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.
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!
2025, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 120 pages, 30 x 30 cm
Ed. of 250 copies w. unique hand-drawn details,
Published by
Self-Published / Naarm
$55.00 - In stock -
Darcey Bella Arnold’s A Measure of Disorder brings together a series of works on paper produced between 2022 and 2024. Presented in a 120-page limited edition (250 copies), measuring 30 x 30 cm, and printed in full colour on high-quality paper in a section-sewn hardback format, the publication documents a body of drawing-based works that extend Arnold’s ongoing inquiry into language, visual structure, and the disruptions embedded within systems of order.
The cover is embossed with black foil printing and each copy of the limited edition book is distinguished by hand-drawn lines in pencil by Darcey Bella Arnold to the cover, rendering each copy unique.
The book includes essays by curator Tim Riley Walsh and artist and curator Brooke Babington. These essays were originally developed in response to Arnold’s two-part exhibition series A Measure of Disorder, held at Gertrude Glasshouse (2022) and ReadingRoom (2023), both in Naarm/Melbourne. Babington’s essay Disordering Measures and Riley Walsh’s If a canvas is feeling and a page is thought situate Arnold’s work within broader conversations around feminist approaches to materiality, language, and repetition.
Designed by Yanni Florence, the publication maintains a focus on the material and formal qualities of the work. The drawings—reproduced at scale and in colour—are presented with attention to their spatial and conceptual detail.
Darcey Bella Arnold is a Melbourne-based artist working across painting, sculpture, and drawing in a research-led practice that interrogates language—its necessity, fallibility, and creative potential. Her work draws on metaphor, humour, and repetition to reframe familiar histories, cultural symbols, and institutional pedagogies through installation-driven environments that merge personal archives with broader cultural and political references. Arnold holds a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts and Honours from Monash University, and has participated in national and international residencies including Gertrude Contemporary (AUS) and Eastside International (LA). Her work has been exhibited at major Australian institutions, with recent commissions at the Melbourne and Lorne Sculpture Biennales.
2025, English
Hardcover, 272 pages, 30 x 23 cm
Published by
Image Comics / US
$75.00 - In stock -
"Vaughn was one of the lights of America."—Moebius
Collecting for the first time, in chronological order, underground comix legend Vaughn Bodē's charmingly risqué strips and "Bodé Broads" from Cavalier magazine ("the kind men like.")
Originally written and drawn in the 1970s, this volume represents a time capsule in erotic humor as only a master of the form could create it. This beautiful hardbound book also collects Bodē's hard-to-find three-page strips and other rarities.
With a foreword and additional new art from Vaughn's son, Mark Bodē. Underground comix enthusiasts, Bodē aficionados and fans of adult humor won't want to miss this uncensored and digitally remastered omnibus.
Vaughn Bodē (1941 – 1975) was an American underground cartoonist and illustrator known for his character Cheech Wizard and his artwork depicting voluptuous women. In 1963, at age 21, and while living in Utica, New York, Bodē self-published Das Kämpf, considered one of the first underground comic books. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he illustrated covers and interior art for the science fiction digests Amazing Stories, Fantastic, Galaxy Science Fiction, Witzend and Worlds of If. Discovered by fellow cartoonist Trina Robbins, Bodē moved to Manhattan in 1969 and joined the staff of the underground newspaper the East Village Other. Beginning in 1968 and continuing until his untimely death from autoerotic asphyxiation in 1975, Bodē entered a prolific period of creativity, introducing a number of strips and ongoing series, most of which ran in underground newspapers or erotic magazines. Bodē described his sexuality as "auto-sexual, heterosexual, homosexual, mano-sexual, sado-sexual, trans-sexual, uni-sexual, omni-sexual." A contemporary of animator Ralph Bakshi, Bodē has been credited as an influence on Bakshi's animated films Wizards and The Lord of the Rings. Bodē has a huge following among graffiti artists, with his characters remaining a popular subject of the culture. Bodē was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame for comics artists in 2006.
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.
2009, English
Softcover, 156 pages, 24 x 16.8 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$78.00 - In stock -
There are some artists who are never forgotten simply because other artists will constantly cite them as examples. Paul Thek (1933-1988) is one such artist. Revered for his disarming humor and irreverent handling of artworld proprieties, and much lamented for his premature death from AIDS at the age of 55, the likes of Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Mike Kelley, John Miller, Paul McCarthy, Kim Gordon and Matthew Barney have all sung his praises. Tales the Tortoise Told Us is a three-part Thek compendium, composed of writing by Margit Brehm, Axel Heil and Roberto Ort (who discuss the artist's ambivalent relationship with his homeland, and Thek's odd place in the Beat and Hippie generation), a large spread of reproductions of Thek works and a chronologically-arranged survey of works from 1963 up to the artist's death in 1988.
2013, English
Softcover
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$20.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published to accompany the 2012-2013 exhibition 'The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster' in Melbourne at the NGV's Robert Raynor Gallery Prints & Drawings, 31 Aug – 28 Jan. Profusely illustrated with accompanying texts.
The Four Horsemen presents images of death and disaster in prints, illuminated manuscripts, illustrated books and paintings from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. This was a period of great turmoil in Europe, during which bitter religious conflict, war, famine and pestilence generated deep anxiety. Dramatic events and natural disasters were increasingly read as divine punishments or warnings that the Last Days were imminent.
This exhibition explores the ways in which artists gave expression to the beliefs and fears that plagued individuals and whole societies. The 120 works on display, including Albrecht Dürer’s extraordinary woodcuts illustrating the Apocalypse, prints by Hans Holbein, Jacques de Gheyn and Jacques Callot, illustrate witches, monsters, demons and the Devil. Death, personified as a skeleton, featured prominently in the visual culture of the period, and is represented in all guises – dancing, riding on horseback, and stalking unsuspecting men and women as they go about their daily lives.
The works in this exhibition are drawn from the Prints & Drawings collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and include key loans from the State Library of Victoria and the Special Collections of the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.
Exhibition curated by Dr Petra Kayser, Curator, Prints & Drawings, NGV; Cathy Leahy, Senior Curator, Prints & Drawings, NGV; Dr Jennifer Spinks, Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne; and Professor Charles Zika, Professorial Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence, History of Emotions, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne.
Near Fine copy.
1993, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 188 pages, 24 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$120.00 - In stock -
First 1993 edition in rare hardcover.
When the definitive history of the emergence of gay culture in the second half of the twentieth century is written, one individual artist is almost certain to be acknowledged for having singlehandedly shaped the erotic imagination of generations of gay men: the Scandinavian illustrator Tom of Finland.
Working alone and in secret in a far-off land, the remarkable drawings that sprang from this artist's hands—leathermen-bikers, cow-boys, cops, lumberjacks, hardhats, soldiers, and sailors—become archetypal images that delineated the shape of homoerotic desire.
With Tom's full cooperation in the years before his death, F. Valentine Hooven Ill has written a full biography of the man, while tracing the evolution and impact of his art on the world.
"Tom of Finland is one of the gay world's few authentic icons. For over thirty years his drawings have appeared in gay magazines and circulated in pirate editions. His men have entered the fantasy life of thousands, and his vision has influenced such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Weber, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder."—Out/Look
Fine copy in Fine DJ.
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.
1984, French
Softcover, 36 pages (6 colour & 8 b/w ill.), 21 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Le Consortium / Dijon
$150.00 - In stock -
Rare 1984 catalogue/artist book published to accompany the exhibition Six Works at Le Consortium, Dijon, 25 June–28 July, 1984. Installation and individual works documented, with laid-in artist-designed wine label. Accompanying texts by Hubert Besacier, Haendel Teicher.
Born in Paris in the aftermath of World War II of a Polish father and a French mother, Marc Camille Chaimowicz (1947-2024) moved as a child to the United Kingdom. He studied at Ealing, Camberwell, and the Slate School of Art in London. In new artistic times, careful to bring art and life closer, often using performance, the life of Marc Camille Chaimowicz has become a great workshop. Living in the exhibition spaces, he sets up hotels entrances, decorates them with his own artefacts, and serves there some tea to visitors with musical background. When it became an official art practice which was no longer subversive, Chaimowicz abandoned performance art. From 1975 to 1979, he designed the interior of his Approach Road flat. Wallpapers, curtains, videos he made while performing in his own decor: everything had been tailored-imagined, drawn, and conceived to turn his interior into a room conducive to reverie. From the 1980s onwards, decors and furniture set like in a theatre scenography took their place in museums. Since then, hundreds of exhibitions have featured the interiors series of this international artist.
Fine—As New copy.
1981, English
Fold-out booklet, 20.4 x 22.6 cm (folded), 72 x 22.6 cm (unfolded)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
The Tate Gallery / London
$50.00 - In stock -
Rare 1981 fold-out booklet published to accompany Marc Camille Chaimowicz's performance of Partial Eclipse… at the Tate Gallery, London in September, 1981.
Born in 1947, Paris, Marc Camille Chaimowicz is a London-based artist whose cross-disciplinary work in painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, furniture, lighting, ceramics, textiles, and wallpaper challenges the categorical divisions between fine and applied arts, masculine and feminine, public and private, past and present.
Fine copy.
2010, English / German / French
Folio of five looseleaf pattern sheets, a letter in facsimile, and catalogue, colour offset printed, 21.5 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Secession / Vienna
Walther König / Köln
$180.00 - In stock -
Out-of-print and collectible artist’s portfolio by Marc Camille Chaimowicz with five pattern sheets, a letter from Chaimowicz in facsimile, and an illustrated catalogue with essay by Silvia Eiblmayr (German/English and French/English). Produced by the Secession in a limited edition and published in cooperation with Musée La Piscine, Roubaix.
Born in 1947, Paris, Marc Camille Chaimowicz is a London-based artist whose cross-disciplinary work in painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, furniture, lighting, ceramics, textiles, and wallpaper challenges the categorical divisions between fine and applied arts, masculine and feminine, public and private, past and present.
Like New copy.
1981, English
Die cut folded exhibition card, 18 x 14.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Nigel Greenwood Inc. / London
$90.00 - In stock -
Rare die-cut folded exhibition card produced by Marc Camille Chaimowicz on the occasion of the exhibition Macquettes… at Nigel Greenwood Inc, London, 10 December, 1981—30 January, 1982.
Born in 1947, Paris, Marc Camille Chaimowicz is a London-based artist whose cross-disciplinary work in painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, furniture, lighting, ceramics, textiles, and wallpaper challenges the categorical divisions between fine and applied arts, masculine and feminine, public and private, past and present.
Fine copy.
1970, German
Softcover, unpaginated, 18 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kiepenheuer & Witsch / Köln
$100.00 - In stock -
Scarce first 1970 German edition of Roland Topor's famous book collection Die Masochisten (The Masochists), one of the finest examples of the artist's profound command of illustrated dark humour. Almost entirely made up of wordless b/w illustrations, with a foreword in german by German designer, illustrator and typographer, Hannes Jähn.
Roland Topor (1938—1997) was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, and much more. A founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962, Topor was known for the surreal and absurdist nature of his work.
Very Good copy. A crisp, solidly bound copy with some foxing/tanning to pages, usual spine edge tanning to bright fluro pink boards (most often bleached out).
1969, French
Hardcover (cloth bound), 106 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Éditions Denoël / Paris
$120.00 - Out of stock
First Edition of the catalogue raisonné of the engraved work of German Surrealist Hans Bellmer, published in 1969 by Éditions Denoël, Paris. Wrapped in the publisher's debossed black covers featuring Bellmer's Céphalopode of 1965, this handsome volume opens with "Morale of Engraving", a four page introduction by author Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues (in French). The rest of the book is made up of 141 reproduced engraved works of Bellmer, including his exquisite works complimenting Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Joyce Mansour, Louis Aragon, Charles Baudelaire, and others, followed by a 7 page catalogue raisonné index, including work title, date, process and technique, dimensions, printing justifications, editors and other details. An essential title in any Bellmer collection and important reference.
Very Good copy, tanning and some marks to board/page edges with age.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 104 pages, 21 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Scarce copy of the now out-of-print Biomannerism book, first edition, published in Japan by Treville in 1997. An incredible selection of international artists linked through their exploration of new aesthetics of erotic metamorphosis between the organic and synthetic compiled with texts by Stéphan Lévy Kuentz. Features lavishly illustrated chapters dedicated to the works of artists Daniel Ouellette, Michel Henricot, Sibylle Ruppert, Joe Hackbarth, Tsutomu Otsuka, Beksinski, Yoshifumi Hayashi, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol, H. R. Giger.
"The erotic Biomannerism movement is a creature of the cyberage, an expression of technophobia and fear of mutation. The artists represented here come from the U.S., France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland, but they share a Kafkaesque view of the human condition, which they express in twisting, writhing, bulging, disintegrating images of the human form. Inspiration flows from Michelangelo, Dali, da Vinci, Rubens, and Duchamp, as well as Blade Runner, Frankenstein, and Intel."
Good copy due to a small knock/closed tear to a few pages, otherwise Very Good in VG dust jacket with only light general wear.
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.