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:
CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
(ORDER SHIPPING RESUMES NOV 10)
World Food Books
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PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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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.
1969, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket) in slipcase, unpaginated, 22 x 16 cm
Signed and numbered edition,
Published by
Gentosha / Tokyo
$280.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare signed first 1969 edition of Japanese illustrator Ken Katayama's masterpiece artbook, Beautiful Days, in limited edition hardcover, numbered and slipcased. Beautiful Days is the most crystallised embodiment of one of the most unique artistic visions of fantasy illustration one could ever find, and the first collection ever published by the artist, when, after discovering the erotic works on the fringe of Surrealism he gave up becoming a painter and gave himself over to the obscene impulses of drawing. "There, so to speak, masturbation became a picture. Until then, I never thought that masturbation could become a painting"—excerpt from Ken Katayama's postscript. Katayama's magnificently, obsessive graphite-rendered world making is, like that of Lewis Carroll before him, made up almost entirely of children; children in states of blank-faced entrancement, possession and naked abandon; groping, lost and frozen in a psychosexual schoolhood theatre. Unlike anything else, aspects of Katayama's bewildering, often sadomasochistic, fairytale visions recall the tales of de Sade, Bataille, Klossowski, Carroll's Alice; the unconscious pictures of Balthus, Hans Bellmer, or Leonor Fini; the architectural dreamscapes of Delvaux or the Metaphysical painters; even the dark psychological renderings of fellow Japanese artist Yoshifumi Hayashi — a haunted landscape of eroticised adolescent memories with recurring motifs of free flowing urination and defecation, violently strewn newspapers, urinals, and apparitions of cat-people. Nothing like it! The work even inspired an experimental film of boyhood memories directed by the provocative film-maker Nakamura Masanobu in 1970.
Signed in 1969 by Katayama.
"If you
keep your hands in your pockets
in your pocket
what are you hiding
that's how I got it
darkness in my pocket, days of dust
I opened the old album and showed
beautiful days other days"
Virtually unknown outside his native Japan, Katayama (b. 1940, Tokyo) studied at the Musahino Art University and in the 1960s and 1970s begin contributing illustrations to underground art and literary magazines such as Black Notebook, Featured Story and fetish magazines such as SM Select, amongst many others. He published art books such as Angel Hour, Lost Child's Top, Match Taker, The Cat in Boots, and many more, and went on to become a successful children's story book illustrator, publishing many works throughout the 1980s—90s.
Very Good copy, beautifully preserved in Very Good slipcase. Signed and numbered first edition. The most complete, finest edition of this work.
1974, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 216 pages, 21 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$35.00 - In stock -
First HC Edition.
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 in Good DJ some light wear, price-clipping to inner.
2024, English
Hardcover, 224 pages, 24.5 x 24.5 cm
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
Albertina Modern / Vienna
$90.00 - In stock -
Kubin's eerie, unsettling illustrations reveal his preoccupation with the world's evils
For Austrian artist Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), evil was intrinsic to his life and work. After a traumatic childhood growing up in Zell am See and subsequent mental crises, he began his artistic training in Munich in 1898. He processed his nightmares and obsessions in a large number of fantastical drawings. His subjects, perpetually pessimistic, remain relevant a century later: war, famine, pestilence, death and every horror in between. Kubin had a pronounced fear of the feminine, sexuality, night time and of being at the mercy of fate, all of which visited him in uncanny dreams. For Kubin, the aesthetic of evil proved to be the antithesis of the idyll: the deliberate suppression of a hideous reality.
Drawn from the Albertina Museum's collection of over 1,800 drawings by the artist, The Aesthetic of Evil displays Kubin's grotesque vision as well as his superb draftsmanship. Amid the violent, haunting atmosphere of his graphic works it is easy to see how Kubin became trapped in his dark visions, to the point where the inexhaustible, intangible specter of evil consumed his life. Essays by Elisabeth Dutz, Natalie Lettner and Brigitte Holzinger explore Kubin's cosmos of the sinister: his personal iconography of evil fueled by his nightmares and obsessions.
Highest recommendation.
2002, English / German
Softcover, 144 pages, 29 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
$70.00 - In stock -
First edition of this major survey catalogue of the great Austrian draftsman, illustrator and author Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) from The Leopold Collection, Vienna, published by Hatje Cantz in 2002. Long out-of-print and one of the best catalogues on the master of the macabre.
Alfred Kubin, an accomplished draughtsman, was inspired by his fascination with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and influenced by the artists Goya, Klinger, Ensor, Redon, Rops and Munch. Kubin called his dreamlike imagery a vital "escape into the unreal": ghostly figures, hybrid creatures, variants of torture and self-torture, dream, vampirism, spiritualism, decadence, sex, death and birth. His extraordinary oeuvre comprises more than 20,000 drawings, a large part of it consist of pen drawings, portfolio pieces and illustrations from more than 70 books. This book features a representative selection of master sheets by the bizarre multi-talented artist.
Very Good copy with light wear.
2013, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 27.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Raw Vision / UK
$45.00 - Out of stock
Now out-of-print, this unique book presents works that until now have only been seen in private collections or museum vaults. Works by well known outsider artists and new discoveries express their personal interpretations of sexual desire and activity.
These rare works are an essential element in the rich and varied world of outsider and self-taught art where the inhibitions and accepted norms of mainstream and contemporary art simply do not apply.
Over 50 outsider and self-taught artists tackle expressions of sex and lust. Their work ranges from depictions of modern sex-folk tales such as the Bobbits or Bill Clinton and Monica, to intimate photographic portraits, rough carvings, kinetic sculptures and startling paintings.
Includes the work of: Aloïse Corbaz, Gaston Duf, Unica Zürn, Malcolm McKesson, Mike Diana, Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern, Miguel Amate, Lewis Smith, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Morton Bartlett, Henry Darger, Katharina Detzel, Hein Dingemans, Ody Saban, Miroslav Tichý, Phillip Heckenberg, Anthony Mannix, Henry Speller, Paul Lancaster, Roy Wenzel, Paulus de Groot, Josef Schneller, Thornton Dial, Steve Ashby, Adolf Wölfli, Royal Robertson, Lawrence Lebduska, Johann Hauser, Ota Keiti, Joe Coleman, Karl Vondal, Josef Hofer, and so many more.
Contents:
Rawerotics. From Compulsion to Repulsion by Colin Rhodes
Depicting the Object of Desire by Roger Cardinal
Steve Ashby, the Outsider’s Outsider by Jenifer P. Borum
Sex as a Matter of Fact: European Outsiders by Laurent Danchin
Free Sexuality or Perversion? The Erotic in American Outsider Art by Michael Bonesteel
The Secret Lens of Miroslav Tichý by Roger Cardinal
Pleasure and Pain—Sexual and Erotic Motifs in the Prinzhorn Collection by Thomas Röske
The Erotic World of Ody Saban by Françoise Monnin
Near Fine copy.
1995, French
Sioftcover, 160 pages, 29.5 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Éditions Herscher / France
$100.00 - In stock -
First 1995 printing of this wonderful survey of artworks and writings by French illustrator, oral poet, and writer, Fred Deux (1924–2015). This profusely illustrated, most comprehensive catalogue was published to accompany the retrospective exhibitions presented at the museums of Bochum in Germany, at the French cultural center of Essen, in Châteauroux, Montpellier and Charleroi between 1995 and 1996. Texts in French by Sepp Hiekisch-Picard, Pierre Watt, Geneviève Bonnefoi and Fred Deux. Illustrated throughout in colour and b/w. Includes, bibliography and biographical references and personal photographs.
As an artist, he may be situated somewhere between Outsider Art (since he disobeyed the established rules) and Henri Michaux. Influenced by contacts with André Breton, Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Hans Bellmer, the constraints imposed by his artistic and literary work prompted him to lead an introspective lifestyle, far from the turbulence of artistic fashion and the art market. As a result, his oeuvre has strong, singular psychological intensity.
A little-known artist outside France, immersed in the quietness of a life devoted to drawing, Fred Deux, illustrator, oral poet, writer, and, under the pseudonym Jean Douassot, author of a cult book, “La Gana”, was a singular artist who cannot be categorised in terms of art fashions and trends. This autodidact, born in the basement of a large house in Boulogne-Billancourt to a working-class family – occasionally flooded and infested with rats – living conditions that had repercussions on his health (tuberculosis). Working night-duties as a maintenance electrician in 1939, he subsequently joined his factory’s FTP resistance group in 1943. This was his first gesture of refusal. In 1944, not wishing to return to factory work, he joined the Moroccan Goums regiment of the French Army (active in the Vosges, Alsace and Germany), but, refusing to serve France’s colonial policy after the war, he was discharged in 1948 and settled in Marseille. In Marseille, Deux worked in a bookshop, discovered literature and spent more time reading than selling books. Among his discoveries: Blaise Cendrars, André Breton (the Surrealist Manifesto), Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille and Benjamin Peret. He was also particularly inspired by a catalogue featuring works by Paul Klee. His first two artworks were created using bicycle paint and involved “spontaneous” gestures. He also began writing notes for what would become Les Rats, the first version of La Gana. His early artworks (1949-1958) are sometimes nicknamed kleepathologies in reference to the influence of Paul Klee. In 1951, he was noticed by Jean Cassou, then director of the National Museum of Modern Art. He also met André Breton, joined the Surrealists and met French resistance member and France's most accomplished living engraver, Cécile Reims, who would become his companion and print collaborator (Reims also famously collaborated with Hans Bellmer). Anxious to preserve his independence and creative freedom, Deux left the Surrealist group in 1954. In 1958, his autobiographical novel La Gana was published by René Julliard under the pseudonym Jean Douassot (the Jean Douassot-Fred Deux duality expressed his double vocation as a writer-illustrator). Awarded the prestigious Prix de Mai, the book gave Deux initial exposure to a wider public.
Very Good copy.
1998, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 104 pages, 30.3 x 23.2 cm
Signed by artist,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asahi Shimbun / Japan
$200.00 - Out of stock
First 1998 hardcover edition of Kuniyoshi Kaneko's Vicious Angel, one of the finest volumes by Japanese painter, illustrator and photographer Kuniyoshi Kaneko (1936—2015), this copy with signed by the artist to the first blank page. Increasingly rare, Vicious Angel collects in one place the famous literary illustration of Kaneko, including Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice's Dream," George Bataille's "Story of The Eye" and "Madame Edwarda," and many others works spanning the 1970s to the 1990s. Kaneko's unique figurative drawings of young men and women in enigmatic, metaphysical scenes of surreal, stylised erotic abandon, channel the spirits of Cocteau, Bellmer, and Balthus; his controversial interpretations graced the pages and covers of these literary classics as they entered the Japanese consciousness. Free of convention, Kaneko's dreamlike scenarios were very often of same-sex, homo-erotic, even fetishistic nature, and his artwork, encouraged by editor and writer Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (1928—1987), became a staple in the underground publishing scene of 1970's Tokyo. Vicious Angel includes a biography, photographic portraits, bibliography, and an introductory essay by Kuniyoshi Kaneko entitled "In honor of the Holy God".
VG copy in CG dust jacket, light edge wear.
2014, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. hardcase + obi), 222 pages, 26.8 x 17.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Toshokankokai / Tokyo
$460.00 - In stock -
Now very rare out-of-print collection, and hands-down one of the best, "Yumenozoki (Glimpse of a Dream), The Art of Toshio Saeki" collects over 150 vividly coloured works of bewitching cruelty and gruesome beauty by Toshio Saeki, all of which were originally published in cult underground fetish magazine SM Select, between 1972—1984. Published only in Japanese in this hardcover and slipcased edition, includes two bilingual essays (Japanese / English) by Michiko Kitamura and Jun Miura, biography, and complete listing of artworks with original publication dates. An incredible volume of these important artworks that made Saeki a master in the Tokyo underground publishing scene, seen for the first time together, scaled-up and exquisitely reproduced in all their ero-guro glory. Highly recommended. First edition.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Very Good copy in VG slipcase w. VG obi.
1981, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 40 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Charles E. Tuttle / Tokyo
$140.00 - In stock -
Scarce first Japanese edition (entirely in English language), published in Tokyo by Charles Tuttle, of this beautifully produced over-sized 1981 book by H. R. Giger. Foreword by Timothy Leary.
In 1981, a year after being awarded the Oscar for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for Alien, the book H.R. GIGER N.Y. CITY was published. This series of post Alien works, the result of an intense period of non-stop painting, literally day and night, were inspired by Giger's trip to New York City and a template which his colleague Cornelius de Fries, brought back from one of his excursions into the electronic industry. The stencil was actually a sheet of scrap metal from which electrical components had been punched out. Alongside these incredible works are drawings, articles, press clippings, posters and polaroids from Giger's time in New York City.
Fantastic Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger was born in 1940, the son of a chemist. He spoke of a father who viewed art as a "breadless profession", and strongly encouraged his son to enter into pharmaceutics. Despite this, in 1962, he moved to Zürich, where he studied Architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts until 1970. Giger's style and thematic execution have been hugely influential. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence. Giger is also well known for artwork on several music recording albums. His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as "biomechanical". His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery. His main influences were painters Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary. Giger suffered from night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder, making his first paintings as a means of art therapy. In 1998 Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now houses the H. R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work.
Good—Very Good copy, tight binding with some cover wear and corner wear, some sunning to edges.
2018, English
Hardcover, 480 pages, 17.4 x 23.2 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$74.00 - In stock -
Georges Bataille's secret society, long the stuff of legend, is now revealed in its texts, meditations, rules and prohibitions.
This book recounts what must be one of the most unusual intellectual journeys of modern times, in which the influential philosopher, cultural theorist and occasional pornographer Georges Bataille (1897-1962), having spent the early 1930s in far-left groups opposing the rise of fascism, abandoned that approach in order to transfer the struggle onto "the mythological plane."
In 1937, Bataille founded two groups in order to explore the combinations of power and the "sacred" at work in society. The first group, the College of Sociology, gave lectures that were intended to reveal the hidden undercurrents within a society on the verge of catastrophe. The second group was Acéphale, a genuine secret society and anti-religion whose emblem was a headless figure that, in part, represented the death of God. Until the discovery a few years ago of the group's internal papers (which include theoretical texts, meditations, minutes of meetings, rules and prohibitions and even a membership list), almost nothing was known of its activities.
This book is the first to collect a representative selection of the writings of Bataille, and of those close to him, in the years leading up to World War II. The texts published here comprise lectures given to the College of Sociology by Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, essays from the Acéphale journal and a large cache of the internal papers from the secret society. A desperate narrative unfolds, wherein Bataille risked all in a wholly unreasonable quest--with a few fellow travelers, he undertook what he later described as a "journey out of this world."
Additional texts by Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Leiris, and by Georges Ambrosino, Pierre Andler, Michel Carrouges, Jacques Chavy, Jean Dautry, Henri Dobier, Henri Dussat, Imre Kelemen, Jean Rollin, Patrick Waldberg.
And with drawings by André Masson
Highest recommendation!
1964, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 124 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Forum Verlag / Vienna
$50.00 - In stock -
1964 first hardcover edition of this monographic study on the Viennese School of Fantastic Realist Painting and the work of Erich Brauer, Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter, and Anton Lehmden. Illustrated with colour plates throughout and a large gallery of monochrome reproductions of many paintings by each artist. Texts in German by AP Gütersloh, W. Schmied, H. Hakel, and Kurt Eigl.
"René Gustav Hocke calls the group of artists to whom this volume is dedicated "one of the greatest surprises in contemporary intellectual Europe." Five painters are grouped together under the term "Vienna School": Brauer, Fuchs, Hausner, Hutter, and Lehmden. As diverse as the individual, expressive artists' personalities are, they all share a commitment to objective, figurative art; they all paint beautiful, precious pictures with technical perfection, high-quality works full of interesting ideas. In Erich Brauer's pure, luminous colors, an oriental, fairytale world emerges; Ernst Fuchs's painting, trained by the old masters, revolves around religious themes and problems in a sensitive, highly individual way; Anton Lehmden paints, in the words of his teacher, "cities and landscapes that need not be on earth." Rudolf Hausner is, to quote Gütersloh again, "the tragedian and tragedian of this group", the only true representative of international surrealism. Wolfgang Hutter is assigned the cheerful subject, "his botanical drum contains more beautiful flowers than grow in forests and gardens." Thus, each of the five painters represents fantastic realism in their own unique way, an art movement that is gaining increasing attention around the world and deserves to be honored in book form by renowned experts in the field."—from the introduction
VG-NF copy in VG dust jacket, page toning, some dj toning and wear to edges.
1974, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 172 pages, 30.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Tate Gallery / London
$50.00 - Out of stock
First 1974 hardcover edition of The Late Richard Dadd, by Patricia Allderidge, published by the Tate Gallery to accompany a major exhibition of Dadd's work that same year. Illustrated with b/w and colour reproductions, this is the first catalogue raisonné of all Dadd's recorded work and includes entries on many items now lost.
Richard Dadd was one of the most strikingly original and technically accomplished painters of the Victorian era. His enormous, almost virtuosic, talents were obvious from an early age, but the brilliant career which seemed inevitably his was cut short, brutally and abruptly, when, as a young man, he lapsed into violent insanity. Dadd’s affliction culminated in the gruesome murder of his father and led to life-long confinement in a criminal lunatic asylum. But even here he continued to paint, fulfilling his early promise of compositional ingenuity, albeit in a mode totally at variance with the conventions of Victorian salon art. Deprived of external influence and stimuli alike, Dadd’s style, especially in his early fairy pictures, combined a singular purity and beauty with a world of tapestry-like detail, rich fantasy and obsessional allegory.
Patricia Allderidge, Archivist of the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospitals, where the artist passed much of his imprisonment, is uniquely equipped to be Richard Dadd’s biographer. She has undertaken extensive research, sifting through secondary and little known primary sources, to construct a carefully documented narrative of Dadd’s career, one which corrects many misconceptions and brings new material to light. In addition to tracing the artist’s life from his childhood and seminal travels to the Middle East to his madness and confinement at Bethlem and Broadmoor, Miss Allderidge also provides a detailed and sensitive analysis of Dadd’s work, fully documented with 115 illustrations, fifteen of which are in colour. She has, in short, produced a complete picture, in words and images, of Richard Dadd as both a man and as an artist, and her study will long serve as a vitally informative and attractive introduction to the vision of this extraordinary Victorian painter.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1980, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fleetbooks / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
"Unblushing color, is the sexual world around us painted by outstanding artists of the twentieth century. In this extraordinary book, the modern world, the flesh, and the devil are captured as never before."
Foreword by Henry Miller.
Within it are 163 newly photographed works of art, each one faithfully reproduced, unretouched, in four color lithography. On these oversized pages is reflected the erotic life of our times from never before published Picasso watercolors of 1901-02 to the initial publication of recent works by George Segal, Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, R.B. Kitaj, Tom Wesselman and many others.
1980 hardcover survey by Bradley Smith, '20th Century Masters of Erotic Art' is a lavishly illustrated (colour and b/w) collection of erotic works from private and public collections and museums. "Within it are 163 newly photographed works of art, each one faithfully reproduced, unretouched, in four-color lithography. On these oversized pages is reflected the erotic life of our times from never before published Picasso watercolors of 1901-02 to the initial publication of recent works by George Segal, Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, R.B. Kitaj, Tom Wesselman and many others." Featuring further works by Leonor Fini, Otto Dix, Ernst Fuchs, Fernando Botero, Hans Bellmer, André Masson, Mel Ramos, Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern, Paul Wunderlich, Richard Lindner, Elias Friedensohn, Roberto Matta, Graham Ovenden, Francisco Toledo, Carlos Revilla, Egon Schiele, Leonard Foujita, Henk Pander, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Félix Labisse, Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dalí, and many other painters and illustrators who have conveyed human sexuality through fantasy, romance, symbolism, and super realism, contributing to the development of diverse erotic themes in art becoming more prominent and accepted in the modern era. We've since regressed.
Good copy in Good DJ, wear to dj extremities.
2023, English / French
Softcover, 219 pages, 15.2 x 21.5 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$40.00 - In stock -
Erotic-macabre poetry by an overlooked Surrealist woman from the Middle East.
"You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me—and very objectively too—the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that's you."—André Breton
"Your poems know the essential cries, those which speak of passion in its vertigo."—Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space
The most significant Surrealist poet to emerge in 1950s Paris was a woman, Joyce Mansour. Mansour was a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt whose fierce, macabre, erotically charged works gave André Breton's Surrealist group a much-needed jolt after the ravages of the Second World War. Among new adherents, only Mansour wrote poems commensurate with those of Robert Desnos, René Char, Benjamin Péret, and other poets from the movement's heyday. Yet she remains curiously neglected in English translation, and even her posthumous reputation in France suffers from the patriarchal and chauvinist biases of the French literary establishment.
Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour is a much-needed corrective to this state of affairs, a compact yet career-spanning, bilingual anthology of this incendiary poet. With a biographical introduction by translator Emilie Moorhouse, Emerald Wounds showcases the entire arc of Mansour's trajectory as a poet, from the at-once gothic and minimalist fragments of her first collection in 1953, Screams, to the serpentine power of her final poems of the 1980s. Juxtaposing the original French poems with their English translations, Mansour's voice surges forward uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society that sees women as superficial objects of desire rather than multidimensional, autonomous subjects. Mansour is a poet the world needs today.
1983, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 28.5 x 22.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Omega Books / Hertfordshire
$25.00 - In stock -
Hardcover volume published in 1983, profusely illustrated throughout. Text by Lucienne and Jesús Romé. English edition.
"[...] This book deals with taboos, the magic of love, the role played by the five senses, rites of initia-tion, the link between religion and eroticism, and homosexuality, as well as many other aspects of the subject. It takes us to Oceania, to Black Africa, to the New World, including both the Pre-Columbian civilizations and the North American Indians, and it takes us back to the time of the Celts and the Vikings.
The very expressive illustrations, often previously unpublished, will give the reader an idea of the extent of sexual liberty among primitive peoples, their audacity and their obsessions, but also of their sense of modesty and their natural unaffectedness."
VG—VG dust jacket.
1981, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 28.5 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Liber / Fribourg
Crescent Books / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Hardcover volume published in 1981, profusely illustrated throughout. Text by Marc de Smedt exploring the customs and traditions of human sexuality in Eastern Asian art.
The people of ancient China were fond of making love. They saw it as a way of harmonizing the energies of heaven and earth, and thus of continuing nature's cycle of creation. So love became an art, the art of living, the art of untying the body's knots. It was also an integral part of religion. Thus to the great indignation of their enemies, the Taoists combined sexual practices with their techniques of meditation. [...]
VG—VG dust jacket.
1981, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 28.5 x 22.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Liber / Fribourg
$30.00 - In stock -
Hardcover volume published in 1981, profusely illustrated throughout. Text by Bernard Soulié and translated by Evelyn Roissiter. 1983 print from Liber, Fribourg. English text.
"As radio cars and helicopters keep the crowd in order, an imposing procession of women follows a group of laughing priests, while expressionless police officers hold the onlookers back. This scene would be fairly commonplace were it not for the nature of the object in honor of which the procession is being held: the phallus. Finely sculpted specimens made of carefully polished wood are to be found in dozens of sanctuaries dedicated to the cult of Shinto, the ancient religion which preceded Buddhism and which still pervades Japan today.
Needless to say, in such a country there is no taboo on sexuality or sexual images. Sex has always been very much taken for granted. The place it occupies in literature and the arts is therefore not surprising. Graphic treatment of the subject in Japan has been abundant, of high quality and distinctly original, even when compared to the work of the Chinese masters. Japanese erotic art blends refinement of line with a brutally realistic depiction of the sexual act. The attendant commentary, often expressed by the protagonists themselves, gives an unabashed account of intimate anatomical and physiological details, while the sexual organs, particularly that of the male, are shown as being vastly larger than life during and just before intercourse. In many instances, however, the rest of the protagonists' bodies is clothed, and sumptuously so. Their finery and hairstyle, as well as the decor of the scene, provide clues as to their social background. Certain pictures include accessories designed to enhance pleasure, whether solitary or shared, such as the harigata (artificial penis) or the higo-miki (ring hastening erection). [...]
VG—VG dust jacket.
1973, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket + slipcase), 475 pages, 28 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Rembrandt Verlag / Berlin
$110.00 - In stock -
Exceptional 1973 hardcover, slipcased first edition volume dedicated the history of Fantastic Painting in all its mutations, compiled by Austrian art historian and critic, curator, literary scholar and writer, Wieland Schmied (1929 – 2014).
"The fantastic and connected with it the remote, the strange, the absurd, the unreal, the irrational and illusionary, the visionary, the hallucinatory and dreamlike belong to the constant undercurrents and countercurrents of all art. Such images remind us that the world is more diverse, richer and more unmistakeable than we sometimes want to admit, that the night pages with their secrets of the dark belong to it in essence like the day with its magic of light. The fantastic art articulates powers and instincts that have a very intense influence on our lives, on our consciousness. It always shakes the questionlessness of the world, it always frightens us: from the abysses within ourselves and from the mysteries of a world that we have not created.
Wieland Schmied, who, as director of the Kestner Society, highlighted the topicality of fantastic and surrealist thoughts in the work of numerous contemporary artists in much-discussed exhibitions, examines in this book the different definitions of the fantastic and tries to distinguish between similar and related phenomena - the poetic, the grotesque, the absurd, the literary - but also to distinguish the fantastic art from the historical currents of Mannerism, Romanticism, Symbolism and Surrealism, which contain all elements of the Fantastic."
At 475 pages, and profusely illustrated with over 200 plates in colour and b/w, featuring the art of Henry Fuseli, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, Alfred Kubin, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, William Blake, Francisco Goya, Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern, Rodolphe Bresdin, Félix Labisse, Meret Oppenheim, Horst Janssen, Edward Burra, Jindřich Štyrský, Victor Hugo, Gustave Moreau, Henri Rousseau, Roland Topor, Giorgio de Chirico, Jane Graverol, Unica Zürn, Max Ernst, Pierre Roy, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, Victor Brauner, Hans Bellmer, Richard Oelze, Wifredo Lam, René Magritte, Ivan Albright, Man Ray, Fred Deux, Morris Graves, Joseph Cornell, Max Klinger, Gustave Doré, Max Walter Svanberg, Toyen, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, André Masson, Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Kurt Seligmann, Miodrag Đurić (Dado), Karel Teige, Paul Wunderlich, Roland Penrose, Josef Šíma, Paul Delvaux, Óscar Domínguez, Fernando Botero, Leonor Fini, Uwe Bremer, Bernard Schultze, František Janoušek, Josef Vyleťal, František Muzika, Domenico Gnoli, Wols, Heinz Trökes, Otto Tschumi, Jindřich Heisler, Václav Tikal, Gisela Breitling, Pit Morell, Graham Sutherland, Ernst Fuchs, Wolfgang Hutter, Erich Brauer, Anton Lehmden, Ursula, Konrad Klapheck, and so many more....
Fine copy in Fine dust jacket, perfectly preserved in Near Fine-Very Good original-issue publisher's box with some light discolouration.
1992, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), unpaginated, 23.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$80.00 - In stock -
Scarce first hardcover edition of Katan Amano's collection of works, published by Treville in Japan in 1992. Japanese doll and puppet artist Katan Amano (1953—1990) is well known in Japan for her tender and haunting doll works. Amano was staff at Tokyo's Pygmalion Doll Studio in the 1980's and during her short life created a universe of Hans Bellmer and Alice inspired dolls. These elegantly beautiful, otherworldly ball-jointed children are Amano's vehicles for an arresting and primal vision. She died in 1990 in a motorcycle accident. This gorgeous book is lavishly illustrated with the finest examples of her award-winning dolls shot by her collaborator Ryoichi Yoshida. In addition to her incredible doll works, the book also features her Hieronymus Bosch and Lewis Carroll inspired sculptural creatures, grotesque-baroque objects and dark fantasy paintings, all lavishly reproduced on gloss stock. A small amount of text in Japanese.
Near Fine copy in NF dust jacket.
2025, English
Hardcover, 320 pages, 30 x 24 cm
Published by
Fulgur Press / UK
$165.00 - In stock -
Breton's late treatise on magic and art appears for the first time in English, complete with citations, commentaries and a bibliography.
What is “Magic Art”? In 1953, André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement, was invited by a prestigious French publisher to explore answers to this question. His resulting analysis is wide-ranging and evocative. Beginning with a literary review of magic and art, Breton draws upon Novalis and Baudelaire before considering the prehistoric rock art of Spain and France, the native art of the Pacific Northwest, the magical grimoires and alchemical symbolism of the Middle Ages, and the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Antoine Caron, Paolo Uccello, Gustav Moreau, Paul Gauguin and the Surrealists. Through these and other diverse sources, Breton traces a mystery that lies at the heart of our timeless fascination with otherness and seeks to place Surrealism as a successor to a magical sensibility that began with art itself.
First published in 1957 as L’Art magique, this important text is offered here as an English translation for the first time. Working from manuscript notes for the original project, this edition presents the iconographic content as Breton intended, together with more than 300 new citations and a comprehensive bibliography that emphasizes sources found in Breton’s own library.
André Breton (1896–1966) was one of the founders and most controversial exponents of Surrealism, defining the movement in his first Surrealist Manifesto as “pure psychic automatism.” Fleeing from Europe during World War II, Breton traveled throughout North America staging Surrealist exhibitions and lending his voice to several political movements.
With contributions by Gérard Legrand, Robert Shehu-Ansell, Merlin Cox, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Dawn Ades, Anne Egger, Kristoffer Noheden.
2002, Japanese
Hardcover in slipcase w. illustrated paste-on, unpaginated, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seirin Kogeisha / Tokyo
$250.00 - In stock -
First, limited number-stamped edition of "The Earliest Works of Toshio Saeki" by the Japanese master of Ero guro, published by Seirin-Kogei-Sha in 2002 and long out-of-print. Before Saeki worked in his later palette of bright flat colours, he expressed the darker and more chaotic aspects of unbridled eroticism in stark black and white, with the occasional and dramatic splash of a single primary colour. In this lavishly illustrated book, Saeki's disturbing iconography reveals links to the past and simultaneously indicates the even more bizarre twists his work would take in the future. The Earliest Works also shows the early inspirations of Toshio Saeki, Tomi Ungerer's effect being a most clear one. Broken into three chapters: Earliest Works, Uncollected Works, and Unpublished Studies from 1969, the book also includes a chronological record and notes by Yuji Yamashita. An incredible book!
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Perfect fine hardcover copy housed in fine slipcase, beautifully preserved.
1968, German
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 19 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kärntner Landesgalerie Klagenfurt / Austria
$30.00 - In stock -
Rare early catalogue published in April 1968 on the occasion of an extensive exhibition at the Kärntner Landesgalerie Klagenfurt in Austria of the graphic works by leading representative of the "Vienna School of Fantastic Realism", the artist, poet, and philosopher Ernst Fuchs (1930 – 2015). Along with biography, this reference catalogue lists 87 llithographs, etchings, and aquatints, including all his major bodies of graphic work, a field in which the master excelled in. Please note: internally this is a text catalogue.
Ernst Fuchs (1930 – 2015) was an Austrian artist and draughtsman of Jewish descent, engraver and sculptor, architect and stage designer, master of visionary painting and book illustration, as well as a composer and poet. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1945), he met Arik Brauer, Rudolf Hausner, Fritz Janschka, Wolfgang Hutter, and Anton Lehmden, together with whom he later founded what has become known as the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. He was also a founding member of the Art-Club (1946), as well as the Hundsgruppe, together with Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Arnulf Rainer. Between 1950 and 1961, Fuchs lived mostly in Paris, and made a number of journeys to the United States and Israel, his work informed by the sermons of Meister Eckehart, the symbolism of the alchemists and Jung's Psychology of Alchemy, along with the paintings of the Symbolists and the Old Masters. In 1958 he founded the Galerie Fuchs-Fischoff in Vienna to promote and support the younger painters of the Fantastic Realism school. Fuchs was a important influence on younger generations of artists including his student in Paris, Australian artist Vali Myers. Painters Mati Klarwein and H.R. Giger were also devoted followers of his work, Giger once saying "If I had not seen his work when I was young, I would never have begun to paint myself."
Very Good copy with light wear. Staples un-rusted.
1967, German
Softcover (staple-bound), 44 pages, 27 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerie Wolkfgang Ketterer / Munich
$50.00 - In stock -
Early 1967 Ernst Fuchs catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition at Galerie Wolfgang Ketterer, Münich, 1967. Includes fold-out invitation to the exhibition of works enclosed from the gallery, along with a further illustrated advertisement for Hans Bellmer, whom the gallery also represented. Illustrated throughout with Fuchs' exceptional early graphic works, accompanied by extensive catalogue information and further information, portrait, etc. Also includes additional single page addition of works.
Ernst Fuchs (1930 – 2015) was an Austrian artist and draughtsman of Jewish descent, engraver and sculptor, architect and stage designer, master of visionary painting and book illustration, as well as a composer and poet. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1945), he met Arik Brauer, Rudolf Hausner, Fritz Janschka, Wolfgang Hutter, and Anton Lehmden, together with whom he later founded what has become known as the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. He was also a founding member of the Art-Club (1946), as well as the Hundsgruppe, together with Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Arnulf Rainer. Between 1950 and 1961, Fuchs lived mostly in Paris, and made a number of journeys to the United States and Israel, his work informed by the sermons of Meister Eckehart, the symbolism of the alchemists and Jung's Psychology of Alchemy, along with the paintings of the Symbolists and the Old Masters. In 1958 he founded the Galerie Fuchs-Fischoff in Vienna to promote and support the younger painters of the Fantastic Realism school. Fuchs was a important influence on younger generations of artists including his student in Paris, Australian artist Vali Myers. Painters Mati Klarwein and H.R. Giger were also devoted followers of his work, Giger once saying "If I had not seen his work when I was young, I would never have begun to paint myself."
Very Good copy, light wear. Fine invite and Bellmer leaflet inclosed.
2014, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 28 x 21.59 cm
Published by
Creation Books / London
$48.00 - Out of stock
The modern era of underground doll-making in Japan began in the late 1960s, with the experiments of Simon Yotsuya and Nori Doi. Directly inspired by the Surrealist Doll constructed by Hans Bellmer in 1932, Simon Yotsuya created a series of ball-jointed, life-sized dolls which featured in his ground-breaking "Eve In The Past And The Future" exhibition in Tokyo, in 1973.
Simon Yotsuya's work inspired a new wave of avant-garde Japanese doll-making, headed by artists such as Ryo Yoshida and Katan Amano, which has continued to flourish to the present day. SECRET DOLL UNDERGROUND, presented by Yuichi Konno, features dolls by fifteen artists, from Simon Yotsuya onwards, with over 80 full-sized colour photographs never before published outside Japan. It also includes Konno's introductory history of the underground doll in Japan.
Yuichi Konno is the editor of Yaso, an independent arts and culture publication founded in 1979.