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
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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.
2001, English
Hardcover (w. galssine dust jacket), 254 pages, 22.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California / Berkeley
International Centre of Photography / New York
$140.00 - In stock -
First 2001 hardcover edition of Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, Therese Lichtenstein's highly original book studying the the life-size, adolescent-girl dolls created by German artist Hans Bellmer in the 1930s.
Disturbing and controversial, Bellmer's dolls with their uncanny, fragmented bodies and eroticized poseswere just as shocking during Bellmer's time as they are today. Until now there has been little available in English about Bellmer's dolls, and Lichtenstein's book will be welcomed for its fresh interpretation of the artist's work and his place in European modernism. Eighty striking photographs accompany the text. Working during a time when Nazism was on the rise, Bellmer created several dolls with fragmented bodies that could be dismantled and arranged in various configurations. Using a narrative format, he then photographed the dolls in a range of grotesque, often sexual, positions. The images he conveyed were of death and decay, abuse and longing, in stark contrast to Nazism's mythic utopian celebration of adolescence.Lichtenstein interprets Bellmer's complex expressions of eroticism as a protest against the Nazis and also against his father, a cold and repressive Nazi sympathizer. At the same time, she says, by hyperbolically flaunting a passive femininity in a theatrical manner, Bellmer's images allow us to consider how cultural representations can affect the formation of identity and alternative possibilities.
"Behind Closed Doors reveals the complex structure behind these photographs of violated female adolescence, a structure in which sadism, masochism, hermaphroditism, fetishism, utopianism, and nostalgia all play a role. Above all, Lichtenstein's study makes clear the political aspect of these transgressive images: the way in which they served to question and undermine the contemporary authoritarian Nazi image of sexual 'normalcy' by recourse to a violent return of the repressed." -Linda Nochlin, author of Representing Women "Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer is a compelling gathering of the narratives around psychoanalysis, visual culture, biology, and gender. Therese Lichtenstein rigorously examines Bellmer's picturing of the body as the site of desire, confusion, and sudden disaster, and in doing so produces a telling tale of history's secrets and lies."—Barbara Kruger
Therese Lichtenstein has taught art history and museum studies at New York University, Rice University, and Mount Holyoke College.
Very Good copy in Good original glassine dust jacket with some light wear.
1997, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 70 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rockin' On / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
The incredible first monograph that doubles as an artist's book of work by Hungarian New York-based artist Rita Ackerman spanning the years 1993—1996, edited and designed by Makoto Ohrui from Fiction Inc., published by Rockin' On in 1997 and only available in Japan. Long out-of-print, this numbered hardcover volume, with illustrated vellum dust jacket, is illustrated profusely with seventy of Ackerman's drawings, paintings and collages throughout in colour and b/w with many fold-outs and notebook scans, accompanied by essays.
New York City based artist Rita Ackerman was born in Budapest in 1968. She studied at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest and The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture from the years of 1989 to 1992. Ackermann invented images that became instant sensations, perturbing young girls that are now part of the universe of global imagery. Her drawings and paintings between 1993-95 depict compositions of adolescent female figures of clonelike multiples engaging in various self-destructive and hazardous activities. Her early works with their ambiguous presence serve as bridges between high and low culture, just as the myths and folk tales which often serve as merits to Ackermann's compositions. Later, Ackerman would abandon the figure, erasing the very matter of her own work, in a complex layering of visual language oscillating between abstraction and figuration into a subconscious unfolding of form—concealed deeply in the abstraction of the omnipresence.
First edition, VG copy in VG dust jacket.
1996, Japanese
Softcover, 84 pages, 24 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Kochi Studio / Japan
$380.00 - In stock -
First edition of the incredible and exceptionally rare and collectible book on Japanese artist Sadao Hasegawa's (1945—1999) amazing male nude erotic artwork — a blend of fantasy, Asian folklore, and the homoeroticism of Yukio Mishima. Beautifully designed and printed, fully illustrated from cover to cover on heavy stock paper with metallic detailing, this long out-of-print monographic volume was the only book collection to be published only years before Hasegawa’s suicide in 1999, and has become a treasure to collector's ever since. Inspired by Nobel Prize nominee Yukio Mishima, beauty, eroticism and death are recurring themes in Hasegawa’s work, his unique vision incorporating Japanese, Indian, South-East Asian and African mythology, combined with homo-erotic depictions of hyper-masculine men, in acts of BDSM, juxtaposed with lush tropical flowers, strings of pearls, birds and animals that float through the margins of dreamy, ecstatic scenes. Hasegawa cited Tom of Finland, photographer Tamotsu Yato and his travels to Bali and Thailand as influences on his work.
Perfect As New copy, beautifully preserved.
2016, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 27.8 x 21.4 cm
Published by
Seagull Books / London
$39.00 - In stock -
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Edited with a Preface by Évelyne Grossman
A poet, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud was a visionary writer and a major influence within and beyond the French avant-garde. A key text for understanding his thought and his appeal, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic is rooted in the nine years Artaud spent in mental asylums, struggling with schizophrenia and the demonic, persecutory visions it unleashed. Set down in a dozen exercise books written between 1946 and 1948, these pieces trace Artaud’s struggle to escape a personal hell that extends far beyond the walls of asylums and the dark magicians he believed ran them.
The first eleven notebooks are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches: totemic figures, pierced bodies, and enigmatic machines, some revealing the marks of a trembling hand, others carefully built up from firm, forceful pencil strokes. The twelfth notebook, completed two months before Artaud’s death in 1948, changes course: it’s an extraordinary text on the loss of magic to the demonic—the piece that gives the book its title.
“Artaud matters,” wrote John Simon in the Saturday Review years ago. Nearly seventy years after his death, that remains true—perhaps more than ever.
"A gloriously reproduced edition . . . . There is something in this text that speaks to the creative process--especially to the degree to which so much of what the writer or artist commits to the page (or canvass) extends from a place beyond conscious attention, to be received actively but without specific intention."—Rough Ghosts
1999, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$200.00 - In stock -
First 1999 edition of the long collectible English-language anthology of Writings of the Vienna Actionists, published by the legendary Atlas Press.
Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. These four artists from the sixties created a form of performance art which has become legendary for the extreme violence of its expression. Fined, gaoled, forced into exile, they were ignored by the art establishment of the day only to now be hailed as one of Europe's most outstanding contributions to post-war art. This anthology of their writings and documentation, brought together with the collaboration of the artists, Brus, Nitsch and Muehl, illustrates their intentions for the first time and shows how they established and explored a new territory for art.
Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. "Four artists who, during the Sixties, became notorious for pushing the definition of art to an extreme which has yet to be surpassed.
Variously fined, gaoled, and forced into exile, they were ignored by the art establishment of the day, only to be hailed in recent years as one of the most outstanding and unique contributions to post-war art in Europe. Exaggeration and myth still obscure their activities, however, and their actual motives for an art centred on the examination of taboos, the "hidden" secrets of the body, the aesthetics of destruction and the possibilities of regeneration have remained elusive. Subsequent generations of artists have claimed them as their forefathers or unscrupulously borrowed their ideas (but without approaching the intensity of their actions), and while international exhibitions have reclaimed their work for the visual arts, their writings have remained largely unpublished since they first appeared in small mimeographed editions, or are long since out of print.
This anthology of photo-documentation and writings - which includes manifestos, theoretical texts, action scores, even police and psychiatric reports - has been assembled in collaboration with the three surviving artists. It provides the first comprehensive survey of their work, and for the first time illuminates their differing intentions. These texts employ humour and vitriol to elaborate a position in total opposition to contemporary social, political and aesthetic mores. A lucid narrative emerges of a determined exploration of these conditioning factors, by means of an art that used life itself as its material.
The Vienna Actionists were indeed unique - at the very outset of post-war performance art they trod a path very different from the "Happenings" in the USA or the belated neo-Dada pranks of many of their contemporaries. They not only established a new territory for art but they explored it so thoroughly as to make most subsequent "body art" simply irrelevant.
Very Good—Near Fine copy.
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.
1995, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 164 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$390.00 - In stock -
His erotic masterpiece, "Chimushi" is the first comprehensive collection of Toshio Saeki's erotic nightmare artwork, published in 1995 by Treville, only available in Japan, and now very collectible in every edition, but especially in this first hardcover edition. One of his most popular books, and certainly his most demented and sexually graphic, each page of Chimushi sees every darkest sexual depravity rendered in vibrant, explicit colour by the unmistakable hand of Saeki, all impeccably printed in Japan by Treville Editions. Although almost entirely packed with full-page and double-page artworks, the book includes a biography and several crucial essays in Japanese by Suehiro Tanemura, Teruhiko Kuze, Masami Akita, Suehiro Maruo, Keiji Ueshima, Shuji Terayama and Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (!!!)
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—Near Fine copy, same dj, same obi. Light wear only.
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.
1974, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 126 pages, 23.6 x 31.4 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Grove Press Inc. / New York
$55.00 - In stock -
First edition of this classic volume on the work of one of the great elusive erotic-fantasy artists from Europe, Raymond Bertrand. Published in New York in 1974, this edition is one of the few publications on Bertrand outside France or Germany. A wonderful collection wrapped in hardcover with an introduction by Emmanuelle Arsan.
"This beautiful volume presents a comprehensive selection of the drawings and paintings of a contemporary French artist whose sensuous fantasy and surrealistic obsession have paid homage to the female body in a series of works which has no equal in modern art. 'The body,' says Emmanuelle Arsan in her introduction, 'is beautiful only if it is invented.' In this collection of drawings and paintings, Raymond Bertrand invents a female unlike any ever beheld by human eyes." (from dust jacket)
Along with Leonor Fini, Raymond Bertrand became acknowledged as one of the major new artists dealing with the modern sexuality in a highly personal fashion in the late 1960s-early 1970s, a period that seemed to encapsulate the entire published work of this little-known artist. Bertrand's work became known through his incredible illustrations for French SF journals Fiction, Galaxie, illustrations for the erotic Emmanuelle novels, and Eric Losfeld published collections. Bertrand is a somewhat elusive and shadowy figure about whom it is hard to find biographical information, and it is sadly unknown whether he continued his work after this period.
VG in Good DJ, toning to pages and DJ, light wear and tear to DJ edges, VG otherwise. Preserved in mylar wrap.
2006, Englih
Hardcover, 128 pages, 43.5 x 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
PictureBox / Brooklyn
$160.00 - Out of stock
Rare first (only) hardcover edition of Brian Chippendale's Ninja, his first book, published by PictureBox Inc.
Both an epic 80-page graphic novel and a document of his vibrant drawings, collages and posters, Ninja is the first book by Fort Thunder co-founder and Lighting Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale. The graphic novel, a work 5 years in the making, takes readers through a fantastic landscape delineated in Chippendale’s dense pen and ink line-work and starring a Ninja hunted by the forces of evil. It functions as both a great fantasy story and a social allegory about an artist’s struggle with money, gentrification, and city politics. Nearly every massive comics page is drawn in a different elaborate style somewhere between Darger, Panter & illuminated manuscript. In between each chapter of the story is a related section of fine art: from bright, exuberant paintings to visionary drawings to the posters for which Chippendale is internationally recognized. Half art book, half graphic novel, this collection is a unique adventure in art and comics.
Good—Very Good copy, bright well-bound copy with some light wear to extremities/scuffing to covers.
1984, Lithuanian / Russian / English / French / German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 310 pages, 33 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Vaga / Vilnius
$100.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 edition of this wonderful, comprehensive monograph published by Leidykla Vaga in Vilnius on the work of fin de siècle composer, artist and writer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. Profusely illustrated with Čiurlionis' visionary musical landscape paintings, with accompanying texts by Antanas Gedminas, Jonas Kuzminskis and Pranas Gudynas in Lithuanian, Russian, English, French and German.
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875 – 1911) was a Lithuanian composer, painter and writer in Polish. Čiurlionis contributed to symbolism and art nouveau, and was representative of the fin de siècle epoch. He has been considered one of the pioneers of abstract art in Europe. During his short life, he composed about 400 pieces of music and created about 300 paintings, as well as many literary works and poems. His works have had a profound influence on modern Lithuanian culture. His pictures often have a philosophical background. The influence of music on painting is striking: Čiurlionis created several cycles of paintings, which he called "sonatas" and whose individual pictures he titled "allegro", "andante" and the like. The individual images are based on the character of the respective musical performance instructions: an Andante, for example, conveys a rather calm atmosphere. Some paintings even bear the title "Fuge". This synthesis of music and painting is unique in terms of art history.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1966, Germand
Softcover, 330 pages, 19 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Frankfurter Kunstverein / Frankfurt
$45.00 - In stock -
Lovely 1966 catalogue of Wols, surveying his paintings, watercolors, drawings, and photos, heavily illustrated in colour and b/w with accompanying texts in German by art historian Ewald Rathke, plus biography, bibliography, and exhibition catalogue.
Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin – 1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement. He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.
Good—VG copy with some wear to extremities and spine creasing, still with sound binding.
1977, Japanese
Softcover, 56 pages, 26 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gallery 8 / Tokyo
$80.00 - In stock -
Very scarce Japanese publication on German painter and photographer Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known as Wols, published by Fuji Television Co. in 1977 on the occasion of an exhibition at Gallery 8, Tokyo. Beautifully illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with over 40 works, including chronology, exhibitions history, and bibliography. Exhibition work-list inserted.
Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin – 1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement. He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.
Near Fine copy.
1992, Dutch
Softcover, unpaginated, 30.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Turbo Comics / Holland
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of this collection of graphic erotic illustration by French draftsman Loïc Dubigeon (1934–2001), published by Dutch private press Turbo Comics. Dubigeon first came to recognition in the world of erotic art through his drawings for Pauline Réage’s novel Histoire d’O (1981), after leaving an illustrious graphic design career creating some of the most iconic scarves for Parisian fashion house Hermès. De Slavinnen (The Slaves) series of books was issued at the start of the 1990s with a focus on his fetish and explicit sexual imagery, years before many of these drawings appeared in Manuel de civilité à l’usage des ‘grandes’ filles (1997), De l’aube à la nuit (1998), and Soumission (2003).
Mature audiences only
Loïc Dubigeon (1934–2001), born in Nantes, France, was a celebrated French illustrator, painter, and stylist whose early works adorned the illustrious world of fashion house Hermès, and later works are some of the most graphic, realistic – and beautiful – drawings of sexual intimacy ever created by any artist. Despite coming from a family of shipowners and originally leaning towards architecture, Dubigeon found his artistic voice in various other forms of creative expression. He started gaining recognition after receiving the Biennale de Paris award in 1963, and his renown expanded with his diverse, vibrant and iconic designs for Hermès scarves, some of the most recognisable today. In the late 1960s he moved to the Normandy coast, where he lived in Berneval-le-Grand, and set up his studio in nearby Derchigny-Graincourt, where he showed and sold his trademark seaside paintings and pastels. In the late 1970s, Dubigeon started to draw naked figures from life with exquisite skill and detail, first in charcoal and later in soft pencil. In 1979 he exhibited some of his nudes alongside other works at an exhibition in Munich, which attracted the attention of the publisher Editions Borderie, who commissioned a series of illustrations inspired by Pauline Réage’s novel Histoire d’O. This appears to have unleashed Dubigeon’s imagination. This was followed by Douces violences and De l’aube à la nuit, and further private press collections of his erotic drawings, all valuable additions to the history of French erotic illustration and curiosa.
"The fact is that the drawings for Histoire d’O, Douces violences and De l’aube à la nuit are clearly drawn from life, and reflect Dubigeon’s determination that art should reflect things as they are in all their starkness and natural beauty. Part of this authenticity and integrity is reflected in the fact that he never attempted to hide his erotic work behind a pseudonym, or to exhibit it separately from his other work; for him art was art, and the erotic works just a small part of his life’s work."—Honest Erotica
Very Good copy. Light wear.
1993, Dutch
Softcover, unpaginated, 30.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Turbo Comics / Holland
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of this collection of graphic erotic illustration by French draftsman Loïc Dubigeon (1934–2001), published by Dutch private press Turbo Comics. Dubigeon first came to recognition in the world of erotic art through his drawings for Pauline Réage’s novel Histoire d’O (1981), after leaving an illustrious graphic design career creating some of the most iconic scarves for Parisian fashion house Hermès. De Slavinnen (The Slaves) series of books was issued at the start of the 1990s with a focus on his fetish and explicit sexual imagery, years before many of these drawings appeared in Manuel de civilité à l’usage des ‘grandes’ filles (1997), De l’aube à la nuit (1998), and Soumission (2003).
Mature audiences only
Loïc Dubigeon (1934–2001), born in Nantes, France, was a celebrated French illustrator, painter, and stylist whose early works adorned the illustrious world of fashion house Hermès, and later works are some of the most graphic, realistic – and beautiful – drawings of sexual intimacy ever created by any artist. Despite coming from a family of shipowners and originally leaning towards architecture, Dubigeon found his artistic voice in various other forms of creative expression. He started gaining recognition after receiving the Biennale de Paris award in 1963, and his renown expanded with his diverse, vibrant and iconic designs for Hermès scarves, some of the most recognisable today. In the late 1960s he moved to the Normandy coast, where he lived in Berneval-le-Grand, and set up his studio in nearby Derchigny-Graincourt, where he showed and sold his trademark seaside paintings and pastels. In the late 1970s, Dubigeon started to draw naked figures from life with exquisite skill and detail, first in charcoal and later in soft pencil. In 1979 he exhibited some of his nudes alongside other works at an exhibition in Munich, which attracted the attention of the publisher Editions Borderie, who commissioned a series of illustrations inspired by Pauline Réage’s novel Histoire d’O. This appears to have unleashed Dubigeon’s imagination. This was followed by Douces violences and De l’aube à la nuit, and further private press collections of his erotic drawings, all valuable additions to the history of French erotic illustration and curiosa.
"The fact is that the drawings for Histoire d’O, Douces violences and De l’aube à la nuit are clearly drawn from life, and reflect Dubigeon’s determination that art should reflect things as they are in all their starkness and natural beauty. Part of this authenticity and integrity is reflected in the fact that he never attempted to hide his erotic work behind a pseudonym, or to exhibit it separately from his other work; for him art was art, and the erotic works just a small part of his life’s work."—Honest Erotica
Very Good copy. Light wear.
1998, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 118 pages, 30.5 x 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taschen / Cologne
$70.00 - Out of stock
First 1998 hardcover edition of Giger's unrealised film masterpiece. The Mystery of San Gottardo exhaustively collates illustrations, texts, photographs, letters, and notes from a covert, personal project that Giger had been striving to realise for over three decades. “A unique love story… about a man and his love for a freak of nature, Armbeinda, which is really a sentient limb combining an arm and a leg. It is the further development of a recurring image in my work over the last 30 years”, a concept that stemmed from a 1963 creation called "The Beggar," Giger's very first sketch, featuring a leg and an arm holding a hat.
From the publisher:
"The dark king of the horrific, fantastic and bizarrely erotic, Swiss artist Giger might have languished in obscurity, such is the uncompromising vision of his work. However, in the late Seventies Hollywood came calling and his legendary designs for the Alien trilogy propelled him towards international fame and an Oscar. But Allen's Face-hugger, Chestburster and the reptilian Xenomorph are only a few visitors from Giger's monstrous universe. This latest book exhaustively collates illustrations, texts, photographs, letters, and notes from a covert, personal project that Giger has been striving to realise for over three decades. In a story mixing disturbing body horror and old-fashioned adventure tales, Giger illustrates the surreal science-fiction of a dystopian Switzerland where man is rendered into three bio-mechanical life-forms at the age of 60. The sexually insatiable arm-leg creature which rampages throughout this volume must rate as one of Giger's most grotesque creations. After being distracted by Hollywood for far too long, in this book Giger presents his latest outlandish and extraordinary visual excursion, a death-driving nightmare that will continue to unspool in your head long after you've closed the covers."
Highly recommended.
VG copy in G dust jacket with tanning to spine edge a ding to back.
1981, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 40 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Charles E. Tuttle / Tokyo
$150.00 - 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 copy, tight binding with some corner cover wear, tanning to page edges and foxing to preliminary pages.
?, Japanese
Softcover, 72 pages, 20 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art Space Mireiju / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Scarce Japanese exhibition catalogue published by Art Space Mireiju, in Shibuya, on the occasion of a major exhibition of French Surrealist artist Pierre Molinier's fetishistic gender-bending paintings, photomontages, and drawings. Alongside b/w reproductions of many of his works are many texts in Japanese, a testimony from Emmanuel Arson, hommages from Japanese artists and poets inspired by Molinier, Breton translations from French, chronology, bibliography, and more. Contributions from master Japanese doll artist Simon Yotsuya in discussion with the book's editor Kunio Iwaya, a Japanese art critic and scholar specializing in surrealism and fairy tales, who also contributed a major essay, and an introduction by Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French literature and student of demonology, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy with some spine tanning.
1969, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 92 pages, 20 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jean-Jacques Pauvert / Paris
$70.00 - In stock -
Excellent copy of the first monograph ever published on the work of Pierre Molinier, published by the great Jean-Jacques Pauvert in Paris, 1969. The only book published on his work while Molinier was alive. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with Molinier's fetishistic gender-bending paintings, photomontages, drawings, and much more. Features texts by Andre Breton and Emmanuelle Arsan, also bibliography and biography. Texts in French.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap.
2010, English
Hardcover, 400 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
Mennour / Paris
$150.00 - In stock -
The Molinier bible! A mammoth, crucial 400 page book on the method and genesis of Pierre Molinier's provocative, gender-bending photos and artwork. Beautifully printed and prodigiously illustrated with over 800 pictures, mostly unpublished, numerous documents, manuscripts and letters, a complete (nearly 100-page) chronology, a critical biography, and a text by Jean-Luc Mercié.Molinier. Essential publication on Molinier, the most comprehensive to date, and a must for any fan.
Rare English edition translated from the French by Edward Penwarden.
Pierre Molinier is an unknown of worldwide renown. Every book and every exhibition on the body, gender confusion or sexual excess seems to feature at least one work by this artist whose “genius” was acclaimed by André Breton in a memorable text published in 1956. But the bulk of his work has remained inaccessible. A number of pictures have never been shown and a corpus of only 160 prints has been published. The ensemble revealed by the artist's archives is much more extensive. It includes numerous proofs made to prepare his photomontages and working prints given to friends, but also notebooks and personal letters. Here, precise links emerge between his paintings, photographs and scandalous life. The myth carefully constructed by the artist begins to crumble before the reality of the work.
An inveterate seducer, thoroughgoing fetishist, unrepentant transvestite and inadvertent bisexual, to the very last Molinier remained haunted by two obsessions: pleasure, meaning immediate access to la petite mort, and “leaving a trace in the infinity of time.” This book charts the aesthetic incarnation of his passions. Its 819 photographs, most of them never published before, reveal the method, shed light on the procedures and give details of the origin and alchemy of his latent or composed images. Finally, an exhaustive chronology offers a new biography of Molinier, based on his letters: for it is in the intimacy of these writings that the shaman's heart beats closest to the truth.
In a career shared between the university (fifteen years) and publishing (twenty) Jean-Luc Mercié has written widely on painting and photography. This monograph is his fourth book about Pierre Molinier, the master from Bordeaux.
Born 1900 in Agen (France), Pierre Molinier, surrealistic painter and photographer, a precursor to body art, died in 1976 after having thought out radical and pornographic artwork.
1997, English / Japanese
Softcover, 100 pages, 37 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Sakuhinsha / Tokyo
$180.00 - In stock -
First Japanese edition of Japanese master of erotic fantasy illustration Hajime Sorayama's classic NAGA, published in 1997. The long awaited arrival of the latest collection Sorayama's erotic illustrations, NAGA, which was completed after his previous best-seller, GYNOIDS. This lavish over-sized volume is illustrated cover-to-cover with 65 of Sorayama's works gathered on the central mythological theme of NAGA — the serpent gods. A celebration of feminine beauty, presented in dramatic, glossy full-colour throughout. This edition with beautiful production, including textured, patterned Japanese paper-stocks and incredible reproductions.
Hajime Sorayama is revered for his erotic airbrushed illustrations of humanoid robots that explore ideals of femininity and beauty. Drawing on pinup pictures, Sorayama published the first book of his signature “Sexy Robot” series of chromium-plated figures in 1983. Decades later, these striking works have sold for more than $500,000. Sorayama started his career in advertising before freelancing in Hollywood, where he helped to produce visuals for sci-fi films. His illustrations gained widespread attention in 1995, when Penthouse began featuring them in a monthly column. While Sorayama has enjoyed a particular cult status for his sensual cyborgs —who appear empowered rather than objectified —he has also received mainstream commercial attention. Sony enlisted him to produce the first designs for its robotic dog AIBO, which won the grand prize for Japan’s Good Design Award in 1999. Sorayama has also worked with fashion titans such as Thierry Mugler and Dior on projects that have extended his illustrations into the realm of wearables, sculpture, and performance.
Very Good copy.
1998, English / Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 100 pages, 37 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Sakuhinsha / Tokyo
$190.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first Japanese hardcover edition of Japanese master of erotic fantasy illustration Hajime Sorayama's absolute classic Torquere (Torture), published in 1998. Following the success of best-seller NAGA, Sorayama's Torquere delves deeper into the darker realm of fantasy fetishism and, as the title suggests, into the world of Sadomasochism. This lavish over-sized volume is illustrated cover-to-cover with Sorayama's most explicit works presented in dramatic, glossy full-colour throughout. Rare in this original hardcover edition.
Hajime Sorayama is revered for his erotic airbrushed illustrations of humanoid robots that explore ideals of femininity and beauty. Drawing on pinup pictures, Sorayama published the first book of his signature “Sexy Robot” series of chromium-plated figures in 1983. Decades later, these striking works have sold for more than $500,000. Sorayama started his career in advertising before freelancing in Hollywood, where he helped to produce visuals for sci-fi films. His illustrations gained widespread attention in 1995, when Penthouse began featuring them in a monthly column. While Sorayama has enjoyed a particular cult status for his sensual cyborgs —who appear empowered rather than objectified —he has also received mainstream commercial attention. Sony enlisted him to produce the first designs for its robotic dog AIBO, which won the grand prize for Japan’s Good Design Award in 1999. Sorayama has also worked with fashion titans such as Thierry Mugler and Dior on projects that have extended his illustrations into the realm of wearables, sculpture, and performance.
Near Fine copy.