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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
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
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 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.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, 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.
2022, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 22 x 15 cm
Published by
Caesura / US
$44.00 - Out of stock
Caesura (seh-'zhur-uh) is a magazine of art and criticism. This inaugural issue of Caesura looks back on Surrealism not as an answer to the current crisis of art, but as one of the last movements to raise it as a question for life. The legacy of Surrealism is undoubtedly problematic: its novel techniques and strange effects have been repeatedly hypostatized and deployed in the production, both high and low, of culture industry kitsch. Still something remains of its original drive: to pierce the veil of appearance for a glimpse at the underlying forms that constitute subjective experience. For the concrete, as Marx says, “is concrete by virtue of being the concentration of many determinations.” Surrealism — more real than reality itself.
Featuring work by Will Alexander, Gabriel Almeida, Dato Barbakadze, Roberta Boffo, Roberto Calasso, Austin Carder, Mary Ann Caws, Billie Chernicoff, Róbert Gál, Allison Hewitt Ward, Robert Kelly, Timothy Kelly, Carlos Lara, Juliette Neil, Joel Newberger, Tamas Panitz, Andrei Pokrovskii, Irakli Qolbaia, Alice Paalen Rahon, Laurie Rojas, Kira Scerbin, Bret Schneider, David Short, Rosmarie Waldrop, Madison Winston, Patrick Zapien, and Maggie Louisa Zavgren.
COVER: Kira Screbin, Triple Breather, 2019
DESIGN: Renata Cruz Lara
About Caesura:
The alarm bells are ringing and catastrophe is at the door. As the last century begins its final exit from the stage, what will happen to the experience it gave humanity? Will this experience survive the world that bore it? Not only common sense but the stars themselves are realigning in an effort to forget the objects of our shattered dreams, shedding them as empty husks of strange, unpleasant times. What shines true today in light of yesterday will not be counted on tomorrow. Only those who learn to brush against the flow of time will have any chance of staying afloat. Thus the sun that we see setting is not the same that will be rising, and everything — all that is holy and all profane — shall be transfigured in the course of night. Art too must stake its place in the world that will dawn in the approaching epoch.
Contemporary art, which has dominated artistic practice for fifty years or more, adheres to a concept of the contemporary which obliterates the shape of history and demands the strictest currency as the criterion of art’s success. Like fashion, it has come to be distinguished by the marvelous arbitrary ascents and subsequent ridiculous falls that churn and cycle through art’s fortune, trend after trend, season after season. Each and every moment is compelled to find its style and is extinguished in a bright and empty glimmer that leaves one wondering, much like Gauguin long ago: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
The academic theory proffered in the schools, journals, galleries, and museums that educate young artists and critics today mistrusts — and oftentimes condemns! — such basic, searching questions about the meaning and purpose of art. More often than not, the theorists and critics of contemporary art regret the fact that artworks strive towards a freedom which seems unforgivably barbaric when so many continue to suffer. But such a ‘critical’ perspective gradually grows indifferent to those images of future happiness which permeate artworks that grasp towards something truly new and different in creation. Thus the history of art has come to give form to the history of the species — to the irresistible rhythm of self-creation and self-destruction that constantly drives humanity to a world beyond its own.
Caesura is a modest project to collect the scattered fragments of art and criticism working to escape the aimlessness that plagues the present. What is necessary is a break, a pause, and some room to breathe. We are looking to publish visual art, poetry, prose, and music as well as fundamental criticism and commentary from artists and writers that recognize the task before us and the need for something new. We have no schemas or positive ideals to enshrine, nor do we endorse particular styles, techniques, or media. What we have to offer is a sense of history, of the dead-end of the present, and the disappointment of the past: “a total absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it.” What we ask is simply that art prove its right to exist. //
“IT IS SELF-EVIDENT THAT NOTHING CONCERNING ART IS SELF-EVIDENT ANYMORE, NOT ITS INNER LIFE, NOT ITS RELATION TO THE WORLD, NOT EVEN ITS RIGHT TO EXIST.”—Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
2017, German / English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 30 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$45.00 - Out of stock
The eighth instalment in Kunstverein München’s ‘Companion’ series, this “Verkaufskatalog” contains images, prices, material descriptions, and gallery designations for each of the works by artists Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys included in the exhibition ‘30 Jahre Kunst’. The diverse spectrum of the duo’s collaborative practice – drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, kinetic objects, and videos – is represented over the book’s 192 pages, all printed in black and white. In addition, a number of lost, destroyed, or forgotten works are featured, as well as new works that were specially commissioned for the exhibition.
Highly recommended.
1977, German
Softcover, 300 pages (approx) plus inserts, 24 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Neue Galerie Graz und Künstlerhaus / Graz
$190.00 - In stock -
Rare catalogue published in the occasion of Trigon 77, 18 October–13 November 1977, Neue Galerie Graz und Künstlerhaus, Graz. The three-country project “trigon” was a biennial founded in Graz, Austria in 1963 that featured contemporary art from the regional neighbours Austria, Italy, and what was then Yugoslavia. Throughout its three-decade run, trigon sought to present the latest developments in art—and it was also one of the first international exhibition series to include artists from Yugoslavia. “The Creative Process” was the motto of trigon 77, held during the heyday of conceptual art—which opted for the total disintegration of conventional modes of artistic expression, transforming sculpture into a process by which to dematerialize both form and matter. Heavily illustrated throughout with work and texts by exhibiting artists : Giovanni Anselmo, Dadamaino, Zvi Goldstein, Fabio Mauri, Aldo Tagliaferro, Grazia Varisco, Nanda Vigo, Giancarlo Zen, Gilberto Zorio, Jovan Cekić, Boris Demur, Goran Djordjević, Mladen Galić, Julije Knifer, Ante Rasić, Šempas family, Predrag Ristić, Andraz Šalamun, Damir Sokic, Josef Bauer, Gottfried Bechtold, Hans Bischoffshausen, Wolfgang Buchner, Karl Hikade, Edelbert Köb, Ferdinand Penker, Arnulf Rainer, Ingo Springenschmid, Ingeborg Strobl... Includes both the (usually missing) foil sheet and frosted acetate sheet inserts edition by Italian artist Nanda Vigo.
Good copy with heavy edge wear and dust marking. An indentation to back cover, inserts edge-worn due to being slightly larger than book dimensions.
1996, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Artspace / Sydney
David Pestorius / Brisbane
Experimental Art Foundation / Adelaide
$25.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the traveling exhibition Gail Hastings — To Make a Work of Timeless Art, at Artspace, Sydney; Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide; David Pestorius Gallery, Brisbane, 1996. Illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with essay by Linda Michael. Published in an edition of 600 copies.
Australian abstract artist Gail Hastings makes work which she describes as 'sculptuation': a combination of sculpture and situation. Her work is a conversation about space and objects, and about the ideas that arise through their interaction and in different situations.
Very Good copy.
1939 / 1973, French
Softcover (w. lace-printed dust jacket), 26 pages, 13.4 x 9.5 cm
1st Facsimile Edition,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
GQ / Tokyo
$250.00 - Out of stock
Super rare and mysterious 1973 reprint of the exceptionally rare 'Oeillades Ciselées en Branche' (1939), Hans Bellmer's (1902 – 1975) collaboration with fellow Surrealist Georges Hugnet (1906 – 1974), published in Paris by publisher Jeanne Bucher in an edition limited to 230 hand-numbered copies wrapped in lace paper. Although Bellmer had illustrated books before 'Oeillades Ciselées en Branche', those, such as the notoriously scarce 'Die Puppe' (1934) and the later French version 'La Poupée' (1936) were illustrated with original photographs, this was his very first illustrated book. Bellmer had worked as a draftsman for his own advertising agency and his technical virtuosity combined with his inspirational predilections produced a highly original body of illustration - here in heliogravure - for Hugnet's erotic text. In the words of Pierre Seghers, the poet and publisher, the text and illustration, as well as the design of the book, with its patterned lace over pink paper, combined to produce 'an absolutely perfect little book'. Hugnet was a French graphic artist, poet, writer, art historian, bookbinding designer, critic and film director and a figure in the Dada movement and Surrealism. This was his second book after the famous collage novel Le septième face du dé (1936). The text is a prose poem on the theme of young adolescent girls, articulated with the erotic images of Bellmer, whose extraordinary skill, inherited from the technical drawing of his engineering studies, perfectly serves this particular eroticism. 'Bellmer's color engravings, placed outside the text or using free spaces in the text, offer variations on the theme of the metamorphosis of the female body associated with that of the double. Disarticulated puppets or slender silhouettes with sometimes disproportionate limbs, young girls evolve slightly over the pages, drawn with spider-like finesse by Bellmer, one of the most successful of all. '
Lovingly reproduced here in limited offset-print on warm, fragile, soft paper stocks with delicate dust jacket lace over-prints, reproducing in simplified facsimile edition number "221" of the original 230. Published in Tokyo by the great 1970s GQ (Graphic Quarterly) periodical, their facsimile editions were widely regarded for their quality, and very collectible in their own right, usually only available to those on their mailing list. They were also official reproductions, permitted by their original publishers and authors. That said, there is little to no information anywhere about this particular 1973 edition, published shortly before the deaths of both artists.
Very Good copy.
1970, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 28 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Evergreen Review Inc. / New York
Ever
$20.00 - Out of stock
Vol. 14 No. 76 March 1970 issue of Evergreen Review. This issue features Kay Boyle (Long Walk from San Francisco), Bill Amidon (short Story), Michael Rumaker (For Charles Olson, a poem), Nat Hentoff (The Joke), Antonin Liehm (Interview with Jaromil Jires), Al Young (Poem), Ed Sanders (short story), Raymond Bertrand (Erotic Drawings), Roy L. Walford (Original Irreplaceable Vision), Richard Brautigan (short Story, The Betrayed Kingdom), Strong & Sterling (Frank Fleet and His Electronic Sex Machine), John Lahr (Putting Shakespeare in a New Environment), plus regular features, illustrations and much more.
The Evergreen Review was a U.S. based literary magazine founded by Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press, and editor Don Allen and Fred Jordan in 1957. It existed in print form until 1973. Evergreen Review debuted pivotal works by Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Günter Grass, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O’Hara, Kenzaburō Ōe, Octavio Paz, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott and Malcolm X. United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote a controversial piece for the magazine in 1969. Kerouac and Ginsberg regularly had their writing published in the magazine. "Evergreen published writing that was literally counter to the culture, and if it was sexy, so much the better. In the context of the time, sex was politics, and the powers-that-be made the suppression of sexuality a political issue. The court battles that Grove Press fought for the legal publication of Lady Chatterly's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch, and for the legal distribution of the film I Am Curious: Yellow, spilled onto the pages of Evergreen Review, and in 1964, an issue of Evergreen itself was confiscated in New York State by the Nassau County District Attorney on obscenity charges...
2020, English
Hardcover, 180 pages, Dimensions 23.9 x 31.5 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$99.00 - Out of stock
Sensuality and abjection in the sculpture of an artist who expressed the female experience unapologetically and presciently.
This catalog considers the pivotal turning points in the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow's (1926-73) life and career from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It considers her experimental approach to materials, ranging from plaster and bronze to her groundbreaking use of polyester resin in the mid-1960s. Szapocznikow's work maps her engagement with her own body as it transformed from healthy to ailing. Her art amounts to a powerful meditation on what she once described as "a fleeting instant, a trivial instant ... our terrestrial passage." These sensual casts and sculptures of body parts are ecstatic and abject, playful and disturbing, direct and elusive. Unapologetic in their expression of the female experience, including that of terminal illness, Szapocznikow's works remain hauntingly relevant today. Featuring new photography, the publication aims to render the tactility and spatiality of these works in brilliant new detail.
1978, English
Softcover, 84 pages, 28.5 x 23 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bantam Books / New York
$70.00 - Out of stock
1978 edition of the first major book published on the work of American fantasy and science fiction artist Frank Frazetta (1928 – 2010). Lavishly illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with Frazetta's incredible paintings and illustrations, this volume (first edition 1975) has become a collector's staple on the artist, leading to two follow-up collections. Often referred to as the "Godfather of fantasy art", and one of the most renowned illustrators of the 20th century, Frazetta is widely recognised for his artwork for comic books, science fiction book covers, paintings, posters, LP record album covers, and other media. Frazetta was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame, the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and was awarded a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
Introduction by Betty Ballantine.
Very Good copy with only minor wear/marks to cover.
2014, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. dust jacket), 272 pages, 25.5 x 17.3 cm
Published by
D.A.P. / New York
MoMA / New York
$60.00 - In stock -
Introduction by Ann Temkin. Essay by Hilton Als. Chronology by Claudia Carson, Paulina Pabocha with Robert Gober. Afterword by Christian Scheidemann.
"Untitled" (1991) with "Forest" (1991) in background are reproduced from "Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor".Robert Gober rose to prominence in the mid-1980s and was quickly acknowledged as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Early in his career, he made deceptively simple sculptures of everyday objects--beginning with sinks and moving on to domestic furniture such as playpens, beds and doors. In the 1990s, his practice evolved from single works to theatrical room-sized environments. In all of his work, Gober's formal intelligence is never separate from a penetrating reading of the socio-political context of his time. His objects and installations are among the most psychologically charged artworks of the late twentieth century, reflecting the artist's sustained concerns with issues of social justice, freedom and tolerance. Published in conjunction with the first large-scale survey of the artist's career to take place in the United States, this publication presents his works in all media, including individual sculptures and immersive sculptural environments, as well as a distinctive selection of drawings, prints and photographs. Prepared in close collaboration with the artist, it traces the development of a remarkable body of work, highlighting themes and motifs that emerged in the early 1980s and continue to inform Gober's work today. An essay by Hilton Als is complemented by an in-depth chronology featuring a rich selection of images from the artist's archives, including never-before-published photographs of works in progress.
Robert Gober was born in 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut. He has had numerous one-person exhibitions, most notably at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Schaulager, Basel. In 2001, he represented the United States at the 49th Venice Biennale. Gober's curatorial projects have been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Menil Collection, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.
Ann Temkin is an American art curator, and currently the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic who writes for The New Yorker.
Claudia Carson is archivist and registrar to Robert Gober.
Paulina Pabocha is Assistant Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art.
Christian Scheidemann is the Senior Conservator and President of Contemporary Conservation Ltd.
2021, English
Hardcover, 76 Pages, 20 x 25 cm
First ed. of 500,
Out of print title / as new
Published by
Baron / UK
$70.00 - Out of stock
Published in a limited first edition of 500 copies and now out-of-print, this is the first posthumous book by Japanese fetish artist Namio Harukawa (May 1947 – April 24, 2020), dedicated to Harukawa’s archive of rarely published work.
Creating a visionary language through the medium of pencil drawings, Harukawa worked for 60 years under a pseudonym, Namio Harukawa: formed from an anagram of “Naomi”, a reference to Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel, and actress Masumi Harukawa, using it until his death in 2020.
Forniphilia and domination has fascinated and preoccupied Harukawa, in his artistic practice, and was central to his life work. His artwork typically featured voluptuous women dominating and humiliating smaller men. His work has been exhibited internationally and received critical praise, from Oniroku Dan to Madonna, and found new contemporary relevance on social networks, from feminists, to liberators.
The book also contains an essay by academic Pernilla Ellens, editor of Post Butt and The true meaning of S.M.H. and is designed by Sam Boxer, Art Director of Gut Magazine.
As New.
2012, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 260 pages, 29 x 30 cm
Published by
Five Continents Editions / Milan
$130.00 - In stock -
The major monograph on Cuban artist Agustin Fernandez.
'As a painter I use a realist technique, but the emblems I invent are not real. They are purely imaginative... Painting is a thing of the mind. My realism is not nature, or landscape, or still life, but the psychological world.' — Agustin Fernandez
At the time of his death in 2006, Agustin Fernandez (b. 1928) ranked among Cuba's most outstanding artists. Defying simple categorisation, today his work is most recognisable for its ambiguous and precariously balanced forms, erotic overtones, surreal juxtapositions, and metallic palette. This superbly illustrated book is the first comprehensive study of Fernandez's work, and includes contributions by renowned critic Donald Kuspit and a team of experts. Fernandez's work has been exhibited throughout Europe and North and South America, and is represented in major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work found a wider audience when one of his larger paintings was featured in the 1980 Brian de Palma film, Dressed to Kill.
Introduction by Donald Kuspit. Texts by Susan Aberth, Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Abby McEwen.
2018, English / French / Dutch
Hardcover, 192 pages, 24.5 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Pandora / Brussels
$130.00 - In stock -
For a long time, the graphic oeuvre of Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) was, if not neglected, then at least
discussed little or summarily. It was only in 1982 that the first exhibition fully devoted to his prints was held. The prints of Spilliaert are perhaps less known than his original works on paper but they are equally mysterious, attractive and varied on topic: portraits, figures, land- and cityscapes, forests and parks...
Together with fellow citizen of Ostend James Ensor, Leon Spilliaert is considered one of the pioneers of Belgian modern art.
Over 35 years on from that first exhibition, this new and updated edition of the catalogue raisonne of the prints of Leon Spilliaert by Xavier Tricot showcases the visionary work of this Belgian artist.
Text in English, French, and Dutch.
2022, English
Hardcover, 260 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
A sweeping selection of Donald Judd’s iconic and ambitious works alongside a diverse collection of newly commissioned writings.
One of the most significant American artists of the postwar period, Judd rigorously experimented with color, form, material, and space. The works in this catalogue range from the artist’s expansive installations to self-contained single units, yielding valuable new insights into his process and approach. The survey includes one of his largest and most intricate installations of wall-mounted plywood boxes, conceived in 1986. Other works include variations on some of Judd’s most recognizable forms, executed in materials such as Corten steel, plexiglass, copper, plywood, brushed aluminum, and painted aluminum. Brilliant and exacting reproductions capture these works in vivid detail. Following the major Judd retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2020, this book serves as a companion volume.
With contributions from a wide range of voices—art historians, critics, writers, and performers— this publication includes rich new writings on Judd’s oeuvre, art criticism, and enduring influence. Artworks 1970–1994 is published on the occasion of the eponymous 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner New York.
Foreword by Flavin Judd. Texts by Johanna Fateman, Lucy Ives, Branden W. Joseph, Marta Kuzma, Thessaly La Force, Anna Lovatt, Lauren Oyler, Wendy Perron, Michael Stone-Richards, and Mimi Thompson.
2014, English
French fold covers, spiral bound, 112 pages, 17.8 × 23 cm
Published by
Rainoff / Sydney / New York
$35.00 $5.00 - In stock -
Following on from their award-winning inaugural collaboration A Bell is a Cup, Sydney and NYC-based imprint Rainoff's second book with Matt Connors, Machines, continues the celebrated US painter's loose and shape-shifting traversals of the histories and aesthetic implications of abstraction. This stunning publication has been produced with four different colours for both the front and back covers. This allows each cover to be interchanged to create a new colour combination. Sixteen different colour combinations can be created in total.
1976, English
Softcover, 249 pages, 28.2 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New York University Press / New York
$100.00 - Out of stock
First 1976 edition of the best book on American artist Eva Hesse (1936—1970), and one of the great artist monographs. Long out-of-print, this classic text is both an insightful critical analysis and a tribute to an artist whose genius has become increasingly apparent with the passage of time. Authored by American writer, art critic, activist, and curator Lucy R. Lippard (b. 1937), Eva Hesse was designed by Hesse's friends and colleagues Sol LeWitt and Pat Stier; her sculptures, drawings, and paintings are reproduced throughout the entire book and discussed; and the text includes numerous quotations from her diaries.
Eva Hesse (1936—1970), was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. As Lippard points out, Hesse's use of obsessive repetition in her works served to increase and exaggerate the absurdity she saw in her life. In many ways, her works were "psychic models," as Robert Smithson has said, of "a very interior person." In pioneering the use of "soft" materials, her sculptures betrayed her awareness of the manner in which her experience as a woman altered her art and career. Although she died before feminism affected the art world to any great extent, her major works have since become talismans for succeeding generations of women artists.
Very Good copy of the softcover first edition.
2012, English
Hardcover, 320 pages, 26.7 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
Whitney Museum of American Art / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) was part of a vibrant community of avant-garde artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle included Wallace Berman, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, Edward Kienholz, and Michael McClure. Although best known for her monumental painting The Rose (1958-66), DeFeo worked in a wide range of media and produced an astoundingly diverse and compelling body of work over four decades. DeFeo's unconventional approach to materials and her intensive, physical method make her a unique figure in postwar American art.
In the first comprehensive monograph on DeFeo, Dana Miller looks at the breadth of the artist's work, her cross-disciplinary practice, broad range of interests and influences, as well as pivotal moments in her career. In addition, Miller dispels misconceptions and assumptions about the artist and also offers new insight into her under-recognized works from the 1970s and 1980s. Greil Marcus explores the significance of titles in DeFeo's work; Michael Duncan considers her approach to her career and the marketplace; Corey Keller looks at DeFeo's photographic oeuvre; and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro examines her materials and processes.
The book features new photography, archival images, and a number of previously unpublished works. Also included are a biographical chronology, an extensive bibliography, and an exhibition history.
2015, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 272 pages, 22.4 x 27.2 cm
Published by
D.A.P. / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Frances Morris, Tiffany Bell. Text by Marion Ackermann, Rachel Barker, Jacquelynn Baas, Tiffany Bell, Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Briony Fer, Lena Fritsch, Anna Lovatt, Frances Morris, Maria Müller-Schareck, Richard Tobin, Rosemarie Trockel.
The critically acclaimed, indispensible illustrated monograph on Agnes Martin, published to accompany the major retrospective exhibition organized by the Tate and on view in 2016 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Guggenheim.
This groundbreaking survey provides an in-depth account of Martin's artistic career, from lesser-known early experimental works through her striped and gridded grey paintings and use of color in various formats, to a group of her final pieces that reintroduce bold forms. A selection of drawings and watercolors and Martin's own writing are also included.
Edited by the exhibitions's co-curators Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell, and with essays by leading scholars that give a context for Martin's work--her life, relationship with other artists, the influence of South-Asian philosophy--alongside focused shorter pieces on particular paintings, this beautifully designed volume is the definitive publication on her oeuvre. Frances Morris places Martin's work in the art historical context of the time; art historian Richard Tobin analyzes Martin's painting The Islands; conservator Rachel Barker offers the reader a close viewing of Morning; curator Lena Fritsch provides a visual biography by comparing photographic portraits of Martin from different periods; and art historian Jacquelynn Baas delves into the spiritual and philosophical beliefs so present in Martin's art, including Platonism, Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism and Taoism.
Agnes Martin was born in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912, and moved to the US in 1932, studying at universities in Oregon, California, New Mexico and New York. She painted still lifes and portraits until the early 1950s, when she developed an abstract biomorphic style influenced by Abstract Expressionism. Her first one-woman exhibition was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1958. Partly through close friendships with artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt, Martin began to experiment with symmetrical compositions of rectangles or circles within a square, then from around 1960-61 to work with grids of delicate horizontal and vertical lines. She left New York in 1967, shortly after the death of Reinhardt, and moved to New Mexico, where she lived until her death in 2004.
2021, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 14.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$40.00 - Out of stock
From the hexing of presidents to a renewed interest in herbalism and atavistic forms of self-care, magic has furnished the contemporary imagination with mysterious and complex bodies of arcane thought and practice. This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians, and theorists that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary art's varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic.
Dispensing with simple narratives of re-enchantment, Magic illustrates the intricate ways in which we have to some extent always been captivated by the allure of the numinous. It demonstrates how magical culture's tendencies toward secrecy, occlusion, and encryption might provide contemporary artists with strategies of remedial communality, a renewed faith in the invocational power of personal testimony, and a poetics of practice that could boldly question our political circumstances, from the crisis of climate collapse to the strictures of socially sanctioned techniques of medical and psychiatric care.
Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a 'magical-critical' thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present.
Artists surveyed:
Holly Pester, Katrina Palmer, Ithell Colquhoun, Anna Zett, Monica Sjoeo, Sofia Al-Maria, Jack Burnham, Jeremy Millar, Susan Hiller, Mike Kelley, Morehshin Allahyari, Center for Tactical Magic, David Steans, Porpentine, Travis Jeppesen, Linda Stupart, Caspar Heinemann, Elizabeth Mputu, Faith Wilding, David Hammons, Ana Mendieta, Henri Michaux, Kenneth Anger, Benedict Drew, Mark Leckey, Robert Morris, Jenna Sutela, Haroon Mirza, Zadie Xa, Saya Woolfalk, Ian Cheng, Tabita Rezaire, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Elijah Burgher, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sahej Rahal
Writers:
Charles Fort, Victoria Nelson, Gary Lachman, Yvonne P. Chireau, Randall Styers, Isabelle Stengers, Alan Moore, Simon O' Sullivan, Lucy Lippard, Louis Chude Sokei, Patricia MacCormack, Mark Pilkington, AE, Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater, Michel Leiris, Aime Cesaire, Austin Osman Spare, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Elaine Graham, Jeffrey Sconce, Giulia Smith, Esther Leslie, Alice Bucknell, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Hannah Gregory, Kristen Gallerneaux, Mahan Moalemi, Jamie Sutcliffe, Gregory Sholette, Aaron Gach, Eugene Thacker, Diane Di Prima, Allan Doyle, Aria Dean, Emily LaBarge, Lou Cornum, Joy KMT, Scott Wark, McKenzie Wark, Phil Hine, Jackie Wang, Sean Bonney
1972/2006, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket, slipcase, obi), 92 pages, 31 x 25 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Kawade Shobo Shinsha / Tokyo
$150.00 - Out of stock
2006 facsimile edition of this wonderful 1972 slip-cased hardcover monograph on German artist Hans Bellmer, considered one of the most important representatives of Surrealist Art. Bound in brown cloth and wrapped in illustrated original dust-jacket, this heavily illustrated book surveys Bellmer's incredible paintings, drawings, photography and sculptural dolls through beautiful colour and monochrome gravure reproductions, with alongside various texts, biography, bibliography and portrait of the artist. Published as volume 2 of the deluxe La Septième Face du Dé series by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in Japan in the 1970s, all later re-printed in the 2000s. All editions now out-of-print.
German artist Hans Bellmer (1902 – 1975), was best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. "Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he'd been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925).
Fine copy.
2015, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 21.5 x 27.5 cm
Published by
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts / San Francisco
MoMA PS1 / New York
Raven Row / London
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$69.00 $45.00 - Out of stock
Fine Arts continues Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s playful and dystopic approach to depicting the human condition. The artist duo became watercolorists for the project, harping back to an early amateur pictorial tradition while basing their picture making on a range of quotidian and historical images culled from the Internet. Deadpan images of the banal and the fanciful accompany the grievous and the tragic, without comment. Nostalgia and innocence are dimly stirred and questioned. Although the genre of the watercolorist, and its association with pastoral and colonialist scenes, may be considered outdated, the contemporary mode of sourcing the images implies that these pictures might not be matters of the past. This book brings together the collection of over ninety watercolors in a glossy format reminiscent of a picture book or auction house catalogue.
Copublished with CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; MoMA PS1, New York; and Raven Row, London, on the occasion of the eponymous traveling exhibition in 2015.
2014, English / German
Hardcover, 492 pages, 30 x 29 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$100.00 - Out of stock
Like a pictorial encyclopedia, Das Wunder des Lebens contains over four hundred drawings that show all that the modern world has to offer, from maps and city views to cars and airplanes. However, unlike conventional pictorial dictionaries, there is no symbolic system. We see laundry bags and paint buckets as well as a nun and a man with a hat in front of a double window, a shy animal with a thick fur, and breakfast on a Victorian table. Juxtapositions are normalized, and normality becomes a farce. Everything is exposed to everyone; everything becomes equal.
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys have been working together as an artist duo since the end of the 1980s. Their photographs, drawings, objects, and videos—steeped in black humor, critical (self)-reflection and overlapping reality, fiction and suppressed history—play with notions of the superficial and banal.
Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien and Kunsthalle Basel on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the former, February 7–May 4, 2014, and “Projekt 13” at the latter, January 16–March 14, 2010
As New with possible light corner bumping during storage.
2000, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 568 pages, 33 x 28.6 cm
Published by
The New York Public Library / New York
Tinwood Books / Burlington
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / New York
$275.00 - In stock -
The African American culture of the South has produced many of the twentieth century’s most innovative art forms. Widely appreciated for its music—from the blues and jazz, to gospel, soul, rock ‘n’ roll—the region has also played host to a less visible but equally important visual art tradition. Working without significant formal training, often employing the most unpretentious and unlikely materials, these grassroots artists have created powerful statements that, like the music, are strongly influenced by the legacies of African belief systems, rooted in community, and committed to cultural continuity. At the same time, however, this quintessentially American art testifies to the originality and transformative force of individual imaginations.
Since the 1980s, popular and critical interest in this genre has grown dramatically and has given it many names: “self-taught,” “folk,” “outsider,” “visionary.” Souls Grown Deep: African AmericanVernacular Art is the opening work in a multi-volume study that offers the first comprehensive exploration of this art form’s development during the late twentieth century, an era shaped by the civil rights movement. Souls Grown Deep illuminates a remarkable spectrum of creativity: the media of painting, sculpture, and works on paper; the region’s outdoor art environments and art installations; historical examples from earlier eras; and relevant decorative arts and crafts.
With unprecedented thoroughness and scope, Souls Grown Deep takes readers inside these creators’ worlds. The book includes lavishly illustrated, full-color chapters on forty vernacular artists. Writing from diverse perspectives, thirty-seven contributing writers—including civil rights leaders, art historians, museum curators, and folklorists—present thematic, and historical overviews crucial to and understanding of the art’s origins.
1974, Japanese
Hardcover (cloth-bound w. original illustrated card box and dust jacket) 160 pages, 21 x 21.6
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$160.00 - In stock -
Stunning boxed first printing of the Japanese edition of "Surrealist Drawings" by František Šmejkal, printed and bound in cloth-covers in Japan in 1973. A beautiful clothbound hardcover folio of drawings by artists affiliated with Surrealism. What makes this lovely collection special is the inclusion of many of the Czech Surrealists, and a generally broad European scope of artists. Czech art historian František Šmejkal has collated a wonderful selection of works on paper by Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, Wolfgang Paalen, Giorgio de Chirico, Hans Bellmer, Alfred Kubin, Francis Picabia, Jacques Hérold, Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Josef Istler, Max Ernst, André Breton, František Muzika, Paul Delvaux, Wilfredo Lam, Richard Oelze, Mikuláš Medek, Joan Miró, Josef Sima, Kurt Seligmann, Odilon Redon, Andre Masson, Max Walter Svanberg, Salvador Dali, Arshile Gorky, Victor Brauner, Rene Magritte, and many more.
Very Good copy in original slipcase and plastic jacket over cloth. Almost Fine, but with corner bumping to top.
1989, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Da Capo Press / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
In the twenties, Surrealists proclaimed that words had stopped playing around and had begun to make love. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of Marcel Duchamp, who fashioned some of the more joyous and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern art. This collection beings together two essential interviews and two statements about his art that underscore the serious side of Duchamp. But most of the book is made up of his experimental writings, which he called "Texticles," the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Eben (also known as The Large Glass ), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Selavy ("Eros, c'est la vie" or arouser la vie", drink it up" celebrate life"). Wacky, perverse, deliberately frustrating, these entertaining notes are basic for understanding one of the twentieth century's most provocative artists, a figure whose influence on the contemporary scene has never been stronger.