the city. Aimless, because the doors remain closed. The architecture is completely in the spotlight, but without everyday life, the city also loses much of its meaning.

“As a photographer I was a privileged witness in special times. It felt like wartime without weapons, a battlefield without opponents. The buzz had given way to an uneasy, restless, deafening silence. Late 2020 ‐ early 2021 I spent a lot of time in Brussels at the request of Jean‐Michel Jaspers (CEO Jaspers‐Eyers Architects). He had already asked me during the first lockdown if I wanted to photograph the empty city. Unfortunately, it was not allowed and not possible at the time, since the government had decided that my profession was not essential. Fortunately, when the curfew went into effect in Brussels, I was allowed to.” – Steven Massart

Text in French and Dutch.

Rediscover the inspiring work of the Belgian architect, Léon Stynen (1899‐1990). Unpublished texts and family photos from the giant of architecture with 990 projects to his name. A reaffirmation of modernism for what it is: a radical shift that continues to influence our times. The two casinos, in Knokke and in Ostend, the pavilions at Expo '38 in New York and Expo '58 in Brussels, the BP building in Antwerp, the deSingel arts centre in Antwerp, single‐family homes, and designs for cruise ships, cinemas, and furniture that are still in circulation today are all examples from a body of work that stand as enduring symbols for an avant‐garde that has passed the test of time. This book highlights Stynen's versatility and profound influence. The man who succeeded Henry Van de Velde as director of La Cambre also worked with Le Corbusier, Camille Huysmans, Henry Van de Velde, Renaat Braem, René Guiette, Victor Bourgeois, Paul Delvaux, the CIAM, and many more besides. The book features extraordinary documents from the family archives.

In 2019, artists Maxime Berthou and Mark Požlep undertook a journey of several months on the Mississippi, from north to south. Their intention was to cross the United States along its most important waterway, brimming with life and marked by history, but also by abuse: from racism, unemployment and poverty to monoculture through to pollution. Along the river, they shot images of their encounters, also documented by sketches and notes in their logbook, but also collected many varieties of cereals, with the aim of later making the famous 'moonshine' alcohol, very popular during prohibition.

A story that this book tells for the first time in its entirety, in words and images, with the help of testimonies, photographs and drawings, as well as essays signed in particular by the French film critic Antoine de Baecque.

The project has already been presented as an installation at HISK Open Studios and, through an educational program, at the Center Pompidou in 2019. It was the subject of a homonymous film, the premiere of which took place in NOLA – acronym for 'New Orleans, Louisiana' – in January 2022, and recently a theatrical event, first performed in Ljubljana in May 2022, then in Utrecht. In their socially engaged and cross-disciplinary performance-based practice, the two artists track down issues lurking beneath the shimmering surface - often water: in 2015 they once worked together at Hogshead 733, restoring an old wreck and traversing the Channel with it, not without difficulty, until reaching Scotland, where they transformed the planks of the boat into wooden barrels to distil whiskey there.

The idea of this book is to shed light on the various stages in the construction of the buildings along with their use in the Cinquantenaire in Brussels from 1880 until today.

Besides statues and monuments, the history of the major institutions that are housed here are brought to life in text and image. The story of the World Fairs is linked to the history of Belgium as well as daily life in the park today with the help of the many unpublished documents.

First curator of the Egyptian department at the Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH), Jean Capart (1877-1947) is often regarded as the founding father of Belgian Egyptology. Besides being the one who gave its impulse and rise to the development of the Egyptian collection at the RMAH, he was at the root of many other initiatives that contributed to turn, within a few years only, the RMAH into a prominent research centre in Egyptology.

Under Capart's leadership, one of the world's finest and most complete Egyptological libraries arose in Brussels at the RMAH during the first decades of the 20th century. Keeping up with pioneering practices that Capart had observed in leading-edge institutions around Europe and the USA, the museum's library rapidly housed a very large collection of books and journals about Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology along with an important photographic archive which was constituted for research purposes and academic dissemination as well as education and public outreach. During his entire career, Capart constantly invested in the development of this collection by feeding it with photos he bought from colleagues and institutions abroad, and with photos he and his collaborators took during their scientific missions and trips throughout Egypt and in museums over the world.

The initial core on which this important photographic archive built up, and which counts more than 53,000 individual non-digital items today, consists of almost 7,000 high resolution historical glass plate photographic negatives dated to the first half of the 20th century. Although this large sub-collection constitutes, by its diversity and historical significance, an extremely rich source of documentation and information, it has been much neglected during the past decades, and its existence and contents remain completely undisclosed to the larger Egyptological community.

Following Capart's initial ambition, the SURA project (sura being the Arabic word for 'photo') aims to make this highly valuable photographic collection available again to the international scientific community as well as to the public, by ensuring its conservation and by creating a fully digitised database that will be freely available online in the near future.

Think you know about the Impressionists? Louvre Abu Dhabi, in partnership with the Musée d’Orsay, invites you to think again with Impressionism: Pathways to Modernity, one of the most significant Impressionist exhibitions ever to be held outside France.

Featuring pioneering works by Manet, Degas, and Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Cézanne, the exhibition brings together more than 150 masterpieces alongside etchings, costumes, film and photography to explore why Impressionism was considered so shocking in the 19th century and how it paved the way for the artistic revolutions that were to come.

The extraordinary abundance of French sculptures in the United States is indicative of a specific taste for this area of French art, but also of the close proximity of Franco-American historical and artistic relations. The United States is the country outside of France with the largest number of French sculptures and the latter represent by far the majority of foreign sculptures.

Once gathered, combined, connected, they weave the story of a taste. Their study makes it possible to detect trends and periods, to identify the personalities of dealers, collectors and curators, and to understand the supply channels of this transatlantic trade, from the place of production to the place of consumption, from the place of creation to place of appreciation.

The purpose of this book is to give life and meaning to these works by placing them in their American context. The first part emphasises the eminently political and official role, tool of political message when it comes to celebrating the heroes of the American independence, or commercial and industrial propaganda when France shows up at universal exhibitions. From its birth, French sculptors have been associated with the development of the American nation and its society.

The second part is devoted to the role played by French sculptors in American urban decor, as well as in the art of parks and gardens. They largely contributed to the introduction of the Art Deco style in ornamental sculpture.

The third part celebrates sculpture as a collector's item, sought no longer for the character it represents, nor for its role as a complement to architecture, but truly as an object whose formal beauty is the primary asset.

The fourth and last part is dedicated to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rodin was all at once: he represented the art of today, that of the Salon to which he regularly sent his works, sometimes the art of yesterday in his few creations in the style of the 18th century, and above all, he was gradually recognised as the path to the art of tomorrow.

In conclusion, an assessment is made of the taste for French sculpture since the 1950s, which saw a change in the relative importance of the various actors, dealers, collectors, academics and curators.

Julien Saudubray graduated in 2012 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and since then has exhibited in Belgium, France, Italy and England.

This young artist excels in experimenting. After a few detours, a synthesis of his painting has now developed into a practice that he calls mechanistic. Between abstract and figurative, he continues to work on images, constantly adding layers and colours while at the same time also removing them, with the subjective being reduced to a minimum. As he says: 'With each brushstroke I hesitate between excitement and boredom as I observe myself while painting as an absurd machine programmed according to the Beckettian formula "To miss more, to miss better".'

Together with gallery Waldburger Wouters, Uitgeverij Snoeck found the time for a first overview of his work in a book with a challenging design. An artist's book, but not only. With texts by Louma Salamé, director of the Fondation Boghossian and by Claire Leblanc, director of the Elsene Museum.

Text in English and French.

Since the mid-1990s, the French artist Jérôme Boutterin has been constructing an impressive work, mainly abstract, remarkable for the dynamism of its interplay of lines, its multiple perspectives and its chromatic exuberance. In different formats, he creates images in a particular formal language. His works are presented in France, but also in Germany, China, South Korea and the United States. He often exhibits in partnership with the Marc Minjauw gallery in Brussels.

This book gives an overview of his work from 1999 to the present day. Organised by theme and interspersed with gallery and workshop views, the series benefits from a fresh and contemporary design.

I travelled across Ukraine in August 2013, three months before the Maidan protests, without of course suspecting that this would be the last summer that this country would experience in its territorial integrity. The heat languished the cities. The beaches of Odessa or Crimea were crowded with Russian and Ukrainian tourists. But behind the carefree summer, we could already see the beginnings of the conflict to come. I brought back 73 films, i.e. more than 2,600 views, to finally select the 76 photographs that make up this book. - Thierry Clech

Text in English, French and Dutch.

With this series, Indra Laenens takes us on an "imaginary journey" through the First World War. Fascinated from a young age by war photography, he made many collages from self-portraits inspired by popular scenes by Bruegel and old black and white documentary photographs. The photos of the First World War led the artist to work in a realistic way, focusing on emotion and experience, but with a personal look at the time guided by his readings and the help of specialists. The principle of the duplication of “self” makes it possible to test the limits of the medium. The book is also intended as a strong call for peace, “no more war”… 

Text in English, French and Dutch.

In 1934-1935, a major ethnographic and archaeological expedition to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) was organised by the Musée de l'Homme in Paris and the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels. In addition to the important scientific data recorded, the mission also led to the donation to Belgium of a statue (moai) called Pou Hakanononga, which is now known to be one of the oldest produced on the island. This book tells the story of this astonishing statue, which has been on display at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels since 1935, and is the first in a new series PLUS - Masterpieces of the Royal Museums of Art and History.

Nicolas Cauwe, a Doctor in Art History and Archaeology from the ULiège, is Acting Head of Department and Curator of the Prehistoric and Oceanic collections at the Royal Museums of Art and History. He is also a guest lecturer at the UCLouvain, a full member of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Bonn. Between 1999 and 2020, he carried out some 20 archaeological missions on Easter Island.

Patrick Vertenten (1964, Sint-Gillis-Waas, Belgium) is an artist who paints from the heart. Marked by the use of diffused light and brushstrokes—reminiscent of shallow focus in cinematography—the atmosphere of the Belgian artist’s oeuvre is one of nostalgia and melancholia.

Inspired by film, literature, poetry, and music, Vertenten recuperates found imagery from various sources before transforming them into a brand new entity, examining the bittersweetness of humanity and life in general; loneliness, weakness, intimacy, desire, and Sehnsucht. 

Moved by the beauty of the picture, the viewer is invited to explore the image in its new context, possibly striking a nerve or two, in which the dark tones of the picture resonate with the burden of life, reviving in the contrast of the symbolic and painterly highlights.

Text in English and Dutch.

Embark on a captivating journey through the world of animal fables with From Kalila wa Dimna to La Fontaine: Travelling through Fables.

This timeless literary genre transcends across cultures and centuries, imparting life lessons and values to both adults and children.

From Kalila wa Dimna to La Fontaine traces the fascinating evolution of these fables. They originated in India and Greece, then evolved through influential figures such as Ibn al-Muqaffa’ and Aesop, reaching their pinnacle with French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine in the 17th century.

Featuring approximately 133 artworks, beautifully illustrated manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, graphic arts, and 3D objects, generously lent from prestigious institutions worldwide, this publication invites readers to witness the commonalities between Kalīla wa Dimna and La Fontaine.

'What if Vincent van Gogh suddenly realises that he is... himself a sunflower? Or thinks he is?

This book recounts the story of this well-known Dutch artist who, standing in the midst of his overwhelming sensory world, becomes aware just how thin the line between reality and dream world is. Did he live and work on a narrow borderline between truth and fantasy? Did he enter a different, perhaps higher frequency? How did all the images and observations come into him so intensely, and then spill out again onto his canvases? And how did the artist, but also beloved son, brother,… and therefore perhaps sunflower, relate to the world and his immediate environment?

In this richly illustrated, poetic book, author Paul de Moor creates, in words and images, an immersive experience for children aged 10 and over into the world of Van Gogh. As a celebrated children's author, De Moor has already introduced children and young people to the artistic universes of Roger Raveel, Francis Alÿs, Michaël Borremans, Luc Tuymans and Raoul De Keyser. And now also Van Gogh.

Ages 10 plus.