Photographer. Filmmaker. Artist. Designer. To master one of those disciplines would be a lifetime achievement for any creative individual, yet William Klein’s career was celebrated in each of them over the last eight decades. Klein was one of the great image makers of the 20th century and one whose work remains an enduring creative influence on the work of contemporary artists, photographers, and filmmakers.

With over 250 images, this career retrospective explores the late William Klein’s entire creative and artistic arc. Directed by Klein himself, from the selection of content to book design, this large-format publication looks back at his uncompromisingly creative lifetime, showcasing Klein’s prolific and relentlessly innovative contribution to the world of photography, art, design, and filmmaking.

Published in association with a major retrospective at the International Center of Photography, this book is a comprehensive take on his career. While best known as a photographer who broke all the rules and conventions, William Klein: Yes focuses on the full range of Klein’s work, from his abstract paintings through to his startling, authentic street photography and photobooks and his dynamic, satirical take on filmmaking. With a flowing, chronological text by David Campany, this book will be both an introduction to William Klein for a new generation and a source of fresh insights for those who already know who William Klein was: a true original.

Specifications - Hardover. 384 pages.

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now is the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, profiling an artist who has achieved truly global acclaim in her lifetime. In a wide-ranging career spanning seven decades and multiple media, she established profound connections with audiences around the world. Emerging at the forefront of artistic experimentation in Asia in the mid-20th century, Kusama soon became a central figure in the New York art scene of the 1960s. Now in her nineties, Kusama continues to communicate her highly personal and spiritual world view through her art.

The volume is structured around six thematic sections, “Infinity,” “Accumulation,” “The Biocosmic,” “Radical Connectivity,” “Death,” and “Joy of Life,” each of which is intended to elucidate the aesthetic and philosophical concerns at the heart of the artist’s oeuvre.

This book features selections from Kusama’s hitherto unpublished writings, as well as correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe, an interview with critic and curator Yoshie Yoshida, and a roundtable discussion from leading curators and Kusama experts. Also included are essays exploring different aspects of her practice, and a detailed illustrated chronology that places her life’s work in context. Appealing not only to those already familiar with Kusama and her work, but also to anyone discovering it for the first time, this monograph reveals an artist who, while shaped by international artistic currents, remains deeply connected to the traditions and culture of her native Japan.

Specifications - Hardcover. 400 pages.

THE THEATRE OF COCAINE WARFARE

From freelance hit squads and cocaine collectors breaking into harbors to grenades used for intimidation and a soundproof torture container.

Cocaine ripdeals and other conflicts caused a series of gangland killings among the new generation of Dutch multi-ethnic organized crime networks.

In this underworld war, many victims are errand boys — followers who have carried out an assignment for money or to belong. With 1 kilogram going for up to 40.000 euros on the street, the profits from smuggling cocaine have fueled the brutality.

For many immigrant youths in the Netherlands who feel marginalized and rejected by society, turning to organized crime can provide a sense of belonging. From their perspective, here, they are not the victim but the aggressor. This is why the underworld, with its own rules and opportunity to make a lot of money, gets a significant following. They are willing to take on various high-risk jobs with the ambition of climbing the ladder within the underworld hierarchy.

The author used a wide variety of sources to assemble a new seamless photo series portraying the Dutch underworld.

Specifications - Hardcover. 26x20 cm. 136 pages.

Founded by Egyptian-born Gaby Aghion in 1952, Chloé pioneered luxury ready-to-wear that was all about ease and femininity, offering an elegant haute bohemian style for the modern, liberated Parisienne. Resolutely contemporary, the house spotted and hired a young Karl Lagerfeld as early as the 1960s: he stayed for over two decades, achieving fame and recognition worldwide through his Chloé work, before Stella McCartney (and her then assistant Phoebe Philo) succeeded him straight out of fashion school.

Following in the footsteps of the hugely successful Monocle Book of Italy and The Monocle Book of the Nordics, Monocle’s latest title turns its focus to Portugal in an exciting new series of country-specific books.

What do Korean bojagi wrapping cloths, Cameroonian Bamileke boubous, Peruvian montera hats, and Hungarian cifraszür shepherd cloaks have in common? Each is made using the ancient technique of patchwork—the art of juxtaposing fabrics and motifs to create blankets, clothes, accessories, and more.

This volume follows Catherine Legrand as she sews together an ethnographic patchwork map. Legrand has spent many years traveling and researching textiles and has a deep knowledge of the techniques and traditions that characterize patchwork, enabling her to create an engaging fabric-inspired travelogue.

Pieced together much like the gorgeous textiles it portrays, Legrand’s beautifully illustrated history features over 300 dazzling photographsof patchwork from around the world and takes the reader from Europe and the Americas to Africa and Asia, where these ancient traditions survive, and patchwork is part of the fabric of everyday life. Textile artists, patchwork enthusiasts, and designers of all stripes will discover an endless source of inspiration.

Specifications - Hardcover. 216 pages.

For the first time, ninety of the designers’ typefaces are catalogued chronologically in a three-part volume, comprising the history of their development; exclusive type specimens; and detailed illustrations of projects in which they appear.

With a foreword by Björk—whose collaboration with M/M spans over two decades—this encyclopaedic volume traces the distinctive and integral nature of type, lettering, and signs in the work of M/M, from one-off artistic commissions to fashion branding and their long-lasting collaborations with musicians and theatres.

This complete typographic collection is the perfect companion to the two-volume monograph M to M of M/M (Paris), and will appeal not only to graphic designers, historians, and students, but to anyone interested in art and visual culture.

Specifications - Hardcover. 480 pages.

What Does Memory Taste Like by chef Bo Bech is part cookbook and part memoir featuring personal anecdotes and essays from employees, guests and friends.

Specifications - Hardcover. Format: 28 x 22 cm. 316 pages. 

“The viewer...should enter my work through their own eyes, and their own lives,” the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has said. An incisive observer and a creator of dazzling pictures, Tillmans has experimented for over three decades with what it means to engage the world through photography. Presenting the full breadth and depth of the artist’s career, Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear invites us to experience the artist’s vision of what it feels like to live today.

From ecstatic images of nightlife to abstract images made without a camera, sensitive portraits to architectural slide projections, documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, Tillmans has explored seemingly every imaginable genre of photography, continually experimenting with how to make new pictures. He considers the role of the artist to be that of “an amplifier” of social and political causes, and his approach is animated by a concern with the possibilities of forging connections and the idea of togetherness.

Tillmans has rejected the prevailing conventions of photographic presentation, continuously developing connections between his pictures and the social space of the exhibition. In his installations, unframed prints are taped to the walls or clipped and hung from pins, and framed photographs appear alongside magazine pages. Constellations of images are grouped on walls and tabletops as photocopies, color or black-and-white photographs, and video projections, exemplifying the artist’s idea of visual democracy in action. “I see my installations as a reflection of the way I see, the way I perceive or want to perceive my environment,” Tillmans has said. “They’re also always a world that I want to live in.”

Growing up in London’s East End, Alexander McQueen left school at fifteen to become a tailor’s apprentice on Mayfair’s Savile Row. At twenty-two, he attended the prestigious art and design college Central Saint Martins and, after presenting his 1992 graduate collection that was bought on the spot by influential fashion stylist Isabella Blow, went on to change the course of fashion history.

Celebrated for his uniquely radical aesthetic, McQueen has captured the public’s imagination as few other fashion designers have before or since. Like his designs, McQueen was de ant in his opinions. His quotes on creativity, “You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition”; and women, “I design clothes because I don’t want women to look all innocent and naive…I want people to be afraid of the women I dress”; make this a thoroughly thought-provoking book. Featuring specially commissioned illustrations, this is the perfect gift for fans of fashion and of McQueen, capturing the sharp wit and unbridled spirit of a true visionary.

Specifications - Hardcover. 176 pages.

Since his death in 2011, Lucian Freud’s reputation as one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century has continued to grow with his inimitable large-scale paintings of human figures hanging in museums worldwide and reaching dizzying prices at auction. Art historians note his talent, brilliance, and complicated personal life, but until now, his own voice has often not risen above the noise. Full of verbal and visual wit, affection and irreverence, Freud’s letters now provide a revealing and at times revelatory personal look at his life and process.

This volume brings together Freud’s early letters, gathered with the endorsement of the Freud estate, from both private collections and public archives, including the Freud Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Tate. Ranging from schoolboy notes to his parents to his early recognition as a professional artist, the letters, which often feature drawings and characterful visual quirks, present the multiple facets of Freud’s complex personality.

Coauthored by David Dawson, Freud’s longstanding personal assistant and now director of the Lucian Freud Archive, and Martin Gayford, author, critic, and acquaintance of Lucian Freud, these extraordinary, illustrated letters are reproduced in facsimile alongside striking reproductions of Freud’s works of this period. Linked by a narrative that weaves the letters and paintings into the story of his life, including his first marriage and separation, this book provides an intimate and fresh perspective on the first three decades of the artist’s life.

Specifications - Hardcover. 392 pages.

“All this must be either surfed or painted”: This is the underlying sentiment behind Raymond Pettibon’s iconic works of surfers and waves in this quintessential volume dedicated to the motif.

Pettibon is known for his characteristically enigmatic aesthetic and sharply satirical critiques of American culture. Though drenched in cynicism, his work empathizes with the dizzying madness of our own humanity as it engages both so-called high and low culture. Perhaps most poetic among the many motifs present in Pettibon’s oeuvre is the surfer. In 1985, Pettibon began his series of surfers and waves––which he continues to work on to this day––popular for depicting a lone surfer silently carving “a line of beauty” along an impossibly large wave. 

This book spotlights a selection of more than one hundred surfers from the series, from smaller monochromatic works on paper to colorful large-scale paintings applied directly to the wall. For Pettibon’s protagonist in these works, surfing exists apart from all else. Momentarily he achieves sublimity on the wave, distant yet synced with turbulent reality. We are forced to confront our own scale: small and feeble in the face of the power of nature, what is beyond our control. Pettibon’s lyrical writings on these painted surfaces—both his own and lines taken from literature—reference his own philosophies and the confusions of reality: he critiques and highlights the hypocrisies and vanities of the world he engages. To help navigate, the scholar Brian Lukacher explores art-historical antecedents in Pettibon’s work, particularly the seascapes of J. M. W. Turner, and Jamie Brisick, the writer and former professional surfer, examines the Southern California surf and music culture of Pettibon’s youth. Professional big wave surfers Emi Erickson and Stephanie Gilmore also describe the sensory experience of conquering the enormous waves depicted in Pettibon’s works.

Specifications - Hardcover. 208 pages.

A sweeping selection of Donald Judd’s iconic and ambitious works alongside a diverse collection of newly commissioned writings.

One of the most significant American artists of the postwar period, Judd rigorously experimented with color, form, material, and space. The works in this catalogue range from the artist’s expansive installations to self-contained single units, yielding valuable new insights into his process and approach. The survey includes one of his largest and most intricate installations of wall-mounted plywood boxes, conceived in 1986. Other works include variations on some of Judd’s most recognizable forms, executed in materials such as Corten steel, plexiglass, copper, plywood, brushed aluminum, and painted aluminum. Brilliant and exacting reproductions capture these works in vivid detail. Following the major Judd retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2020, this book serves as a companion volume.

With contributions from a wide range of voices—art historians, critics, writers, and performers— this publication includes rich new writings on Judd’s oeuvre, art criticism, and enduring influence. Artworks 1970–1994 is published on the occasion of the eponymous 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner New York.

Specificaitons - Hardcover. 284 pages.

There has never been a period in photography’s long history – no school, no movement – when flowers have not been a central focus, whether in the form of the classic still life, the botanical study, incorporated into portraiture and studies of the human body, documented in street photography, or used subversively in surrealist collage and montage.

It's a country that feels comfortingly familiar for many, yet beyond the clichés lies a complexity and variety that's perpetually surprising. For more than a decade, Monocle has roamed the length of the nation and The Monocle Book of Italy is the result of our dedicated reporting. Join us as we throw down our towels at the best beaches, sit front row at dazzling runway shows, call in at vineyards, gelato spots and furniture fairs, and maybe even hit a disco or two. See Italy through a whole new lens.

Specifications - Hardcover. 302 pages.