ALFRED BAUR. PIONEER AND COLLECTOR

The Fondation Baur, Musée des Arts d Extrême-Orient, Geneva, Switzerland, houses one of the most important collections of Asian art in the world: some 9,000 works from China and Japan. This new book celebrates the 50th anniversary of the museum and the 150th birthday of Alfred Baur (1865-1951), whose collections are housed in the museum s elegant nineteenth-century townhouse. Lavishly illustrated with stunning new photographs, most full page, the book showcases the diversity and quality of Baur s collections, which span netsuke, lacquerware, saber fittings, prints, jades, imperial ceramics, textiles, and much more. Precious Japanese objects, meticulously worked and technically perfect, reveal the outstanding skills of Japanese craftsmen; the simplicity of the forms of Chinese monochrome ceramics displays the contemporaneity of the visionary master ceramists of the Song dynasty.