Atelier Éditions – serie

A kaleidoscopic celebration of the USDA’s pomological collection, offering an engaging, biophillic meditation upon the sweetest of the earth’s produceThe United States Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection encompasses 7,497 botanical watercolor paintings of evolving fruit and nut varieties, alongside specimens introduced by USDA plant explorers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Assembled between 1886 and 1942, the collection's remarkable, botanically accurate watercolors were executed by some 21 professional artists (including nine women). Authored largely before the widespread application of photography, the watercolors were intended to aid accurate identification and examination of fruit varietals, for the nation’s fruit growers.Documenting the transformation of American pomology, the science of fruit breeding and production, and the horticultural innovations accountable for contemporary fruit cultivation and consumption, the USDA’s collection offers fascinating anthropological and horticultural insights concerning the fruits we ecstatically devour, and why.With an abundance of reproductions from the collection, this gorgeous volume encompasses fruit-suffused anecdotes and observations drawn from the fields of archaeology and anthropology, horticulture and literature, ancient representation and contemporary visual art. It includes contributions by authors Jacqueline Landy, John McPhee, Michael Pollan and Marina Vitaglione.

A fascinating glimpse into an experimental British nudist culture that radically challenged and transformed conventional attitudes to bodies and their representationsThis richly illustrated volume examines the idiosyncratic phenomenon of social nudism in mid-20th-century Britain, an island nation fabled for its lack of sunshine and its reserved social attitudes.Structured across three interrelated phases, readers first encounter the movement at its genesis in the 1920s, when nudism was synonymous with vegetarianism, intellectualism and utopianism. That nascent culture proliferated in the postwar era, with a widening landscape of amateur clubs and governing organizations alongside high-circulation publications and censorship-challenging photographers. Finally, Annebella Pollen examines the movement’s redefinition as naturism, its cultural battles and its struggle to survive amid shifts in sexual liberation in the permissive 1960s.Unadorned bodies were the central campaigning tool of British naturism’s photographic propaganda. They drew attention to the cause and drove publication sales but they also attracted regular public opprobrium. Naturism’s shifting visual culture thus provides a microcosmic view of British moral, legal and aesthetic transformations in a period of rapid social change, revealing evolving perspectives on health and sex, gender and ethnicity, pleasure and power.Annebella Pollen is Reader in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her first book, Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life, explored 55,000 amateur snapshots taken on one day in 1987. The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift examined the modernist craft and occult spirituality of former scoutmasters in 1920s England.

Food as social ritual, personal liberation and spiritual alchemy: from Alison Knowles and Adrian Piper to Agnes Denes and Andy WarholIn More Than the Eyes, writer Ellen Mara De Wachter considers the ways in which food, when used as a material in contemporary art, confronts, subverts and ultimately brings us to our senses. Focusing on artists working between 1960 and 2000, the book shows how we have become restricted by a hierarchy that values sight and reason above other senses, and how encounters with food in art can help us break this bind. By putting food at the center of the highly visual art world, the artists in this book quicken a range of sensations beyond visual perception, helping us access and liberate aspects of our experience that have been ignored or suppressed. Topics include Carolee Schneemann’s performance pieces using meat; the way in which Hannah Wilke rejects the imperative for women to be “sweet”; Zoe Leonard’s exploration of decomposition as process; Adrian Piper’s conceptual work incorporating hamburgers; the SoHo artists’ restaurant FOOD; Agnes Denes’ wheat field near Wall Street; and how other artists, such as Sarah Lucas and Andy Warhol, introduce the iconography, foods and desires of the working class into the rarefied environment of the gallery and museum.London-based writer Ellen Mara De Wachter is the author of Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration and the coauthor of Great Women Artists (both published by Phaidon). Her writing has featured in publications including Frieze, Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, the World of Interiors and the White Review.