New library acquisitions: Spring 2025

28 April 2025

Cover of the books Beuys: In Defense of Nature and Gustav Metzger: Interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Navigate this page

Cover of the book The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.

Cover of the book The Life of Forms in Art: Modernism, Organism, Vitality.

Cover of the book War and Aesthetics: Art, Technology, and the Futures of Warfare.

Cover of the book Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.

Cover of the book Fluid Bodies: Methods for Casting New Esthetics.

Cover of the book Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700-1900.

Cover of the book Feminism, Pedagogy, and the Studio: Reflections Across Four Decades.

Cover of the book Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 1938-1968.

Cover of the book Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet.

Cover of the book Beuys: In Defense of Nature.

Cover of the book Elemental: an arts and ecology reader.

Cover of the book Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic.

Cover of the book Simone Fattal (Imagine Otherwise).

Cover of the book Biennale Arte 2024: Foreigners Everywhere.

Cover of the book Barbara Steveni: I find myself.

Cover of the book Artists Making Landscapes in Post-war Britain.

Cover of the book Claire Langdown: Within the Grain - Stories in Wood: Twenty Years of Narrative Relief Carving.

Cover of the book Éléonore False: Ensembles.

Cover of the book Gustav Metzger: Interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Cover of the book Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive.

Cover of the book Monster Chetwynd: Moths, Bats and Velvet Worms! Moths, Bats and Heretics!

Cover of the book Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art.

Cover of the book Re-Materialization of Language 1978-2022.

Cover of the book Still Here: Women Making Abstract Sculpture.

Cover of the book Words and Things: celebrating fifty years of writing on art.

Cover of the book The Theatre of Refusal: Black Art and mainstream Criticism.

Cover of the book Shelia Hicks: a little bit of a lot of things.

Cover of the book Peter Gregory: Publisher and Patron of Modern British Artists.

Cover of the book Inside Other Spaces: Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976.

New acquisitions this season include publications which look at the relationship between art and the environment.

We’ve added early catalogues of American artist Alan Sonfist (b.1946), a pioneer of environmental art, as well as new books on artists Gustav Metzger (1926-2017) and Joseph Beuys (1888-1958) – both visionary thinkers committed to combating environmental destruction.

In a new volume of interviews with Gustav Metzger, conducted by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, we learn that Metzger’s concern with nature began when he lived in Yorkshire and worked on the Harewood Estate as a young assistant in the joinery department. He later contacted Henry Moore and asked about becoming his assistant. Moore suggested he go to art school first, and so began Metzger’s career thinking about art as a vehicle for change.

In Defense of Nature looks at Beuys’s radical vision of ecology and tree planting schemes inspired by the artist. In 1982, Beuys began planting 7,000 trees throughout Kassel, Germany, accompanied by stone markers as part of a mission to bring about environmental and social change. The project was to be the first in an ongoing series of tree planting schemes across the world, which includes the oak tree and ancient basalt stone outside the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, planted in 1997.

Ahead of the conference Forces of Nature, which accompanies the current exhibitions at the Institute, you can use our library to explore the history of environmental art and contemporary artists’ concerns with ecology. We also recommend: RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology (London: Barbican, 2024); Groundswell: Women of Land Art (New York: DelMonico Books, 2024); and Radical Landscapes: Art, Identity and Activism (London: Tate, 2022). All these books and many more are available in our library.