German-born and France-based artist, Anselm Kiefer, presents 'il mistero delle cattedrali', a 11,000 square foot installation at the White Cube Bermondsey Gallery in London. The exhibition includes works from various times within the artist's four decades as a creative force and explores the idea of alchemy. The show is given the name 'il mistero delle cattedrali' due to the closely linked subject matter with that of a book in the 1920's by a French alchemist and esoteric author under the pseudonym Fulcanelli by the same title.

The art of Anselm Kiefer is rich with references to writers, philosophers, and poets, and his relationship with Paul Celan has been the most complex and intense of these dialogues with the past. Celan's poetry, inextricably linked with the memory of the Holocaust, has haunted Kiefer's work for more than twenty-five years and has influenced him on every level, from the naming of works and exhibitions to the incorporation of symbolic materials from Celan's imagery - sand, straw, hair, and ashes - into his paintings.Like other German artists of his generation, Kiefer began by questioning his own artistic heritage, focusing on the iconographic and mythological elements of German culture that had been taken over by Nazi propaganda, and subsequently repressed and buried deep in the collective unconscious. It was his encounter with Celan's work in the early 1980s that first enabled him to escape from the vicious circle of fascination and disgust at the cultural ties that bound him to the Third Reich, leading him to confront the subject of the Holocaust and Jewish memory as a whole and to embrace this body of traditions within his art.Magnificently illustrated throughout with reproductions of Kiefer's best-known works, this book explores the intricate web of associations between the poet and the painter, a network that is extended to embrace other artistic and literary figures such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Joseph Beuys.

Today the very ideas that made America great imperil its future. Our plans go awry and policies fail. History's grandest war against terrorism creates more terrorists. Global capitalism, intended to improve lives, increases the gap between rich and poor. Decisions made to stem a financial crisis guarantee its worsening. Environmental strategies to protect species lead to their extinction. The traditional physics of power has been replaced by something radically different. In The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo puts forth a revelatory new model for understanding our dangerously unpredictable world. Drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, psychology, immunology, and the science of networks, he describes a new landscape of inherent unpredictability -- and remarkable, wonderful possibility.

This catalogue of the December 1998 exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art presents a detailed look at works on paper by Kiefer, the German artist whose work has continually dealt with the Holocaust as well as other elements of German culture and history. Representing a variety of media--watercolors, acrylics, painted-over photographs, and woodcuts--the 54 color reproductions of his works cover the years from 1969 to 1993 and reveal the artist's talent for blending biting commentary and humor. Also contains about 50 bandw illustrations that demonstrate pertinent connections to works by both Kiefer and other artists. Oversize: 10.25x11.25". Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Description for this book, In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann, will be forthcoming.

Written by eleven contributors of international standing, this book offers a readable and authoritative account of Europe's turbulent history from the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the present day. Each chapter portrays both change and continuity, revolutions and stability, and covers the political, economic, social, cultural, and military life of Europe. This book provides a better understanding of modern Europe, how it came to be what it is, and where it may be going in the future.