World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1961, English
Softcover, 234 pages, 20.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Capricorn Books / New York
$70.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first paperback edition of this classic survey of conversations, published by Capricorn Books, New York, in 1961. Selden Rodman, a poet, compiled this lively survey of modern American art, architecture and sculpture at the close of the 1950s - by means of amusing and often revealing interviews with several dozen exponents. These revealing and entertaining conversations, convey the vitality, range and excitement of the art world in America in the 1950s through the words of the artist's themselves.
Artists include: Leonard Baskin, Alexander Calder, Joseph Glasco, Adolph Gottlieb, Morris Graves, David Hare, Edward Hopper, Philip Johnson, James Kearns, Frank Kline, Willem de Kooning, Rico Lebrun, Jack Levine, Jacques Lipchitz, Kenzo Okada, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Larry Rivers, Mark Rothko, Ben Shahn, David Smith, Saul Steinberg, Mark Tobey, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Andrew Wyeth.
Very Good copy from the collection of American curator and art critic Norman A. Geske, who authored many books on American art, directed the Sheldon Art Gallery in Nebraska (which included his building collaboration with architect Philip Johnson, who is featured herein), and curated the American Pavillion at the Venice Biennale in 1968, amongst other things. Norman A. Geske collection personal stamp to title page.
1958, Dutch
Softcover (staple-bound), 26 pages, 26 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
$25.00 - In stock -
Rare early Jackson Pollock catalogue published by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (SM Catalogue nr 189) in 1958, designed by the legendary Willem Sandberg. Profusely illustrated in b/w with Pollock's artworks, including a colour centrefold, printed across various paper stocks, accompanied by biography, exhibition history, catalogue and text by Sam Hunter (translated into Dutch).
Very Good copy but ex-National Gallery of Victoria library copy, therefore two stamps to cover, plus staple holes to top right of cover, otherwise VG throughout.
1974, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 21 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
Environments and Happenings by painter and poet Adrian Henri, published by Thames & Hudson in 1974, forms one of the first mainstream book surveys to trace the phenomenon of environmental/performative/total living artworks that became prevalent in the 1960s/70s. This historical study is profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with many international works from Fluxus to Zero to Dolle Mina to Nouveau Réalisme to Provo to Gutai to The Situationists and much more. Includes the works of Joseph Beuys, Clarence Schmidt, Ray Johnson, Öyvind Fahlström, Paul Thek, Yves Klein, Allan Kaprow, Hans Haacke, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Guerllia Art Action Group, Daniel Spoerri, Wolf Vostell, Gustav Metzger, Peter Kuttner, Jackson Pollock, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Robert Morris, Situationist International, Ferdinand Kriwet, Klaus Rinke, Duane Hanson, A-Yo, Meret Oppenheim, Space Structure Workshop, Ferdinand Cheval, Dolle Mina (Mad Mina), Robert Smithson, Jeff Nuttall, Stefan Wewerka, Christo, Dennis Oppenheim, Vladimir Tatlin, Provo, Barry Flanagan, Andy Warhol, Meredith Monk, Atsuko Tanaka, Kazuo Shiraga, Ed Keinholz, Yayoi Kusama, Piero Gilardi, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Les Levine, James Rosenquist, Red Grooms, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Eduardo Paolozzi, and many many more. Includes reproductions of performance scripts, partial chronology, etc.
Very Good copy, previous owner name to front endpaper.
2016, English
Hardcover, 336 pages, 27 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Metropolitan Museum of Art / New York
$340.00 - In stock -
This groundbreaking, award-winning book, long out-of-print, presents a multidisciplinary analysis that illuminates the making, meaning, and reception of the unfinished in art, from the Renaissance to the present day.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, at The Met, New York, March18—September 4, 2016. Edited by Kelly Baum, Andrea Bayer, and Sheena Wagstaff with further essays by Carmen C. Bambach, Thomas Beard, David Bomford, David Blayney Brown, Nicholas Cullinan, Michael Gallagher, Asher Ethan Miller, Nadine M. Orenstein, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Susan Stewart, and Nico Van Hout.
This exhibition addresses a subject critical to artistic practice: the question of when a work of art is finished. Beginning with the Renaissance masters, this scholarly and innovative exhibition examines the term "unfinished" in its broadest possible sense, including works left incomplete by their makers, which often give insight into the process of their creation, but also those that partake of a non finito—intentionally unfinished—aesthetic that embraces the unresolved and open-ended. Unfinished features more than 200 works, created in a variety of media, by artists ranging from Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, and Cezanne to Picasso, Warhol, Twombly, Freud, Richter, and Nauman. Essays and case studies by major contemporary scholars address this key concept from the perspective of both the creator and the viewer, probing the impact that this long artistic trajectory which can be traced back to the first century has had on modern and contemporary art. The book explores the degrees to which instances of incompleteness were accidental or intentional, experimental or conceptual. Also included are illuminating interviews with contemporary artists, including Tuymans, Celmins, and Marden, and parallel considerations of the unfinished in literature and film. The result is a multidisciplinary approach and thought-provoking analysis that provide valuable insight into the making, meaning, and critical reception of the unfinished in art.
Very Good copy, only light wear/marks to boards.
1970, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 20 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jonathan Cape / London
$80.00 - Out of stock
First 1970 hardcover Jonathan Cape English edition of Michel Butor's Inventory, a selection from Butor's writings, edited and with a foreword by Richard Howard.
"Michel Butor, author of three celebrated novels - A Change of Heart, Passing Time and Degrees - is, with Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, a leader of the revolutionary literary movement, the French 'new novel'. He is also, as he displayed in Histoire Extraordinaire: Essays on a Dream of Baudelaire's, a brilliant and original critic and essayist. Richard Howard, critic, poet and the outstanding translator of modern French writers, has made a selection from Butor's writings that reveals the uncommon depth and scope of his critical accomplishment. An important group of theoretical essays on the aesthetics of the novel is followed by essays on classic French writers such as Balzac, Chateaubriand, Verne, Proust and Apollinaire. A discussion of fairy tales and science fiction as literary genres meriting serious critical thought precedes essays on modern art - the work of Mondrian, Pollock and Rothko - and on modern music as created by Stravinsky, Schönberg and Boulez. In every essay, Butor writes with an intensity, intellect and imagination that make Inventory one of the most valuable collections of critical writings to appear in this country in recent years."—Jacket
Michel Butor (1926—2016) was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic and translator, and one of the leading exponents of the nouveau roman (“new novel”) alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, an avant-garde literary movement that emerged in France in the 1950s.
Very Good copy, light wear and tear to VG dust jacket.
1966, English
Hardcover (Burlap covered boards), 342 pages, 32 x 31cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$400.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1966 burlap-bound edition of this seminal work by Allan Kaprow documenting the milieu of performance art and happenings in the early-mid 1960s. Published by H. N. Abrams, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings is a legendary photo-artist-book by “one of the grand antiheroes of contemporary art”, produced in way we would never see today. Wrapped in a heavy, debossed and screen-printed raw burlap hardcover, this massive and visually stunning volume features incredible typography, commentary and lay-out by Kaprow himself, accompanying countless photogravures (photos taken by Oldenburg, Robert McElroy, Peter Moore and others) featuring the work of artists (and non-artists) such as Claes Oldenburg, Tetsumi Kudo, Jean Tinguely, Clarence Schmidt, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Wolf Vostell, George Brecht, Kenneth Dewey, Milan Knizak, Jackson Pollock, Robert Whitman, Red Grooms, George Segal, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, together with images of works by the Japanese Gutai Group (Murakami Saburo, Shozo Shimamoto, Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, et al) and many more.
Allan Kaprow, “an artist who coined the term ‘happenings’ in the late 1950s and whose anti-art works contributed to radical changes in the course of late 20th-century art,” was a leading member-with artists George Segal, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenberg-of a group whose performance works were signally influenced by John Cage’s “reliance on chance as an organizing, or disorganizing element in art. Like Cage, Kaprow used a combination of choice and accident as a way of creating nonverbal, quasi-theatrical situations in which performers functioned as kinetic objects, the role of the single artist-genius was de-emphasized, audience members became creative participants and no-clear distinction was made between everyday actions and ritual…” (New York Times).
"Step Right In"
Very Good copy, spotless with tight-As New binding, perfectly preserved.
1986, English
Softcover, 319 pages, 175 x 229 mm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$69.00 - Out of stock
Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.
Rosalind E. Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University and an editor and cofounder of October magazine, is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), The Optical Unconscious (1993), The Picasso Papers (1999), and Bachelors (1999), all published by the MIT Press, and coauthor (with Yve-Alain Bois) of Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books, 1997).
"All of her observations are unfailingly original and provocative."—Art Documentation
Very Good copy of original 1986 edition, 1993 printing.
2012, English / Swedish
Softcover, 224 pages, 28 x 21.7cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$68.00 - Out of stock
In the years following the Second World War, artists across the world began to attack the most basic premises of painting, in ways that were both aggressive and playful. The creative act itself was deemed as important as the painting that resulted from it, creating an energetic interzone between painting and performance in which chance procedures, the movement of bodies and the participation of spectators were all recruited as tools.
Explosion! Painting as Action explores the connections and cross fertilizations between painting, performance and conceptual art from the late 1940s to the present. Examining painting, photography, video, performance, dance and sound art, this volume includes works by Lynda Benglis, Niki de Saint Phalle, Cai Guo-Qiang, the Gutai Group, Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, Alison Knowles, Ana Mendieta, Rivane Neuenschwander, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Shozo Shimamoto, Lawrence Weiner and many others.
1952, French
Softcover, 26 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gariel-Giraud / Paris
$350.00 - Out of stock
First, very rare 1952 edition of this important piece of art history, considered the manifesto of "L'art Informel". Published in an edition of only 1000 copies, Michel Tapié's book Un Art Autre (Art of Another Kind) defined a tendency in postwar European painting that he saw as a radical break with all traditional notions of order and composition—an art that worked through ‘paroxysm, magic, total ecstasy’. This dominant trend of abstract art in the 1940s and 1950s was characterised by an improvisatory approach and highly gestural technique, much aligned with America's Abstract Expressionism. In describing such work he used the term art informel (from the French ‘informe’, meaning unformed or formless), and presented the exemplary works of Wols, Herni Michaux, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock, Pierre Soulages, Georges Mathieu, Ruth Francken, René Guiette, Victor Brauner, Alfonso A. Ossorio, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jean Fautrier, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Karel Appel, Mario Sironi, Camille Bryen, Alberto Burri, Hans Hofmann, Claire Falkenstein, Slavko Kopač, Germaine Richier, Graham Sutherland, Sam Francis, Mark Rothko, Gianni Dova, Jaroslav Serpan, André-Pierre Arnal, Roger-Edgar Gillet, Lucio Fontana, Roberto Matta, Eduardo Paolozzi, Willem de Kooning, and more.
Very Good copy with tanning from age and light spotting. Beautifully preserved copy.
2012, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 15 x 25 cm
Published by
Getty Trust Publications / Los Angeles
$56.00 - In stock -
Annette Leddy and Donna Conwell
Introduction by Dawn Ades
“Farewell to Surrealism” is the title of a 1943 essay by Austrian artist-critic Wolfgang Paalen published in the inaugural issue of the journal Dyn. The journal was founded by Paalen and an international group of writers and artists taking refuge in Mexico City during World War II, including Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Eva Sulzer. Several of them had been part of André Breton’s Parisian surrealist circle in the 1930s. When they arrived in Mexico, they were still proponents of surrealism. Two years later, however, this group had broken with Breton and set out to define a new direction for art. Their vision coalesced in the pages of Dyn.
While recent scholarship has treated individual artists in the circle, this study is the first to examine the new aesthetic found in Dyn itself. Transformed by the mysterious pre-Columbian artifacts, distressed by the failure of political ideology, and inspired by scientific discoveries of the day, these artists played a critical but under-recognized role in the transition from surrealism to abstract expressionism. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition of the same name on view at the Getty Research Institute October 2, 2012 to February 17, 2013.
Annette Leddy is a senior cataloguer and a consulting curator at the Getty Research Institute. Donna Conwell is an associate curator at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California. Dawn Ades is a semi-retired professor at the University of Essex.
1971, English
Softcover, 210 pages, 23 x 25 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Mathews Miller Dunbar / London
$70.00 - Out of stock
First English edition from 1971, Udo Kultermann's "Art-Events and Happenings", published by Mathews Miller Dunbar of London, translated by John William Gabriel. A deep reflection on an important part of Art's development throughout the 1960s - the turn to action through performance and conceptual art - surveying happenings, protests, theatre, ritual, land art and much more, and featuring a vast collection of black and white photographic illustrations of the work of Allan Kaprow, Ann Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham, Otto Mühl, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Piero Gilardi, Charlotte Moorman, Franz Erhard Walther, Joseph Beuys, Tetsumi Kudo, Lygia Clark, Carolee Schneemann, Stan Brakhage, John Cage, Hermann Nitsch, Günther Brus, Dennis Oppenheim, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Andy Warhol, Jan Dibbets, Carl Andre, Barry La Va, Rafael Ferrer, Marinus Boezum, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Milan Knizak, Jackson Pollock, Saburo Murakami, Atsuko Tanaka, Claes Oldenburg, Piero Manzoni, Peter Hutchinson, Christo, Robert Morris, and many more.
Very good copy (some tanning, previous owners name to first page)
1972, German
Hardcover, 216 pages, 24.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Georg Wenderoth Verlag / Kassel
$60.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
documenta - Dokumente 1955 - 1968 (Four International Exhibitions of Modern Art), was published by Georg Wenderoth Verlag, Kassel in 1972. This clothbound hardcover book of texts (by Dieter Westecker, Carl Eberth, Werner Lengemann, Erich Müller) and photographs of the first four documenta exhibitions, is quite a unique publication. Written at the suggestion of former students and collaborators of Documenta initiator Arnold Bode, it does not replace a documenta chronicle or a scientific study of individual facts. On the contrary, the textual and pictorial material is selected from a technical point of view, processed and presented in a comprehensible form to stimulate detailed investigations into the exhibition-presentations. The bulk of the photographic documentation is of visitor reception and interaction with the installations of artworks, including those of Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Lee Bontecou, Victor Pasmore, Marino Marini, Jean Dubuffet, Konrad Klapheck, George Segal, Robert Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, Walter de Maria, Eduardo Paolozzi, Phillip King, Erich Hauser, Ernest Trova, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Carl Andre, William Tucker, Peter Brüning, David Smith, Edward Keinholz, Dan Flavin, Morris Louis, Sol Lewitt, Robert Morris, Frank Stella, Tom Wesselmann, James RosenquisThomas Lenck, Francis Bacon, Horst Antes, Shinkichi Tajiri, Christo, Jackson Pollock, Karel Appel, Bernard Schultze, Otto Herbert Hajek, Jacques Lipchitz, Lynn Chadwick, Paul Delvaux, Helen Frankenthaler, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Leger, Max Bill, Joan Miro, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Giogio de Chirico, Victor Vasarley, Zoran Music, Giuseppe Capogrossi, and many others.
Texts in German. First and only edition.
Vert Good copy with original dust jacket.
1984, English
Softcover, 342 pages, 270 x 280 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
U.M.I. Research Press / Michigan
$50.00 - Out of stock
Softcover edition of "LOOKING CRITICALLY: 21 YEARS OF ARTFORUM MAGAZINE", the heavy 342 page volume anthology of the first 21 years of the world's most important modern and art journal. An incredibly valuable collection of art theory.
Edited by Amy Baker Sandback, designed by Roger Gorman and Mary Beath and published in 1984 by U.M.I. Research Press, this dense volume, bound in hardcover to the dimensions of a copy of ARTFORUM, begins with an Ed Kienholz review at the Ferus Gallery from ARTFORUM's June 1962 inaugural issue, and ends with Barbara Kruger reviewing the film "TRON" for the November 1982 issue. An amazing compendium of articles and reviews from the magazine's important first 21 years, featuring contributions by the likes of John Cage, Robert Morris, Kate Steinitz, Henry T. Hopkins, Don Factor, Robert Pincus-Witten, Dennis Adrian, John Coplans, Hilton Kramer, Harold Rosenberg, Henry Geldzahler, John Cage, Walter Hopps, Ed Ruscha, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rosenblum, Dan Flavin, Boris Groys, Sam Wagstaff, Billy Kluver, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert Rosenblum, Roger Shattuck, Ad Reinhardt, Mel Bochner, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Rose, Manny Farber, Michael Fried, Robert Morris, Philip Leider, Hollis Frampton, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Lawrence Alloway, Barbara Kruger, Jane Livingston, Lizzie Borden, Kenneth Baker, Laurie Anderson, Agnes Martin, Cindy Nemser, Sidney Tillim, Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Roberta Smith, Peter Plagens, Peter Schjeldahl, J. Hoberman, Hal Foster, Richard Flood, Carter Ratcliff, Stuart Morgan, Max Kozloff, Donald Kuspit, Dan Graham, Walter De Maria, Komar & Melamid, Edit De Ak, Lawrence Weiner, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas McEvilley, Louise Bourgeois, Ingrid Sischy, and too many more to list. Artists featured include: Josef Albers, Richard Tuttle, Jo Baer, Carl Andre, Ant Farm, Hans Arp, Max Bill, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Lee Bontecou, Constantin Brancusi, Bertholt Brecht, Richard Avedon, Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Lynda Beglis, Larry Bell, Terry Fox, James Byers, Rober Barry, Marcel Breuer, AA Bronson, Luis Buñel, Daniel Buren, Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, Anthony Caro, Marcel Broodthaers, John Chamberlain, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Merce Cunningham, Sonia Delauney, Walter de Maria, Bruce Connor, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Walker Evans, Dan Flavin, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Lucio Fontana, Hollis Frampton, Alberto Giacometti, Eva Hesse, Gilbert & George, Philip Glass, John Cage, Nancy Graves, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Nancy Grossman, Walter Gropius, Hans Haacke, Hairy Who, David Hockney, Douglas Huebler, Jorg Immendorff, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Keinholz, Paul Klee, Alison Knowles, Joseph Kosuth, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Roberto Matta, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, Jannis Kounellis, Markus Lüpertz, El Lissitzky, Rene Magritte, Robert Mapplethorpe, John McCracken, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Ree Morton, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzio, A. R. Penck, Irving Penn, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Larry Poons, Ken Price, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Roman Polanski, Jackson Pollock, Steve Reich, Gerrit Rietveld, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dorothae Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Lucas Samaras, Kurt Schwitters, Oscar Schlemmer, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Robert Venturi, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Saul Steinberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Taut, Jean Tinguely, Anne Truitt, Paul Wunderlich, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Hitchcock, and so many more.
A Good copy throughout, with cover rubbing and corner bumping. Tightly bound and clean copy internally.
2016, English
Paperback, 240 pages, 21.6 x 27.9 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
Judd Foundation / New York
$85.00 - Out of stock
This is the complete, authorized collection of Donald Judd's early art criticism and polemical writings; it includes his landmark essay "Specific Objects" plus more than 500 contemporary art reviews he wrote on key artists and exhibitions of the 1960s.
Complete Writings 1959–1975 was first published in 1975 by The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and since then it has been the primary source for Donald Judd’s early writing. Working as an art critic for the magazines Arts, Arts Magazine and, later, Art International, Judd regularly contributed reviews of contemporary art exhibitions between 1959 and 1965, but continued to write throughout his life on a broad range of subjects. In his reviews and essays, Judd discussed in detail the work of more than 500 artists showing in New York in the early and mid-1960s, and provided a critical account of this significant era of art in America. While addressing the social and political ramifications of art production, the writings frequently addressed the work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Kazimir Malevich, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Lee Bontecou, Yayoi Kusama, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Kenneth Noland and Claes Oldenburg. Judd’s essay "Specific Objects," first published in 1965, remains central to the analysis of the new art developed in the early 1960s. Other essays included in this publication are "Complaints I" (1969), "Complaints II" (1973) and his previously unpublished essay "Imperialism, Nationalism and Regionalism" (1975), all of which establish the polemical importance of Judd’s writing.
Donald Judd (1928–94) was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and after having served in the United States Army, attended the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, and Columbia University, New York, where he received a BS in Philosophy, cum laude, in 1953. Studying at the Art Students League, Judd began his artistic career as a painter and transitioned to three-dimensional work in the early 1960s. Throughout his lifetime, in his writings and his work, he advocated for the importance of art and the artist’s role in society.
"Perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, Judd shaped the cultural discourse of his time- not only through his radical sculptures, but with his prolific writing on his peers." - Zoë Lescaze, Artnews
1968, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
$30.00 - Out of stock
Battock's definitive 1968 collection of writings by and about the work of the 1960s minimalists, generously illustrated with photographs of paintings, sculpture, and performance, published by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., New York.
A collection of twenty-eight seminal essays by both critics and artists across over 400 pages, analyzing all aspects of Minimal Art at it's height in the late 1960s. Includes Lawrence Alloway (Systemic Painting), Mel Bochner (Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism), David Bourdon (The Razed Sites of Carl Andre), Nicolas Calas (Subject Matter in the Work of Barnett Newman), Bruce Glaser (Questions to Frank Stella and Donald Judd), Lucy R. Lippard (Eros Presumptive), John Perreault (Minimal Abstracts), Irving Sandler (Gesture and Non-Gesture in Recent Sculpture), Peter Hutchinson (Mannerism in the Abstract0, Willoughby Sharp (Luminism and Kineticism), Elayne Varian (Schemata 7), Richard Wollheim (Minimal Art), and texts by Martial Raysse, Michael Fried, Clement Greenberg, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson, and more.
Heavily illustrated throughout with 170 photographs featuring the work of Sol LeWitt, Lee Bontecou, Donald Judd, Hanne Darboven, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg, Yves Klein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, Agnes Martin, Christo, Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Kienholz, Anne Truitt, Joseph Kosuth, Piet Mondrian, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Marcel Duchamp, Chryssa, Anthony Caro, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Robert Barry, Larry Bell, Carlo Belloli, William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Ronald Balden, John Cage, Walter De Maria, Stephen Antonakos, Walter Darby Bannard, Allan D'Arcangelo, Stuart Davis, Mark di Suvero, Helen Frankenthaler, Jim Dine, Al Held, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Hans Haacke, Ralph Humphrey, Eva Hesse, Douglas Huebler, Will Insley, Patricia Johanson, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Yvonne Rainer, Julio Le Parc, David Smith, Richard Tuttle, Tony Smith, Keith Sonnier, James Raphael Soto, Clyfford Still, Les Levine, Victor Vasarely, Ad Reinhardt, John McCracken, Robert Morris, Kenneth Noland, Robert Whitman, Jules Olitski, Milton Resnick, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jackson Pollock, Larry Poons, Jack Youngerman, George Rickey, Dorothea Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Edward Ruscha, Jan van Eyck, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and many others.
Good with general wear and previous owner underlining / notation. Ex-library.
1968, English / French / German / Italian
Softcover, 64 pages, 24.5 x 34.5 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
James Fitzsimmons / Lugano
$55.00 - Out of stock
Art International, Vol. XIII/5 May 20, 1968
Published and Edited by James Fitzsimmons
Advisory Editors: Umbro Apollonio, Jean-Christophe Ammann, Lucy R. Lippard, James Mellow.
Features: Jean Arp, Kaspar-Thomas Lenk, Eugenio Carmi, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Paul Thek, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Joe Brainard, Fernando Botero, David Carr, Helio Oiticica, Alexander Calder, Victor Pasmore, Phillip Sutton, Joe Perlman, Michael Kenney, Ritzi Jacobi, Roy Adzak, George Segal, Berrocal, John McCracken, Richard Serra, Jan Dibbets, Mario Merz, Markus Raetz, Robert Morris, Michael Heizer, Antonio Calderara, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Pieter Engels, Ger van Elk, David Smith, Kenzo Okada, Umberto Eco, and many more.
Art International was a highly regarded international art journal based in Switzerland from 1957-1984. With international editors and contributing writers, A.I. was issued 10 times per year and was published and edited by James A. Fitzsimmons.
1971, German
Softcover, 32 pages, 15 x 10 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Phillipp Reclam / Stuttgart
$20.00 - Out of stock
Robert Morris "Felt Piece", from the Phillipp Reclam (Stuttgart) pocket-book series on individual artworks. Text in German by Walter Kambartel with illustrated section of Morris' works, alongside works by Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Constantin Brancusi, David Smith, Marcel Duchamp, John McCracken, Frank Stella, Jackson Pollock, and Allan Kaprow.
First edition, very good copy.
1963, Swedish
Softcover, 76 pages, 16.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Moderna Museet / Stockholm
$55.00 - Out of stock
Önskemuseet: The Museum of Our Wishes (December 26, 1963 - February 16, 1964), was a unique and very ambitious exhibition initiated by director Pontus Hultén and Moderna Museet staff that gathered together a collection of modernist art from private owners, in order to present to the public and political administration their vision of what a museum collection could actually be. The exhibition featured works from private collections alongside a “wish list” of works that were still available on the market, calling for the government to allocate funds for purchasing new works for the museum. The request was acknowledged and the Museum received a one-off allocation of five million kronor, a substantial amount in today’s currency, which enabled the purchase of several works that now constitute the core of the collection, positioning Moderna Museet as one of the most dynamic and committed contemporary art institutions of the 1960s.
This is a copy of the first and only edition of the catalogue for the exhibition, which makes up a visual checklist of the artworks and artists featured in this enormous exhibit, taking it's form from art history guides that had started to be created after the war.
Includes introduction by Gerard Boniier as well as additional text by Olle Granath, K.G. Hulten, Ulf Linde and Karin Bergqvist Lindegren. Features works by Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, Raoul Dufy, Emil Nolde, Edwin Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Oscar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Chaim Soutine, Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Roger de la Fresnaye, Henri Laurens, Amédée Ozenfant, Juan Gris, Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz, Giacomo Balla, Ardengo Soffici, Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Piet Mondrian, El Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, Antoine Pevsner, Georges Vantongerloo, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Naum Gabo, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Calder, Charles Despiau, Andre Derain, Maurice Utrillo, Amedeo Modigliani, Otto Dix, Ben Shahn, Marie Laurencin, Constantin Brancusi, Julio Gonzales, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Juan Miró, Andre Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Alberto Giacometti, Wilfredo Lam, Victor Brauner, Salvador Dali, Sebastian Matta, Henry Moore, Roger Bissière, Jean Bazaine, Maurice Esteve, Alfred Manessier, Nicolas De Staël, Auguste Herbin, Serge Poliafkoff, Victor Pasmore, Barnett Newman, Richard Mortensen, Jean Fautrier, Lucio Fontana, Henri Michaux, Jean Dubuffet, Germaine Richier, Francis Bacon, Wols, Asger Jorn, Alberto Burri, Antonio Tapies, Karel Appel, Mark Tobey, Fritz Hundertwasser, Mark Rothko, Archile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Sam Francis, Robert Jacobsen, Robert Rauschenberg, Enrico Baj, César, Jasper Johns, Richard Stankiewicz, Jean Tinguely, Arman, and Yves Klein.
All texts in Swedish. The bulk of the reproductions are in black-and-white with several larger, tipped-in images in color.
Ex-library copy with stamps, stickers and covering. Otherwise a good copy.
1998, German
Hardcover, 366 pages, 22.5 x 31 cm
1st German edition, Out of print title / used / very good,
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
$70.00 - Out of stock
The long out-of-print heavyweight "Out of Actions" book (First German hardcover edition) that was published to accompany the spectacular 1998 Paul Schimmel-curated travelling exhibition. "Out of Actions" surveyed the broad international history and influence of post-war Performance Art, and the objects that exist today as its documentation. It features significant texts by Schimmel, Kristine Stiles, Guy Brett, Hubert Klocker, Shinichiro Osaki, Leslie King-Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims, and Keiko Okamura.
This important and heavily researched document is lavishly illustrated throughout in colour and black and white, capturing the work and actions of the artists featured in the exhibition and essays: Marina Abramovic, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Vito Acconci, Genpei Akasegawa, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Rasheed Arseen, Mowry Baden, Artur Barrio, Joseph Beuys, Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, George Brecht, Stuart Brisley, Robert Delford Brown, Gunter Brus, Chris Burden, James Lee Byars, John Cage, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Lygia Clark, Pinchas Cohen Gan, Collective Action Group, Houston Conwill, Paul Cotton, COUM Transmissions, Guy de Cointet, Jim Dine, John Duncan, Felipe Ehrenberg, Roberto Evangelista, Valie Export, Robert Filliou, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Sherman Fleming, Lucio Fontana, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Gideon Gechtman, Gilbert & George, Alberto Greco, Ion Grigorescu, Victor Grippo, Red Grooms, Guerrilla Art Action Group, David Hammons, Al Hansen, Maren Hassinger, Lynn Hershman, Dick Higgins, Tatsumi Hijikata, Susan Hiller, Rebecca Horn, Tehching Hsieh, Joan Jonas, Kim Jones, Michel Journiac, Akira Kanayama, Tadeusz Kantor, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley, Juergen Klauke, Yves Klein, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Komar & Melamid, Jannis Kounellis, Shigeko Kubota, Tetsumi Kudo, Yayoi Kusama, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, John Latham, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Lea Lublin, George Maciunas, Leopoldo Maier, Piero Manzoni, Tom Marioni, Georges Mathieu, Gordon Matta-Clark, Paul McCarthy, Bruce McLean, David Medalla, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendieta, Gustav Metzger, Marta Minujin, Jan Micoch, Linda Montano, Robert Morris, Otto Muehl, Saburo Murakami, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Bruce Nauman, Paul Neagu, Senga Nengudi, Joshua Neustein, Hermann Nitsch, Helio Oiticica, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Orlan, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Lorenzo Pace, Nam June Paik, Gina Pane, Lygia Pape, Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jackson Pollock, William Pope L., Robert Rauschenberg, Carlyle Reedy, Klaus Rinke, Ulrike Rosenbach, Dieter Roth, Zorka Saglova, Niki de Saint Phalle, Alfons Schilling, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Bonnie Sherk, Shozo Shimamoto, Ushio Shinohara, Kazuo Shiraga, Barbara T. Smith, Daniel Spoerri, Petr Stembera, Wolfgang Stoerchle, Jiro Takamatsu, Atsuko Tanaka, Mark Thompson, Jean Tinguely, Rasa Todosijevic, Kerry Trengove, Ulay, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Franz Erhard Walther, Peter Weibel, Franz West, Hannah Wilke, Emmett Williams, and Zaj.
Scarce first German edition, published by Hatje Cantz.
1958, English
Softcover (stapled), 24 pages, 19 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
MoMA / New York
$15.00 - Out of stock
Art Bulletin (XXV, No. 4, 1957)/catalogue supplement published to accompany an exhibition in 1957 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, to showcase their recent Painting and Sculpture collection acquisitions. Features work by Fernand Léger, Odilon Redon, Egon Schiele, Robert Motherwell, Robert Delaunay, Arshile Gorky, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Paul Klee, George Grosz, Giorgio de Chirico, David Smith, Gustav Limpt, Otto Dix, and many others, illustrated in black and whit throughout.
1984, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 342 pages, 270 x 280 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
U.M.I. Research Press / Michigan
$150.00 - Out of stock
First, hardcover edition of "LOOKING CRITICALLY: 21 YEARS OF ARTFORUM MAGAZINE", the heavy 342 page volume anthology of the first 21 years of the world's most important modern and art journal. An incredibly valuable collection of art theory.
Edited by Amy Baker Sandback, designed by Roger Gorman and Mary Beath and published in 1984 by U.M.I. Research Press, this dense volume, bound in hardcover to the dimensions of a copy of ARTFORUM, begins with an Ed Kienholz review at the Ferus Gallery from ARTFORUM's June 1962 inaugural issue, and ends with Barbara Kruger reviewing the film "TRON" for the November 1982 issue. An amazing compendium of articles and reviews from the magazine's important first 21 years, featuring contributions by the likes of John Cage, Robert Morris, Kate Steinitz, Henry T. Hopkins, Don Factor, Robert Pincus-Witten, Dennis Adrian, John Coplans, Hilton Kramer, Harold Rosenberg, Henry Geldzahler, John Cage, Walter Hopps, Ed Ruscha, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rosenblum, Dan Flavin, Boris Groys, Sam Wagstaff, Billy Kluver, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert Rosenblum, Roger Shattuck, Ad Reinhardt, Mel Bochner, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Rose, Manny Farber, Michael Fried, Robert Morris, Philip Leider, Hollis Frampton, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Lawrence Alloway, Barbara Kruger, Jane Livingston, Lizzie Borden, Kenneth Baker, Laurie Anderson, Agnes Martin, Cindy Nemser, Sidney Tillim, Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Roberta Smith, Peter Plagens, Peter Schjeldahl, J. Hoberman, Hal Foster, Richard Flood, Carter Ratcliff, Stuart Morgan, Max Kozloff, Donald Kuspit, Dan Graham, Walter De Maria, Komar & Melamid, Edit De Ak, Lawrence Weiner, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas McEvilley, Louise Bourgeois, Ingrid Sischy, and too many more to list. Artists featured include: Josef Albers, Richard Tuttle, Jo Baer, Carl Andre, Ant Farm, Hans Arp, Max Bill, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Lee Bontecou, Constantin Brancusi, Bertholt Brecht, Richard Avedon, Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Lynda Beglis, Larry Bell, Terry Fox, James Byers, Rober Barry, Marcel Breuer, AA Bronson, Luis Buñel, Daniel Buren, Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, Anthony Caro, Marcel Broodthaers, John Chamberlain, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Merce Cunningham, Sonia Delauney, Walter de Maria, Bruce Connor, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Walker Evans, Dan Flavin, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Lucio Fontana, Hollis Frampton, Alberto Giacometti, Eva Hesse, Gilbert & George, Philip Glass, John Cage, Nancy Graves, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Nancy Grossman, Walter Gropius, Hans Haacke, Hairy Who, David Hockney, Douglas Huebler, Jorg Immendorff, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Keinholz, Paul Klee, Alison Knowles, Joseph Kosuth, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Roberto Matta, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, Jannis Kounellis, Markus Lüpertz, El Lissitzky, Rene Magritte, Robert Mapplethorpe, John McCracken, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Ree Morton, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzio, A. R. Penck, Irving Penn, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Larry Poons, Ken Price, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Roman Polanski, Jackson Pollock, Steve Reich, Gerrit Rietveld, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dorothae Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Lucas Samaras, Kurt Schwitters, Oscar Schlemmer, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Robert Venturi, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Saul Steinberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Taut, Jean Tinguely, Anne Truitt, Paul Wunderlich, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Hitchcock, and so many more.
Very uncommon hardcover edition, with dust jacket.
1976, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 28 x 27 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / New York
$20.00 - Out of stock
Offering a unique glimpse into the acquisition priorities of a large-scale institution, this catalogue juxtaposes works from the Guggenheim’s own collection with a selection of highly ranked artworks on the list of potential acquisitions, showcasing 32 American artists who shaped the mid-20th century's art world.
Published by Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, to accompany the exhibition Acquisition Priorities: Aspects of Postwar Painting in American, October 15, 1976–January 16, 1977, this book functions as much more than just a review of postwar American painting, acting as a self-analytical, institutional critique bringing the strengths and weaknesses of the Guggenheim’s holdings into stark relief. The catalogue features large images in both colour and black and white, followed by artists’ biographies, which are illustrated by social photographs.
Features: Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Alfred Jensen, Jack Tworkov, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, amongst others.
Text by Thomas M. Messer
1970, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Studio Vista / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
"Renderings : Critical Essays on a Century of Modern Art" is a collection of forty-three essays, originally published in The Nation, Artforum, Art International and elsewhere, organized in six sections, "Revisitations Within the Modern Tradition"; "American Art and the Generation of the Second World War"; "Essays in Modern Sculpture"; "Current Art: Options and Responses"; "Sketches in the Aesthetics of Photography" and "The Methodology of Criticism". Illustrated sections reproduce selected works by the many artists featured throughout the texts collected here, including Gustave Courbet, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Kienholz, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Toulouse-Lautrec, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, David Smith, Rene Magritte, Mark Rothko, Camille Pissarro, Henri Matisse, Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell, Édouard Manet, Pierre Bonnard, Alberto Giacometti, Joseph Cornell, Medardo Rosso, Francis Bacon,Julio Gozalez, John Chamberlain, Ronald Bladen, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Larry Poons, Diane Arbus, Marcel Duchamp, and many others.
Max Kozloff (born 1933) is an American Art Historian, art critic of modern art and photographer. He has been art editor at The Nation, and Executive Editor of Artforum. His essay, "American Painting During the Cold War" is of particular importance to the criticism on American Abstract Expressionism.