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—SAT 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.
2024, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 21 x 28 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$110.00 - In stock -
The book Archive of Dreams is published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name that will open the Archiv der Avantgarden. Marking the hundredth anniversary of the first surrealist manifesto and the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris in 1924, the volume is dedicated to the surrealist movement as well as the networks it engendered and the artistic stimuli it provided in the twentieth century. The idea was for the Bureau to collect dream testimonies in whatever form, not only to preserve and analyse them but also to give active expression to them in artistic processes. The publication shows how the practices of the avantgardes blurred the boundaries between dream and reality, between the traditional, passive notion of the archive and the idea of active, innovative artistic experiment — and thus ultimately also between the past, the present, and possible futures.
Works and documents from the period before, during, and after the Second World War shed light on the working methods of international artists and the global network they were involved in. They are complemented by diverse reflections on global protest movements and the traumas of war, thus connecting, too, to everyday experiences in a Europe beset by warfare.
2025, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 114 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
Published by
Sammlung Philara / Düsseldorf
$45.00 - In stock -
The publication, which documents the eponymous exhibition at the Philara collection in Düsseldorf, highlights aspects of freedom, self-determination, and the ecstasy of physical love and brings together two internationally renowned artistic perspectives: William N. Copley and Dorothy Iannone.
Whereas Copley was influenced by Dadaism, Surrealism, and Pop Art, Dorothy Iannone developed a unique visual language from American Expressionism, a movement overwhelmingly male-dominated in the 1950s. Here, for the first time, the works of Copley and Iannone are being presented in juxtaposition. Playful expressions of freedom and an appreciation of the mundane can be discerned in the work of both artists. A humorous approach to recurring pictorial elements, symbolism, narratives, and text are also revealed. During their lifetimes, the two artists had few points of contact. Independently of each other, both created a highly coherent visual language that manifests parallels as well as clear differences. Transcending gender roles, stereotypes, and social norms as well as the accompanying fight against censorship are characteristic of Iannone's pictures; Copley, on the other hand, selected depictions whose formulaic strictness and exaggeration of gender roles demonstrate a deeply ambiguous sense of humor to the point of absurdity.
Includes an interview with Florence Bonnefous from the Dorothy Iannone Estate and Anthony Atlas from the William N. Copley Estate .
Accompanies the exhibition at Sammlung Philara, Dusseldorf, 13.08.2023-14.01.2024
1994, English
Softcover, 632 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1994 edition.
Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance.
Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty.
His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.
Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Force Fields (1992), Marxism and Totality (California, 1984), Adorno (1984), and The Dialectical Imagination (1973).
Good—VG copy with common rippling of laminate separation to gloss boards, light handling wear. Sample image only.
2025, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 376 pages, 28 x 20 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Fridericianum / Kassel
$85.00 - In stock -
This is the most comprehensive book ever published on one of the most extraordinary figures in post-war American art: Forrest Bess, who described himself as a painter and fisherman and whose biomorphic abstractions cannot be assigned to any movement. Starting in the 1940s, he lived in isolation in Texas and created small paintings that reflect his visionary experiences between wakefulness and sleep. Bess combined his art with an intense exploration of mythology, psychology, and sexology. Believing that immortality could be achieved through the union of the masculine and feminine, he underwent medical procedures. His unconventional works received posthumous recognition in international exhibitions and influenced many contemporary artists such as Amy Sillman, Richard Hawkins or James Benning.
Lavishly illustrated throughout, the work of Forrest Bess is accompanied by texts (in English and German) by Tomma Abts, Dieter Schwarz, Amy Sillman and Moritz Wesseler.
Forrest Bess, born in 1911 in Bay City, Texas, where he also died in 1977, led an extremely secluded existence in the first half of the 1940s on the Gulf of Mexico, where alongside catching and selling fishing bait he dedicated himself to painting. During this time, Bess began to systematically encapsulate in painting “visions” that appeared to him on the threshold between wakefulness and sleep. For Bess, subconscious human experiences manifested themselves in these abstract and highly symbolic images. He pursed their exploration like a piece of obsessive research that he articulated in countless records and intensive correspondence without ever unravelling the mystery of his creativity.
2024, English
Hardcover, 304 pages, 25 x 23 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$110.00 - In stock -
An updated edition of the indispensable guide to the British artist Phyllida Barlow's sculptural oeuvre across 6 decades.
Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture, 1963-2023 is a comprehensive guide to Phyllida Barlow's sculptural language, charting the progression of the artist's extraordinary and influential career. Barlow's restless invented forms stretch the limits of mass, volume, and height, challenging her audience into a new relationship with the sculptural object, the gallery environment, and the world beyond.
Originally published by Fruitmarket and Hatje Cantz in 2015, this major monograph begins in the 1960s and documents six decades of Barlow's astonishing sculptures and expansive installations, including the Duveen Commission for Tate Britain (2014) and her 2015 Fruitmarket exhibition, set. It has now been expanded to include Barlow's important exhibitions in the years that followed, among them the British Pavilion for the 2017 Venice Biennale, her work for New York's High Line (2018), and her Schwitters-Prize-winning exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover (2022).
Authored by curator Frances Morris, who has made extensive additions to her original text for this updated edition, and featuring illustrations of over 130 works, Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture, 1963-2023 is the indispensable resource on the important British sculptor.
1995, English / Spanish / German
Softcover, 80 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Norma Editorial / Barcelona
$50.00 - In stock -
"In the adventure of her breasts, there are vines which extend themselves tangling lustfully, with powerfully cold hips. There is a dagger, iron, blood, fury... penetrating into the most hidden recesses of her flesh. Magic."
First 1995 edition of Spanish fantasy artist Luis Royo's (b. 1954) full-colour volume of artworks dedicated to "Women", published by Norma Norma Editorial in Barcelona. Packed full of his remarkable airbrush paintings and drawings of women who famously featured in the pages of Heavy Metal magazine and adorned the covers of many sci-fi paperback throughout the 1980's. From Cyber-punk to Sword and Sorcery, Royo's most iconic heroines and femme fatales are all here, alongside commentary in Spanish, English and German, biography and many unseen personal works.
Very Good—NF copy.
1989, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and original plastic wrap), 80 pages, 22.8 x 16.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gakutokan / Japan
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of The World of Pierre Molinier, published in 1989 in Japan. An exquisite book of Molinier's fetishistic gender-bending paintings, photomontages, and drawings, fittingly wrapped in "stocking" dust jacket, with texts by André Breton, translated from French to Japanese by Kosaku Ikuta, imagery from "Molinier" (1966) film by Raymond Borde, beautifully designed and printed in Japan where Molinier's artworks had a particular resonance.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy in original plastic jacket.
2010, English
Hardcover, 400 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
Mennour / Paris
$150.00 - In stock -
The Molinier bible! A mammoth, crucial 400 page book on the method and genesis of Pierre Molinier's provocative, gender-bending photos and artwork. Beautifully printed and prodigiously illustrated with over 800 pictures, mostly unpublished, numerous documents, manuscripts and letters, a complete (nearly 100-page) chronology, a critical biography, and a text by Jean-Luc Mercié.Molinier. Essential publication on Molinier, the most comprehensive to date, and a must for any fan.
Rare English edition translated from the French by Edward Penwarden.
Pierre Molinier is an unknown of worldwide renown. Every book and every exhibition on the body, gender confusion or sexual excess seems to feature at least one work by this artist whose “genius” was acclaimed by André Breton in a memorable text published in 1956. But the bulk of his work has remained inaccessible. A number of pictures have never been shown and a corpus of only 160 prints has been published. The ensemble revealed by the artist's archives is much more extensive. It includes numerous proofs made to prepare his photomontages and working prints given to friends, but also notebooks and personal letters. Here, precise links emerge between his paintings, photographs and scandalous life. The myth carefully constructed by the artist begins to crumble before the reality of the work.
An inveterate seducer, thoroughgoing fetishist, unrepentant transvestite and inadvertent bisexual, to the very last Molinier remained haunted by two obsessions: pleasure, meaning immediate access to la petite mort, and “leaving a trace in the infinity of time.” This book charts the aesthetic incarnation of his passions. Its 819 photographs, most of them never published before, reveal the method, shed light on the procedures and give details of the origin and alchemy of his latent or composed images. Finally, an exhaustive chronology offers a new biography of Molinier, based on his letters: for it is in the intimacy of these writings that the shaman's heart beats closest to the truth.
In a career shared between the university (fifteen years) and publishing (twenty) Jean-Luc Mercié has written widely on painting and photography. This monograph is his fourth book about Pierre Molinier, the master from Bordeaux.
Born 1900 in Agen (France), Pierre Molinier, surrealistic painter and photographer, a precursor to body art, died in 1976 after having thought out radical and pornographic artwork.
2024, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 19.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Mousse / Milan
$49.00 - Out of stock
Mike Kelley is best known as one of the most influential visual artists of his generation. But he was also an insightful theorist who wrote profusely about his work as well as on aesthetics in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, an epoch marked, in his view, by victim culture and the pop psychology phenomenon known as repressed memory syndrome.
Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions presents the artist in a new light, almost as an empirical philosopher delivering his position through art as well as writing. In a meticulous and transdisciplinary approach, Laura López Paniagua presents Kelley’s oeuvre as a stance in materialist aesthetics and weaves thoughtful relations between the artist’s critique, statements, and comments and the theories of thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. López Paniagua focuses on Kelley’s artistic production between 1995 and his death in 2012, analyzing these works vis-à-vis the concept of memory, one of the artist’s obsessions and leitmotivs throughout his career.
An essay by Laura López Paniagua, with an introduction by John Miller.
2024, Second edition
1999, English / German
Softcover, 64 pages, 27 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Kunstverein Braunschweig / Germany
$65.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1999, this catalogue is the first book to document two of Mike Kelley's central works, Sublevel (1998) and Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1991-1999), and includes deluxe large-format installation shots of these two pieces, as well as an interview and an essay by the artist.
2003, English
Softcover, 458 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$45.00 - In stock -
While many acknowledge that Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have redefined our notions of time and history, few recognize the crucial role that “the infinite relation” between seeing and saying (as Foucault put it) plays in their work. Gary Shapiro reveals, for the first time, the full extent of Nietzsche and Foucault’s concern with the visual.
Shapiro explores the whole range of Foucault’s writings on visual art, including the theory of visual resistance, the concept of the phantasm or simulacrum, and his interrogation of the relation of painting, language, and power in artists from Bosch to Warhol. Shapiro also shows through an excavation of little-known writings that the visual is a major theme in Nietzsche’s thought. In addition to explaining the significance of Nietzsche’s analysis of Raphael, Dürer, and Claude Lorrain, he examines the philosopher’s understanding of the visual dimension of Greek theater and Wagnerian opera and offers a powerful new reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Archaeologies of Vision will be a landmark work for all scholars of visual culture as well as for those engaged with continental philosophy.
Fine copy.
1992, English
Softcover, 460 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Manchester University Press / Manchester
$50.00 - In stock -
First 1992 edition, long out-of-print.
In 1846, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world'. The conjuction of death, art and femininity forms a rich and disturbing strata of Western culture, explored here in fascinating detail by Elisabeth Bronfen. Her examples range from Carmen to Little Nell, from Wuthering Heights to Vertigo, from Snow White to Frankenstein. The text is richly illustrated throughout with thirty-seven paintings and photographs.
The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me", culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.
'Aside from the originality-or fearful finality -of its arguments, the book will be invaluable as an introduction to the use of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of cultural texts'—New Statesman & Society
'[Death] faces a similar taboo in our century to the one that sex suffered in the last... [Bronfen] addresses an important silence in contemporary culture'—The Times
Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich
Good copy with some creasing (spine, corners).
1975, English
Hardcover (clothbound in slipcase), 48 pages, 27.5 x 19 cm
Ed. of 3000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$30.00 - In stock -
Lavish 1975 slipcase reproduction of Le livre du Coeur d'amour épris (The book of the love-smitten heart) an allegorical romance written in 1457 by King René of Anjou (1409-80). Inspired by a tragic loss, illustrated with the most beautiful twilight scenes of illumination: an allegorical chivalric romance written by Duke René d´Anjou and illustrated by Barthélemy d'Eyck
The text in verse and prose recounts the quest for love of the knight Heart who, in a dream, leaves with Desire in search of his lady, Mercy. This amorous journey combines the knight's studies and his personal memories. The tone is that of a disenchanted man at the end of his life, for whom courtly love and desire both amount to obstacles and suffering. The work combines features of the Arthurian novels in prose and allegorical poems in the style of the Roman de la Rose.
Near Fine—Fine copy all-round.
1981, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 40 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Charles E. Tuttle / Tokyo
$170.00 - In stock -
Scarce first Japanese edition (entirely in English language), published in Tokyo by Charles Tuttle, of this beautifully produced over-sized 1981 book by H. R. Giger. Foreword by Timothy Leary.
In 1981, a year after being awarded the Oscar for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for Alien, the book H.R. GIGER N.Y. CITY was published. This series of post Alien works, the result of an intense period of non-stop painting, literally day and night, were inspired by Giger's trip to New York City and a template which his colleague Cornelius de Fries, brought back from one of his excursions into the electronic industry. The stencil was actually a sheet of scrap metal from which electrical components had been punched out. Alongside these incredible works are drawings, articles, press clippings, posters and polaroids from Giger's time in New York City.
Fantastic Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger was born in 1940, the son of a chemist. He spoke of a father who viewed art as a "breadless profession", and strongly encouraged his son to enter into pharmaceutics. Despite this, in 1962, he moved to Zürich, where he studied Architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts until 1970. Giger's style and thematic execution have been hugely influential. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence. Giger is also well known for artwork on several music recording albums. His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as "biomechanical". His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery. His main influences were painters Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary. Giger suffered from night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder, making his first paintings as a means of art therapy. In 1998 Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now houses the H. R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work.
Good copy, tight binding with some corner cover wear, tanning to page edges and foxing to preliminary pages.
2024, English
Softcover, 134 pages, 24 x 17.5 cm
Published by
ACCA / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
Fusing First Nations cultural traditions, the industrial materiality of the mining industry, and regional and global art influences, this title and its accompanying exhibition asserts and re-imagines the artists’ cross-cultural identities, drawing upon the haunting wounds of post-contact histories, the renewal and remaking of cultural practices, and the collaborative resilience and audaciously punk attitude of a frontier community.Encompassing contemporary artists from Northern Central Australia and Melbourne, Tennant Creek Brio includes key members Fabian Brown Japaljarri, Lindsay Nelson Jakamarra, Rupert Betheras, Joseph Williams Jungarayi, Clifford Thompson Japaljarri, Jimmy Frank Jupurrula, Fabian Rankine Jampijinpa, Marcus Camphoo Kemarre, and collaborators including Eleanor Jawurlngali Dixon, Lévi McLean, and Gary Sullibhaine. The group first converged in 2016 when the artists initiated an outreach program at the local men’s centre, Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation.
Edited by Max Delany and Elyse Goldfinch
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 154 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$220.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition collection of "The Early Works" by the Japanese master of Ero guro Toshio Saeki, published by Treville in 1997 and long out-of-print. An extensive collection of incredible works gathered from his first major book in 1970, his acclaimed 1971 Red Book, the panel-by-panel replication of an early Saeki manga story, and much more. Texts by Akira Uno, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Timothy Leary.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, light wear.
2025, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 124 pages, 23 x 23 cm
Published by
Drill Hall Gallery / Canberra
$45.00 - In stock -
This title brings the collection of Canberra couple Susan Taylor and Peter Jones into focus on the advent of its 25th anniversary. Seeded from an initial interest in mid-century modern design and early twentieth century avant-gardes, the collection blossomed into an embrace of non-objective and abstract art. Artists featured include General Idea, Maria Kozic, Peter Maloneyi, Elizabeth Newman, John Nixon, Robert Rooney, Janet Burchill, Jennifer McCamley and many more.It has grown to revel in the intersections between conceptual art, geometric abstraction, seriality, non-objective painting, photography, contemporary jewellery and poetics to develop conjunctions across time, place and materiality.
The publication accompanies the exhibition curated by Peter Jones at the Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, 19 April – 15 June 2025.
Eye to Eye delves into several of the collection’s multi-faceted and revelatory cross-sections. In his essay Peter Jones explores how the couple’s interests have been refined and extended by the art they love and the people that surround that art. In an interview with Drill Hall Gallery director Tony Oates, Susan Taylor discusses the correlations between sustainable fashion and conceptual art with a focus on jewellery. National Gallery of Australia’s curator of photography, Shaune Lakin, traces developments in local conceptual photography from the 1960s as they play out across the Taylor Jones collection. Acclaimed writer Quentin Sprague offers illuminating insight into the work of Robert Rooney and John Nixon, two stalwarts in the Taylor Jones collection. The publication touches on a vast array of local and international art historically significant developments, revealing the power of the private collection to expose perspectives that may go unnoticed in larger, public collections.
2025, English
Softcover, 96 pages. 27 x 21 cm
Published by
Drill Hall Gallery / Canberra
$35.00 - In stock -
This title surveys the paintings, prints, and experimental films by Australian artist Jonas Balsaitis (b. 1948, Germany), re-examining the artist’s use of ‘imaging systems’ in the context of contemporary developments in technology. This thoroughly researched and sympathetically designed catalogue includes full colour reproductions of Balsaitis’s paintings from 1968 to 2001, as well as digitised stills of the newly restored 16mm films, as well as accompanying scholarly essays.
The publication accompanies the exhibition Jonas Balsaitis: Analogue, curated by Oscar Capezio at the Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, 14 February – 13 April 2025. Scholarly essays by curator Oscar Capezio and writer and researcher of film and media histories at the University of Melbourne, Giles Fielke, provide a rich context for the work of one of Australia’s most profound, yet underrepresented, experimental artists.
2025, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 23 x 16.6 cm
Published by
Memo Review / Naarm
$35.00 - In stock -
What happens when political art becomes indistinguishable from marketing? Catherine Liu calls it “the highest form of kitsch” — where liberal good intentions become another elite commodity. Vincent Lê sees Apple’s crushingly smooth aesthetics not as mere flattening, but as capitalism’s natural logic of “creative destruction” at work: art compressed into commodity pixels; culture remade through self-improving competition. Either way, we’ve reached peak kitsch. Slavoj Žižek spots it: Trump’s AI-generated Gaza fantasy isn’t just tasteless satire; it’s political kitsch perfected. Call it hasbara via hyperpop.
Meanwhile, Isobel D’Cruz Barnes shows how artists on Narrm’s subculture music scene recognise that the real stage isn’t sound — it’s Instagram, TikTok, and every surface of aesthetic performance. Emerging now is culture as costume, rebellion reimagined as self-design, “lazy representation politics and identity capitalism” countered by their acceleration. And maybe that is just fine.
But no one slices open this tension between image and impact like artist Maria Kozic, whose visceral pop provocations twist kitsch into something uncomfortable, even violent—like Warhol thrown into a meat-grinder. Here kitsch doesn’t comfort but “pops.”
Khaled Sabsabi’s Venice controversy crystallises the stakes: Creative Australia recoiled from his political ambiguities, preferring art to neatly market their own virtue. Adorno (via Benjamin and Greenberg) knew all along: kitsch is the aestheticisation of politics. Or was it fascism? Or is art best when it risks being misunderstood or ambivalent, or, even better, wrong?
1989, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket + ephemera), 96 pages, 42.5 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1989 Japanese edition of H. R. Giger's Biomechanics. In his classic series of oversized and visually immersive early art volumes, this book comprises a retrospective showcase, from 1964—88, of Giger's work, designed by and with running commentary by Giger himself, with over 200 drawings, paintings, and sculptures, and including concept art for the film Poltergeist II, and design paintings for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer albums, his lost film work and early cartoons. With a foreword by legendary Science Fiction author and longtime Giger fan Harlan Ellison, who dubs him "our latter-day Hieronymus Bosch."
Note: the Japanese editions of these books often had better reproductions from the original plates than the German and English language editions.
Includes Treville publisher ephemera inserted as issued, including an illustrated advert for Giger poster editions, etc.
Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. Excellent, well-preserved copy.
1996, Japanese
Softcover, 86 pages, 30 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
First Japanese edition of the official companion book to the 1995 American sci-fi horror film Species (directed by Roger Donaldson and written by Dennis Feldman) and the film's artistic designer H.R. Giger, famous for his creations for the Alien film. This profusely illustrated "Making of" book is packed with reproductions of Giger's incredible conceptual drawings and models as well as photographs of special effects processes, Giger's set-design, animatronics, and creature fabrication, detailing all the work involved in bringing the science fiction creature Sil to the screen. Includes fold-out illustration of the famous "Ghost Train" and much more.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
2004, Japanese
Hardcover (w. slipcase), 48 pages, 27 x 19 cm
Signed and numbered edition,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seirin Kogeisha / Tokyo
$350.00 - In stock -
Very rare first Japanese edition of Picture Scroll of Pathos by ero-guro master Toshio Saeki (1945—2019), limited to only 1000 copies, numbered and this special copy signed by Saeki inside the cover! A gorgeous and rarely seen collection of Saeki's early manga works and picture stories that were originally published in the early 70's and thought to be lost, here reproduced impeccably in black and white with stunning multi-panel colour fold-out spreads. Hardcover bound in illustrated slipcase. Most complete.
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.
Fine copy with Fine dj, slipcase. Signed in bold silver pen by Saeki.
1971, Japanese
Rigid softcover (in illustrated slipcase), 64 pages, 30 cm x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gakugei Shorinsha / Tokyo
$400.00 - In stock -
Super rare and bookshop favourite early collection of artworks by ero-guro master Toshio Saeki (1945—2019), published in 1971 by Gakugeishorin. Stunning large-format softcover collection of exquisitely printed saturated full-bleed colour and b/w artworks on warm matte paper stock capturing this legendary underground artist at the height of his powers, housed in original publisher's cardboard slipcase. His third book collection featuring so many of his finest works. Postface by Hiraoka Masaaki in Japanese. A must!
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Very Good copy. Very complete copy with slipcase and obi present. Some wear/marking to a VG slipcase.
2025, English
Hardcover, 320 pages, 30 x 24 cm
Published by
Fulgur Press / UK
$165.00 - Out of 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.