World Food Books

Meret Oppenheim
Arbeiten von 1930-1978 / Works from 1930-1978

1978, German
Softcover, 224 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by Galerie Levy / Hamburg

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Incredible monographic catalogue produced on the occasion of the exhibition "Meret Oppenheim - Arbeiten von 1930 - 1978" at Galerie Levy in Hamburg, September 11 - November 11, 1978.
Forming an amazing, visually-rich and valuable partial catalogue raisonné document, this volume collects, page by page, 205 of the exceptional works by one of the world's most independent artists of the twentieth century, German-born Swiss Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim. Includes her sculptural objects, paintings, drawings, prints, collages, furniture, and more, all reproduced in colour and black and white. Includes a short introduction in German alongside a number of portraits of Oppenheim by Man Ray.
A highly recommended collection.

Méret Elisabeth Oppenheim (6 October 1913 – 15 November 1985) was a German-born Swiss Surrealist artist. Oppenheim was a member of the Surrealist movement of the 1920s along with André Breton, Luis Buñuel, Max Ernst, and other writers and visual artists. Besides creating art objects, Oppenheim also famously appeared as a model for photographs by her friend Man Ray.
A a young age Oppenheim discovered the writings of Carl Jung, a friend of her father's, and was inspired to record her dreams in 1928. Her dreams would serve as important sources for much of her art throughout her life. The work of Paul Klee, the focus of a retrospective at the Kunshalle Basel in 1929, provided another strong influence on Oppenheim, arousing her to the possibilities of abstraction.
In 1932, at the age of 18, Oppenheim moved to Paris and met Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti, who after visiting her studio and seeing her work, invited her to participate in the Surrealist exhibition in the “Salon des Surindépendants,” Paris. Oppenheim later met André Breton and began to participate in meetings at the Café de la Place Blanche with the Surrealist circle. The conceptual approach favored by Marchel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia became important to her work. She continued to contribute to Surrealist exhibitions until 1960. Many of her pieces consisted of everyday objects arranged to allude to female sexuality and feminine exploitation by the opposite sex. Oppenheim’s paintings focused on the same themes. Her originality and audacity established her as a leading figure in the Surrealist movement.
Méret Oppenheim's first one-woman exhibition in the Galerie Sohulthess, Basel featured surrealist objects. In 1937, Oppenheim returned to Basel and this marked the start of her artistic block. She struggled after she met success and worried about her development as an artist. Méret Oppenheim usually worked in spontaneous bursts and at times destroyed her work. Oppenheim took a hiatus from her artistic career in 1939 after an exhibition at the Galerie René Drouin started by Rene Drouin in Paris. In the exhibition she was featured alongside many artists, including Leonor Fini and Max Ernst. She did not share any art with the public again until the 1950s. Oppenheim then reverted to her "original style" and based her new artworks on old sketches and earlier works and creations.
Méret Oppenheim's best known piece is Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) - Object (Breakfast in Fur)(1936). The sculpture consists of a teacup, saucer and spoon that the artist covered with fur from a Chinese gazelle. It was purchased by Alfred Barr for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and included the museum's first surrealist exhibition Fantastic Art: Dada and Surrealism in 1936. Oppenheim was willing to sell the piece for one thousand francs, but Barr only offered her $50 and she accepted. This was the first piece of art that the museum acquired, and Oppenheim became known as the First Lady of MoMA. The enormous success of this early work would later create problems for Oppenheim as an artist. Soon after its creation she drifted away from the Surrealists.
In 1937, Oppenheim returned to Basel, training as an art conservator in order to ensure her financial stability. This marked the beginning of a creative crisis that lasted until 1954. Although she maintained some contact with her friends in Paris, she created very little and destroyed or failed to finish much of what she created.
In 1956, Oppenheim designed the costumes and masks for Daniel Spoerri’s production of Picasso’s play Le Désir attrapé par la queue in Berne. She and artist Lilly Keller were cast as the curtains. Three years later, in 1959, she organized a Spring Banquet (Le Festin) in Bern for a few friends at which food was served on the body of a naked woman. With Oppenheim's permission, Andre Breton restaged the performance later that year at the opening of the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surrealisme (EROS), at the Galerie Cordier in Paris. Outside its original intimate setting, the performance was overly provocative and Oppenheim felt her original intention for the work was lost.
In the 1960s, Oppenheim's home base of Bern became much more important as an art center. She continued to live and work there, as well as at a second home in Carona, Italy (1968), and maintained a studio in Paris starting in 1972. She was an important figure in feminist debates in the early 1970s, although she refused to identify as a feminist.
In 1983 Oppenheim designed The Spiral Column (Spiralsaule), unofficially known as "Meret Oppenheim Fountain," on the Waisenhausplatz in Bern. A tall concrete column wrapped with a garland of grass over a small watercourse, the fountain provoked a petition for its removal. In 1985 City of Paris commissioned Spiral (Nature's Way) [Spirale (Gang de Natur) from Oppenheim for the Jardins de l'ancienne Ecole polytechnique on the Montagne Ste. Genevieve near the Pantheon. The work was based on a 1971 model and finished posthumously a few months after Oppenheim's death in 1986.
Levy Galerie, founded in 1970 by Hamburg resident Thomas Levy, represents the estate of Meret Oppenheim, in close collaboration with the artist's family.

Condition: Fine (a tight, clean copy) – All care is taken to provide accurate condition details of used books, photos available on request.

File under: Meret Oppenheim Galerie Levy / Hamburg Art Drawing Out-of-print / Rare Painting Sculpture / Installation Surrealism

Önskemuseet : The Museum of Our Wishes

1963, Swedish
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by Moderna Museet / Stockholm

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Önskemuseet: The Museum of Our Wishes (December 26, 1963 - February 16, 1964), was a unique and very ambitious exhibition initiated by director Pontus Hultén and Moderna Museet staff that gathered together a collection of modernist art from private owners, in order to present to the public and political administration their vision of what a museum collection could actually be. The exhibition featured works from private collections alongside a “wish list” of works that were still available on the market, calling for the government to allocate funds for purchasing new works for the museum. The request was acknowledged and the Museum received a one-off allocation of five million kronor, a substantial amount in today’s currency, which enabled the purchase of several works that now constitute the core of the collection, positioning Moderna Museet as one of the most dynamic and committed contemporary art institutions of the 1960s.

This is a copy of the first and only edition of the catalogue for the exhibition, which makes up a visual checklist of the artworks and artists featured in this enormous exhibit, taking it's form from art history guides that had started to be created after the war.
Includes introduction by Gerard Boniier as well as additional text by Olle Granath, K.G. Hulten, Ulf Linde and Karin Bergqvist Lindegren. Features works by Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, Raoul Dufy, Emil Nolde, Edwin Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Oscar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Chaim Soutine, Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Roger de la Fresnaye, Henri Laurens, Amédée Ozenfant, Juan Gris, Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz, Giacomo Balla, Ardengo Soffici, Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Piet Mondrian, El Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, Antoine Pevsner, Georges Vantongerloo, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Naum Gabo, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Calder, Charles Despiau, Andre Derain, Maurice Utrillo, Amedeo Modigliani, Otto Dix, Ben Shahn, Marie Laurencin, Constantin Brancusi, Julio Gonzales, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Juan Miró, Andre Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Alberto Giacometti, Wilfredo Lam, Victor Brauner, Salvador Dali, Sebastian Matta, Henry Moore, Roger Bissière, Jean Bazaine, Maurice Esteve, Alfred Manessier, Nicolas De Staël, Auguste Herbin, Serge Poliafkoff, Victor Pasmore, Barnett Newman, Richard Mortensen, Jean Fautrier, Lucio Fontana, Henri Michaux, Jean Dubuffet, Germaine Richier, Francis Bacon, Wols, Asger Jorn, Alberto Burri, Antonio Tapies, Karel Appel, Mark Tobey, Fritz Hundertwasser, Mark Rothko, Archile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Sam Francis, Robert Jacobsen, Robert Rauschenberg, Enrico Baj, César, Jasper Johns, Richard Stankiewicz, Jean Tinguely, Arman, and Yves Klein.

All texts in Swedish. The bulk of the reproductions are in black-and-white with several larger, tipped-in images in color.
Ex-library copy with stamps, stickers and covering. Otherwise a good copy.

File under: Henri Matisse Georges Rouault Raoul Dufy Emil Nolde Edwin Ludwig Kirchner Erich Heckel Oscar Kokoschka Max Beckmann Chaim Soutine Wassily Kandinsky Kasimir Malevich Pablo Picasso Georges Braque Jacques Villon Raymond Duchamp-Villon Henri Le Fauconnier Fernand Léger Robert Delaunay Roger de la Fresnaye Henri Laurens Amédée Ozenfant Juan Gris Alexander Archipenko Jacques Lipchitz Giacomo Balla Ardengo Soffici Carlo Carrà Umberto Boccioni Gino Severini Francis Picabia Jean Arp Marcel Duchamp Man Ray Kurt Schwitters Piet Mondrian El Lissitzky Theo van Doesburg Antoine Pevsner Georges Vantongerloo Sophie Tauber-Arp Naum Gabo Lazlo Moholy-Nagy Alexander Calder Olle Granath K.G. Hulten Ulf Linde Karin Bergqvist Lindegren Gerard Boniier Pontus Hultén Moderna Museet / Stockholm Art Painting Dada Surrealism Sculpture / Installation Group Shows / Collections Out-of-print / Rare Nouveau Réalisme Pop Art Drawing

The Return of The Real
by Hal Foster

1996, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 18 x 22.2 cm
Published by October Books / New York The MIT Press / Massachusetts

$69.00 - In stock -

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In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real -- to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation -- and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

Includes the work of David Hammons, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Jasper Johns, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher, Hans Haacke, Fred Wilson, Silvia Kolbowski, Larry Bell, Sol Lewitt, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Tony Smith, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Ross Bleckner, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Gordon Matta-Clark, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Allan McCollum, Gerhard Richter, Richard Estes, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, John Miller, Zoe Leonard, Gran Fury, Renée Green, Dan Graham, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Lothar Baumgarten, Fred Wilson, Jimmie Durham, and many more.

File under: David Hammons Robert Gober Mike Kelley Marcel Duchamp Alexander Rodchenko Vladimir Tatlin Dan Flavin Carl Andre Jasper Johns Daniel Buren Marcel Broodthaers Michael Asher Hans Haacke Fred Wilson Silvia Kolbowski Larry Bell Sol Lewitt Richard Serra Eva Hesse Donald Judd Tony Smith Robert Morris Robert Smithson Jeff Koons Haim Steinbach Peter Halley Ashley Bickerton Ross Bleckner Barbara Kruger Sherrie Levine Vito Acconci Bruce Nauman Gordon Matta-Clark Frank Stella Robert Rauschenberg Andy Warhol Allan McCollum Gerhard Richter Richard Estes Richard Prince Cindy Sherman Kiki Smith John Miller Zoe Leonard Gran Fury Renée Green Dan Graham Martha Rosler Allan Sekula Mary Kelly Lothar Baumgarten Jimmie Durham Hal Foster October Books / New York The MIT Press / Massachusetts Art Theory / Essay Dada Surrealism Photography Film / Video Performance / Dance / Theater Painting Sculpture / Installation Minimal Art Conceptual Art Curatorial Pop Art

Francis Picabia
I am a Beautiful Monster : Poetry, Prose, and Provocation

2012, English
Softcover, 486 pages, 17 x 23 cm
Published by The MIT Press / Massachusetts

$70.00 - In stock -

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Poet, painter, self-described funny guy, idiot, failure, pickpocket, and anti-artist par excellence, Francis Picabia was a defining figure in the Dada movement; indeed, Andre Breton called Picabia one of the only "true" Dadas. Yet very little of Picabia's poetry and prose has been translated into English, and his literary experiments have never been the subject of close critical study. I Am a Beautiful Monster is the first definitive edition in English of Picabia's writings, gathering a sizable array of Picabia's poetry and prose and, most importantly, providing a critical context for it with an extensive introduction and detailed notes by the translator. Picabia's poetry and prose is belligerent, abstract, polemical, radical, and sometimes simply baffling. For too long, Picabia's writings have been presented as raw events, rule-breaking manifestations of inspirational carpe diem. This book reveals them to be something entirely different: maddening in their resistance to meaning, full of outrageous posturing, and hiding a frail, confused, and fitful personality behind egoistic bravura.
I Am a Beautiful Monster provides the texts of of Picabia's significant publications, all presented complete, many of them accompanied by their original illustrations.

File under: Francis Picabia Francis Picabia The MIT Press / Massachusetts Art Dada Fiction / Poetry Painting Surrealism

The Artwork Caught by the Tail : Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris
by George Baker

2010, English
Softcover, 496 pages, 18 x 22 cm
Published by The MIT Press / Massachusetts

$65.00 - In stock -

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The artist Francis Picabia -- notorious dandy, bon vivant, painter, poet, filmmaker, and polemicist -- has emerged as the Dadaist with postmodern appeal, and one of the most enigmatic forces behind the enigma that was Dada.

In this first book in English to focus on Picabia's work in Paris during the Dada years, art historian and critic George Baker reimagines Dada through Picabia's eyes. Such reimagining involves a new account of the readymade -- Marcel Duchamp's anti-art invention, which opened fine art to mass culture and the commodity. But in Picabia's hands, Baker argues, the Dada readymade aimed to reinvent art rather than destroy it. Picabia's readymade opened art not just to the commodity, but to the larger world from which the commodity stems: the fluid sea of capital and money that transforms all objects and experiences in its wake. The book thus tells the story of a set of newly transformed artistic practices, claiming them for art history -- and naming them -- for the first time: Dada Drawing, Dada Painting, Dada Photography, Dada Abstraction, Dada Cinema, Dada Montage. Along the way, Baker describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events, from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada "manifestations" to Picabia's polemical writings; from a lost work by Picabia in the form of a hole (called, suggestively, The Young Girl) to his "painting" Cacodylic Eye, covered in autographs by luminaries ranging from Ezra Pound to Fatty Arbuckle. Baker ends with readymades in prose: a vast interweaving of citations and quotations that converge to create a heated conversation among Picabia, Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Art history has never looked like this before. But then again, Dada has never looked like art history.

George Baker is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an editor at October magazine and October Books. He is the editor of James Coleman (MIT Press) and a frequent contributor to Artforum.

File under: Francis Picabia Man Ray Marcel Duchamp Tristan Tzara George Baker The MIT Press / Massachusetts Art Dada Fiction / Poetry Painting Poetry Surrealism Theory / Essay

The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp
by Elena Filipovic

2016, English
Hardcover, 360 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by The MIT Press / Massachusetts

$85.00 - In stock -

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This groundbreaking and richly illustrated book tells a new story of the twentieth century’s most influential artist, recounted not so much through his artwork as through his “non-art” work. Marcel Duchamp is largely understood in critical and popular discourse in terms of the objects he produced, whether readymade or meticulously fabricated. Elena Filipovic asks us instead to understand Duchamp’s art through activities not normally seen as artistic—from exhibition making and art dealing to administrating and publicizing. These were no occasional pursuits; Filipovic argues that for Duchamp, these fugitive tasks were a veritable lifework.

Drawing on many rarely seen images, Filipovic traces a variety of practices and projects undertaken by Duchamp from 1913 to 1969, from his invention of the readymade to the release of his last, posthumous work. She examines Duchamp’s note writing, archiving, and quasi-photographic activities, which resulted in the Box of 1914 and the Green Box; his art dealing, marketing, and curating that culminated in experimental exhibitions for the Surrealists and his miniature museum, The Boîte-en-valise; and his administrative efforts and clandestine maneuvering in order to posthumously embed his Étant donnés into a museum. Demonstrating how those activities reflect the artist’s questioning of reproduction and originality, as well as photography and the exhibition, Filipovic proposes that Duchamp’s “non-art” labor, and in particular his curatorial strategies, more than merely accompanied his more famous artworks; in a certain sense, they made them.

Through Duchamp’s elusive but vital activities he revised the idea of what a modern artist could be. With this fascinating book, Filipovic in turn revises the very idea of Duchamp.

About the Author
Elena Filipovic, an art historian, is Director and Chief Curator of the Kunsthalle Basel. Among her curatorial projects is the traveling retrospective “Marcel Duchamp: A Work That Is Not a Work ‘of Art'” (2008-2009).

Endorsements:
“In the 1970s Lucy Lippard remarked that Duchamp was already too much written about. How, then, is one to contribute effectively to the Duchamp literature today, given that it has become all the more voluminous since? In The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp Elena Filipovic finds a way, and does so with great intelligence. She claims, rightly, that the dominant readings of Duchamp have led to an occlusion of the ‘fugitive actions’ undertaken by Duchamp vis-à-vis the institution of art, and it is there that she locates her incisive study—specifically on ‘his role as administrator, archivist, art advisor, curator, publicist, reproduction maker, and salesman.’ Rather than see these activities as ancillary to his life as an artist, Filipovic locates them, brilliantly, at its center; they are indeed only ‘apparently marginal.’ This is just the book to reanimate discourse around Duchamp.”
—Hal Foster, Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor, Princeton University, author of Compulsive Beauty and Prosthetic Gods

“When an artist becomes a curator today, the exhibition is often treated like an extension of the artist’s medium. A century ago when Duchamp, having ceased to consider himself a professional artist, undertook to help out his friends by designing their exhibitions, did he think like a modernist fixated on medium specificity? This is the classic question that lies behind Elena Filipovic’s careful research in the archives. In light of her new syntheses, she rewrites the question to read: just how did Duchamp open up new possibilities for curators? The answer: the medium was not his message. Duchamp worked without professing, in a series of small, nonretinal steps; he avoided creating a single, prototypical model. He left behind a panorama of new ideas. Filipovic has collected them into a book that curators will come to regard as a resource.”
—Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art History, Vassar College, author of Their Common Sense

“In 1959, Marcel Duchamp referred to himself as ‘a non-artist.’ Exactly what he meant by this has never been fully explained until now, a lacuna in the vast literature on this artist that finally has been filled by Elena Filipovic’s marvelous new book, the first to deal with the various activities that preoccupied Duchamp when he wasn’t making art, particularly in the realm of curating (not only his own work, but that of his fellow artists in various exhibitions that he oversaw). Filipovic argues that these activities occur with such frequency and consistency in Duchamp’s life that they must be considered an integral component of his creative endeavors. The result is an entirely new way to look at the work of this important and highly influential artist.”
—Francis M. Naumann, author of The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost

“Yes, another Duchamp book. The one we least expected, but perhaps the one that we now need the most. Elena Filipovic’s brilliant book locates a ‘curatorial’ logic at the heart of Duchamp’s (deeply fascinating, often confusing, and impossibly disparate) activities. But more crucial even than its tracing of a long-ignored curatorial modernism, this book will in turn challenge what it might mean to curate today, at precisely the moment curators increasingly claim an artistic dimension for their own work.”
—George Baker, Professor of Art History, UCLA, author of The Artwork Caught by the Tail

File under: Marcel Duchamp Elena Filipovic The MIT Press / Massachusetts Art Conceptual Art Curatorial Dada Drawing Painting Sculpture / Installation Surrealism Theory / Essay

Film As A Subversive Art
by Amos Vogel

2005, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 22.5 x 16 cm
2005 edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by D.A.P. / New York

$95.00 - Sold

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The now scarce 2005 reprint edition of one of the greatest books on film. A classic returns! The original edition of Amos Vogel's seminal book, Film as a Subversive Art was first published in 1974, and has been out of print since 1987. According to Vogel--founder of Cinema 16, North America's legendary film society--the book details the "accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored."
So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas that he penned some 30 years ago are still relevant today, and readily accessible in this classic volume. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, Film as a Subversive Art analyzes how aesthetic, sexual and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works.
This 2005 edition, published by D.A.P./C.T. Editions, also quickly went out of print and it has not been available since.

Includes Luis Buñuel, Dusan Makavejev, Luis Buñuel, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor, Roman Polanski, Vera Chytilova, Alfred Hitchcock, Carolee Schneemann, Peter Watkins, Tony Conrad, Jonas Mekas, Andrei Tarkovsky, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Bresson, Luchino Visconti, Chris Marker, Federico Fellini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kate Millett, John Cassavettes, Shuji Terayama, William Klein, Russ Meyers, Louis Malle, Woody Allen, Yoko Ono, Michelangelo Antonioni, Agnes Varda, Walerian Borowczyk, Andy Warhol, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, Lindsay Anderson, Roberto Rossellini, Marguerite Duras, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Morrissey, Joseph Losey, Otto Muehl, Hans Richter, Fritz Lang, Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Jean-Luc Godard, Frans Zwartjes, Arrabal, Jack Smith, Stan Vanderbeek, Werner Herzog, Morgan Fisher, Jean Renior, Michael Snow, Robert Frank, Jan Svankmajer, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Sharits, Akira Kurosawa, Yoko Ono, Orson Welles, Frederick Wiseman, Ken Jacobs, Martin Scorcese, Jean Cocteau, Manuel Octavio Gomez, Stanley Kubrick, Norman McLaren, Albert Maysles and David Maysles, to name only a few of the hundreds of film-makers whose works are featured in this essential film book.

Condition: Good (tight, clean copy throughout with only light creasing to covers and light wear) – All care is taken to provide accurate condition details of used books, photos available on request.

File under: Agnès Varda Akira Kurosawa Albert Maysles and David Maysles Alfred Hitchcock Andrei Tarkovsky Andy Warhol Arrabal Bruce Conner Carolee Schneemann Charlie Chaplin Chris Marker Dusan Makavejev Federico Fellini Frans Zwartjes Frederick Wiseman Fritz Lang Hans Richter Ingmar Bergman Jack Smith Jacques Rivette Jan Svankmajer Jean Cocteau Jean Genet Jean-Luc Godard Jean Renior John Cassavettes Jonas Mekas Joseph Losey Kate Millett Ken Jacobs Kenneth Anger Lindsay Anderson Louis Malle Luchino Visconti Luis Buñuel Manuel Octavio Gomez Marcel Duchamp Marguerite Duras Martin Scorcese Maya Deren Michael Snow Michelangelo Antonioni Morgan Fisher Norman Mclaren Otto Muehl Paul Morrissey Paul Sharits Peter Watkins Rainer Werner Fassbinder Robert Bresson Robert Frank Roberto Rossellini Roman Polanski Russ Meyers Sam Peckinpah Sergei Eisenstein Shuji Terayama Stan Brakhage Stan VanDerBeek Stanley Kubrick Tony Conrad Vera Chytilova Walérian Borowczyk Werner Herzog William Klein Woody Allen Yoko Ono Amos Vogel D.A.P. / New York Art Film / Video Out-of-print / Rare Performance / Dance / Theater Surrealism Theory / Essay

Kiyoshi Koishi and Naniwa Shashin Club

1988, Japanese
Softcover, 80 pages, 22 x 22 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by Seibu / Tokyo

$90.00 - In stock -

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Very scarce catalogue for the only major exhibition on Kiyoshi Koishi and Naniwa Shashin Club, held in 1988 at Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art and Seibu Contemporary Art Gallery.

Kiyoshi Koishi (March 26, 1908 - July 7, 1957) was one of the most prominent Japanese photographers in the first half of the 20th century. He was born in Osaka and became a member of Naniwa Shashin Club (浪華写真倶楽部, Naniwa Photography Club) in 1928.

In 1933 he published the monograph Shoka Shinkei (初夏神経, "Early Summer Nerves"), one of the most important works for Japanese modernist photography and one of the most sought after volumes. In this work, he used many photographic techniques such as photomontage and photograms, succeeding in creating surrealistic images. From 1938, he worked for the Japanese government in the magazine Shashin Shūhō (写真週報, "Photo Weekly"). And he became a war photographer of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Therefore, he was no longer able to produce avant-garde photo. After World War II, he continued to take many photographs. But tragically, he couldn't leave the works from the effects of restricted activity due to the war. In 1957, Koishi died by accident, falling on the station platform in Moji, Fukuoka Prefecture.

Very rarely seen outside of Japan, and little printed document there either, this catalogue collects a valuable photographic history of Koishi's stunning work, alongside the work of his fellow Naniwa Shashin Club members from 1921-1950.

Condition: Very Good (light wear only) – All care is taken to provide accurate condition details of used books, photos available on request.

File under: Kiyoshi Koishi Nakaji Yasui Naniwa Shashin Club Seibu / Tokyo Art Japanese Photography Out-of-print / Rare Photography Surrealism

Z
Lagerkatalog 1970

1970, German
Softcover, 92 pages, 11 x 17 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by Galerie Rudolph Zwirner / Köln

$60.00 - In stock -

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"Z" is a great, unsuspecting pocketbook from Galerie Rudolph Zwirner in 1970, collecting together a wonderful group of works by 78 artists (Yves Klein, Richard Tuttle, Donald Judd, Cy Twombly, René Magritte, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Kenneth Noland, Daniel Spoerri, Frank Stella, Jean Tinguely, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Linder, Jasper Johns, Martial Raysse, Dieter Rot, Franz Erhart Walther, Bruno Goller, Morris Louis, Jim Dine, Otto Dix, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Konrad Klapheck, Lucio Fontana, Blinky Palermo, Hundertwasser, Gerhard Richter, Antoni Tapies, Andy Warhol, George Grosz, Robert Graham, Allen Jones, Henri Michaux, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Oskar Schlemmer, Yves Tanguy, Louis Soutter, Tom Wesselmann, Toyen, Wols, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Panamarenko, Sol Lewitt, etc.) across painting, sculpture, drawings, collage and multiples, all reproduced in black and white across this almost entirely visual volume.

Condition: Very good (light wear only) – All care is taken to provide accurate condition details of used books, photos available on request.

File under: Allen Jones Andy Warhol Antoni Tàpies Blinky Palermo Bruno Goller Cy Twombly Dan Flavin Daniel Spoerri Dieter Roth Donald Judd Frank Stella Franz Erhard Walther George Grosz Gerhard Richter Henri Michaux Hundertwasser Jasper Johns Jean Dubuffet Jean Tinguely Jim Dine Kenneth Noland Konrad Klapheck Larry Bell Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Louis Soutter Lucio Fontana Martial Raysse Max Ernst Morris Louis Oskar Schlemmer Otto Dix Panamarenko René Magritte Richard Linder Richard Tuttle Robert Graham Robert Rauschenberg Roy Lichtenstein Salvador Dali Sol Lewitt Tom Wesselmann Toyen Wols Yves Klein Yves Tanguy Claes Oldenburg Galerie Rudolph Zwirner / Köln Art Drawing Out-of-print / Rare Painting Sculpture / Installation Group Shows / Collections Pop Art Surrealism Fluxus Minimal Art Dada

Displaying the Marvelous
Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations

2003, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 18 x 23 cm
Published by The MIT Press / Massachusetts

$55.00 - In stock -

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Surrealism in its late phase often abandoned neutral exhibition spaces in favor of environments that embodied subjective ideologies. These exhibitions offered startled viewers an early version of installation art before the form existed as such. In Displaying the Marvelous, Lewis Kachur explores this development by analyzing three elaborate Surrealist installations created between 1938 and 1942. The first two, the "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme" (1938) and the "Dream of Venus" at the New York World's Fair (1939), dealt with the fetishization of the female body. The third, "First Papers of Surrealism" (1942), focused not on the figure but on the entire expanse of the exhibition space, thus contributing to the development of nonfigurative art in New York. Kachur presents a full visual and verbal reconstruction of each of the exhibitions, evoking the sequence that the contemporary viewer would have encountered.

The book considers Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, two artists who are not usually compared, within a common framework. Duchamp specialized in frustrating the spectator, using his ironic wit to call into question the definition of the work of art. Dali was a master at disorienting the senses by establishing and then undermining everyday spatial and object properties. The Surrealist challenge, as voiced by Andre Breton, was to evoke the marvelous. Duchamp and Dali extended that challenge to the physical and commercial realm of the exhibition installation.

About the Author
Lewis Kachur is Associate Professor of Art History at Kean University, New Jersey.

“Lewis Kachur hands us a free time-travel ticket, with himself as marvelous pilot. Transporting us into the thick inventions of late Surrealist exhibitions, he gives us the ravishing gift of being there, present at the birthing and, as well, the seeding of so much installation and site-specific art to come decades later. For artists now who feel tied to Grandfather Marcel without having known him, Kachur's work vividly opens up the real moves of Duchamp's reinvention of what it is to be an artist. Revealing secret interior paths of communication among artists that flow synaptically across generations, this sumptuous work points to a new holistic way to understand art.”
—Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artist

“A splendid analysis of the late Surrealist exhibitions. Anyone interested in Surrealist art would want this book; anyone interested in the consideration of display in twentieth-century art must have this book.”
—Richard Martin (1945-1999), former curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Perceptive, fascinating, and written with pleasure and delight. The reciprocal exchange between art work and its context is presented with a steady, at times inspired, sense of inquiry.”
—Brian O’Doherty, writer

File under: Man Ray Marcel Duchamp Salvador Dali Lewis Kachur The MIT Press / Massachusetts Art Sculpture / Installation Surrealism Theory / Essay

The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp
by T.J. Demos

2012, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 136 x 203 mm
Published by The MIT Press / Massachusetts

$35.00 - In stock -

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Marcel Duchamp was a famous expatriate, a wanderer, living and working in Paris, New York, and Buenos Aires and escaping from each in turn. But exile, argues T. J. Demos in this innovative reading, is more than a fact in Duchamp's biography. Exile--in the artist's own words, a "spirit of expatriation"--infuses Duchamp's entire artistic practice. Duchamp's readymade constructions, his installations for surrealist exhibitions in Paris and New York, and his "portable museum" (the suggestively named La boite-en-valise), Demos writes, all manifest, define, and exploit the terms of exile in multiple ways. Created while the artist was living variously in New York, Buenos Aires, and occupied France during the global catastrophes of war and fascism, these works express the anguish of displacement and celebrate the freedom of geopolitical homelessness. The "portable museum," a suitcase containing miniature reproductions of Duchamp's works, for example, represented a complex meditation--both critical and joyful--on modern art's tendency toward itinerancy, whereas Duchamp's 1942 installation design entangling a New York gallery in a mile of string announced the dislocated status that many exiled surrealists wished to forget. Duchamp's exile, writes Demos, defines a new ethics of independent life in the modern age of nationalism and advanced capitalism, offering a precursor to our own globalized world of nomadic subjects and dispersed experience.

T. J. Demos is a Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University College London and the author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007). His essays have appeared in such journals as Artforum, Grey Room, October, and Texte zur Kunst.

File under: André Masson Francis Picabia Kurt Schwitters Man Ray Marcel Duchamp Max Ernst T. J. Demos The MIT Press / Massachusetts Art Dada Surrealism Theory / Essay

Leonor Fini

1972, Japanese / French
Softcover, 180 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by Yomiuri Shimbun / Tokyo

$70.00 - In stock -

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Wonderful and scarcely seen Japanese catalogue on the work of Argentine artist Leonor Fini. Profusely illustrated throughout with Fini's incredible (Surrealist) paintings and drawings from 1936-1972, in colour and black and white. Includes biography and artist's introduction by Fini in French. All other texts are in Japanese.

Leonor Fini (1907–1996), an Argentine painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women, is considered one of the most important women artists of the twentieth century and also one of the most misunderstood.
Fini had no formal artistic training. Born in Buenos Aires, she travelled extensively from a young age, living in Milan and then moving to Paris in 1931-32 where she was considered part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists, becoming acquainted with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, who inspired much of her work, and also Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues. She had her first one person show in Paris when she was twenty-five at a gallery directed by Christian Dior. Her work caught on fast and was included in the pivotal and groundbreaking Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition at the MOMA in 1936 while at the same time she had her first New York exhibition at the avant-garde Julien Levy Galley. Surrealist artists in France came to know her as important in the movement. She is mentioned in most comprehensive works about surrealism, although she did not consider herself a surrealist, nor a part of any particular artistic movement. Fini preferred to stake her own claim on modernism with a vision that owes more to the farthest shores of her imagination than to any affiliation with art trends, schools or movements. The originality of her art as well as her intelligence, famous wit and charisma accorded her celebrity status in the Paris art world and beyond beginning in the late thirties. Her panache and glamour, once they found a place in the collective imagination of the time, turned her into a much-publicized fashion and feminist icon. Always controversial, with as many detractors as admirers, she lived and painted consummately on her own terms.
In Paris in 1939 she curated the inaugural exhibition of her friend Leo Castelli’s first gallery (of surrealist furniture) and shortly thereafter, just before the German occupation, she traveled with André and a new lover to Arcachon in the southwest of France to begin waiting out the war. She remained there for almost a year with Salvador and Gala Dali before moving to Monte Carlo where she met the young Italian diplomat, Stanislao Lepri who became one of the great and enduring loves of her life. As the war intensified she moved with Stanislao to Rome where she lived, worked and formed close friendships with Anna Magnani, Luchino Visconti and other leading figures of world of art and letters. After the Liberation of Paris in 1946 she returned there to live and work for the remainder of her life, exhibiting extensively around the world.
The predominant themes in Leonor Fini’s art are sexual tensions, mysteries and games. One of her favored subjects is the interplay between the dominant female and the passive male, and in many of her most powerful works the female takes the form of the sphinx to which she felt a strong identification. She was also a renowned portraitist, and among her subjects were such friends as writers André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jean Genet, Klaus Mann (son of Thomas), such actresses as Anna Magnani and Suzanne Flon, ballerina Margot Fonteyn, film director Luchino Visconti and artists Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington.
Her genius for stage and screen design is evident in her numerous ground breaking theater decors with their elaborate conception, costumes and phantasmagorical masks. She designed for the Paris Opera, George Balanchine’s ballet Palais de Crystal, and choreographer Roland Petit’s company Ballets de Paris, for Maria Callas at the La Scala theater in Milan, as well as over seventy productions at theaters in Paris between 1946 and 1969. She had a unique talent for film design and created costumes for Fellini's 8 ½ as well as for Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet and John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death.
In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe. Her friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris. She illustrated many works by the great authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. She was very generous with her illustrations and donated many drawings to writers to help them get published. She is, perhaps, best known for her graphic illustrations for Histoire d'O.
The provocative and much-publicized life of Leonor Fini was pure theater. Her story is that of a hard-won struggle to forge her life as a woman artist in a man’s world and to invent herself on her own terms. It is the story of a woman possessing exceptional independence, a highly original vision and great personal magnetism who lived passionately through her art and friendships and in the process became a feminist role model.

Condition: Good-Very Good (light wear to cover, ageing, loose leaf page that is not bound but inserted, which is common across all copies of this book as it was not bound into the original print run - therefore not damage) – All care is taken to provide accurate condition details of used books, photos available on request.

File under: Leonor Fini Yomiuri Shimbun / Tokyo Art Drawing Out-of-print / Rare Painting Surrealism