World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1999, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 23.2 x 16.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$40.00 - In stock -
Tyrus Miller breaks new ground in this study of early twentieth-century literary and artistic culture. Whereas modernism studies have generally concentrated on the vital early phases of the modernist revolt, Miller focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years.
In the post-World War I reconstruction and the worldwide crisis that followed, Miller argues, new technological media and the social forces of mass politics opened fault lines in individual and collective experience, undermining the cultural bases of the modernist movement. He shows how late modernists attempted to discover ways of occupying this new and often dangerous cultural space. In doing so they laid bare the ruin of the modernist aesthetic at the same time as they transcended its limits.
In his wide-ranging theoretical and historical discussion, Miller relates developments in literary culture to tendencies in the visual arts, cultural and political criticism, mass culture, and social history. He excavates Wyndham Lewis's hidden borrowings from Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer; situates Djuna Barnes between the imagery of haute couture and the intellectualism of Duchamp; uncovers Beckett's affinities with Giacometti's surrealist sculptures and the Bolshevik clowns Bim-Bom; and considers Mina Loy as both visionary writer and designer of decorative lampshades. Miller's lively and engaging readings of culture in this turbulent period reveal its surprising anticipation of our own postmodernity.
VG copy, first ed.
1964 , French
Hardcover, 192 pages, 30.5 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pont Royal Del Duca - Laffont
Paris
$100.00 - In stock -
First 1964 hardcover edition of Histoire de l'insolite (History of the Unusual) by Romi. Preface by Philippe Soupault, artistic design by Pierre Chapelot. An incredible visual survey of the weird and wonderful from the history of occultism to the absurd, the cabinet of curiosities to the voyages of science fiction, demonology to psychosis, the Fin de siècle, Futurists, Surrealists, Dadaists, Pataphysicians, the visionaries, the mediums, the curios, the macabre, the bizarre. Profusely illustrated in mono and duotone with many pasted-in lush colour plates, this is a beautiful visual reference of the fantastic throughout history. Chapters include (translated from French): The Sources of the Unusual - A Legendary Bestiary - Fantastic Voyages - The Design to Surprise - Unusual Enterprises, featuring Alfred Jarry, Giuseppe Arcimbaldo, P.T. Barnum, Edward Lear, Hélène Smith, Raymond Roussel, Alessandro Cagliostro, Stanislao Lepri, Hieronymus Bosch, Ferdinand Cheval, and hundreds of other artists, poets, mystics and unknowns. With a preface by none other than Surrealist founder, Dadaist, writer, poet, novelist, critic, political activist, Philippe Soupault (1897-1990).
Very Good copy, highly recommended.
2011, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 14.7 x 22.4 cm
Published by
Graywolf Press / Washington
$38.00 - In stock -
Still later, when I was more in touch with
the world, they told me, "You have a future."
I thought that over. Even if I believed them,
what did my little future, whatever that was,
have to do with the real thing, whatever that is?
—from "Waiting"
In this second daring collection, Coming to That, the centenarian painter and poet Dorothea Tanning illuminates our understanding of creativity, the impulse to make, and the longevity of art. Her unique wit and candor radiate through every poem, every line, and her inquisitive mind is everywhere alive and restless. As she writes in one poem, "If Art would only talk it would, at last, reveal / itself for what it is, what we all burn to know."
"[Coming to That] is playful and unrestrained, each poem containing a spontaneous logic of its own. . . . Tanning's poems take the reader on unexpected journeys that stray far from their beginnings, moving with the momentum of sheer joy and restless artistic energy. Pulsing underneath are larger questions, sometimes almost bittersweet, sometimes daunting." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Tanning's poems are beautifully created, filled with rich rhythms and imagery. . . . Often ironic and often filled with wisdom and humor, a Tanning poem asks readers to believe in her artistic vision. These are poems of beginnings and choices, of marriage and aging, and of creation--poems still filled with wondering." —Library Journal
"Dorothea Tanning, who has had a long and marvelous life as a visual artist, is our most surprising new poet." —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post Book World
"Dorothea Tanning's verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight." —J. D. McClatchy
2004, English
Softcover, 83 pages, 23 x 16 cm
Published by
Graywolf Press / Minneapolis
$38.00 - In stock -
The extraordinary first poetry collection by the renowned painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning
Finally, on second, in bras. Bras swarming everywhere,
giant pink moths at rest, their empty cups clamoring,
"Fill me."
—from "End of the Day on Second"
Dorothea Tanning is an exceptional visual artist, and now, in her nineties, she has become an exceptional poet. In A Table of Content, we are made to see more clearly the city landscape, the creative impulse, and the worlds of potential disaster and sensual erotics with a vision that survives taste, trend, and time.
"Some would call these poems collages, finery glued into dreamy images. But I prefer to call the whole of them a kaleidoscope-angled feelings and dappled ideas constantly shape-shifting into remarkable new patterns, by turns giddy and grave. And when you put the little device down, you realize you've all along been looking at your own life, grandly reimagined by a master. Dorothea Tanning's verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight, and readers who sit down to A Table of Content can expect to stand up more strangely themselves. She wears her soul on her sleeve, and it shines, it shines!"—J. D. McClatchy
Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) lived an extraordinary life as an artist and writer. She published two books of poetry, A Table of Content and Coming to That; two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives: An Artist and Her World; and a novel, Chasm. In 2012, she died at the age of 101 at her home in New York City.
1992, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), unpaginated, 23.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first hardcover edition of Katan Amano's collection of works, published by Treville in Japan in 1992. Japanese doll and puppet artist Katan Amano (1953—1990) is well known in Japan for her tender and haunting doll works. Amano was staff at Tokyo's Pygmalion Doll Studio in the 1980's and during her short life created a universe of Hans Bellmer and Alice inspired dolls. These elegantly beautiful, otherworldly ball-jointed children are Amano's vehicles for an arresting and primal vision. She died in 1990 in a motorcycle accident. This gorgeous book is lavishly illustrated with the finest examples of her award-winning dolls shot by her collaborator Ryoichi Yoshida. In addition to her incredible doll works, the book also features her Hieronymus Bosch and Lewis Carroll inspired sculptural creatures, grotesque-baroque objects and dark fantasy paintings, all lavishly reproduced on gloss stock. A small amount of text in Japanese.
Near Fine copy in NF dust jacket.
2019, English / Polish
Hardcover, 64 pages, 19.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Bosz / Lesko
$25.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of this new volume dedicated to the graphics of Zdzisław Beksiński (1929–2005). Profusely illustrated throughout, with an introduction by art historian Wiesław Banach.
“Beksiński. Graphics” is another miniature book presenting one of the arts that the very talented artist from Sanok, Zdzisław Beksiński, was passionate about. On sixty pages, you will find the master’s works selected by the head of the Historical Museum in Sanok, Wiesław Banach, a friend of Beksiński and connoisseur of his art.
Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005) was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor. Beksiński had no formal training as an artist. Born in Sanok, he studied architecture in Kraków and worked as a construction site supervisor before turning to his passion for art, sculpting with construction site materials for his medium. His early photography would be a precursor to his paintings, often referred to as dystopian surrealism. Beksiński claimed, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Beksiński undertook painting with a passion, working intensely whilst listening to classical music and quickly becoming a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the mid-1980s, during which he created his famed images of desolate, surrealistic landscapes with intricate depictions of anxious, abstracted figures and architecture in states of decay, mutation and decomposition. Although Beksiński's art was often dark, he himself was known to be a pleasant person with a keen sense of humour. Modest and somewhat shy, he avoided public events such as the openings of his own exhibitions and almost never visited museums or exhibitions in general. He always credited music as his main source of inspiration. Beksiński avoided concrete analysis of the content of his work, saying "I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting". Beksiński was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment in February 2005 by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.
According to Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro "In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh – whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish – thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust."
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen" H.R. Giger
2019, English / Polish
Hardcover, 64 pages, 19.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Bosz / Lesko
$25.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of this new volume dedicated to the photography of Zdzisław Beksiński (1929–2005). Profusely illustrated throughout, with an introduction by art historian Wiesław Banach.
Zdzisław Beksiński was a photographer for a relatively short period of less than eight years. The artist's main model was his wife, Zofia Beksinska, who not only brilliantly exposed the female beauty, but also lived up to the experimenter's requirements. Beksinski's photographs, characterised by formal diversity and poetic sensitivity, focus mainly on the issue of transience. The photographs featured in this book belong to the collection of the Historical Museum in Sanok.
Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005) was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor. Beksiński had no formal training as an artist. Born in Sanok, he studied architecture in Kraków and worked as a construction site supervisor before turning to his passion for art, sculpting with construction site materials for his medium. His early photography would be a precursor to his paintings, often referred to as dystopian surrealism. Beksiński claimed, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Beksiński undertook painting with a passion, working intensely whilst listening to classical music and quickly becoming a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the mid-1980s, during which he created his famed images of desolate, surrealistic landscapes with intricate depictions of anxious, abstracted figures and architecture in states of decay, mutation and decomposition. Although Beksiński's art was often dark, he himself was known to be a pleasant person with a keen sense of humour. Modest and somewhat shy, he avoided public events such as the openings of his own exhibitions and almost never visited museums or exhibitions in general. He always credited music as his main source of inspiration. Beksiński avoided concrete analysis of the content of his work, saying "I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting". Beksiński was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment in February 2005 by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.
According to Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro "In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh – whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish – thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust."
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen" H.R. Giger
2019, English / Polish
Hardcover, 64 pages, 19.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Bosz / Lesko
$25.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of this new volume dedicated to the drawings of Zdzisław Beksiński (1929–2005). Profusely illustrated throughout, with an introduction by art historian Wiesław Banach.
"Since early childhood, drawings had been the artist's main means of communication. "Usually, when I explain something to others, I like to draw it on a piece of paper", he would say. In fact, he left thousands of drawings, usually sketches, sometimes even notes reflecting the way he thought and rendered the original idea into a complete work of art. Due to its nature, this album merely presents a selection of his works that mark various stages of Beksinski's artistic activity, starting from his 1946 youthful self-portrait, to pieces from his final years." - Wiestaw Banach
Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005) was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor. Beksiński had no formal training as an artist. Born in Sanok, he studied architecture in Kraków and worked as a construction site supervisor before turning to his passion for art, sculpting with construction site materials for his medium. His early photography would be a precursor to his paintings, often referred to as dystopian surrealism. Beksiński claimed, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Beksiński undertook painting with a passion, working intensely whilst listening to classical music and quickly becoming a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the mid-1980s, during which he created his famed images of desolate, surrealistic landscapes with intricate depictions of anxious, abstracted figures and architecture in states of decay, mutation and decomposition. Although Beksiński's art was often dark, he himself was known to be a pleasant person with a keen sense of humour. Modest and somewhat shy, he avoided public events such as the openings of his own exhibitions and almost never visited museums or exhibitions in general. He always credited music as his main source of inspiration. Beksiński avoided concrete analysis of the content of his work, saying "I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting". Beksiński was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment in February 2005 by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.
According to Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro "In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh – whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish – thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust."
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen" H.R. Giger
1997, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Morpheus International / US
$70.00 - In stock -
First 1997 edition of H.R. Giger's Retrospective 1964-1984, presenting over 150 artworks, spanning 20 years in the career of the world's most renowned fantasy artist, gathered chronologically in this one rich and detailed volume. Carefully rendered reproductions of Giger's paintings, drawings, designs, videos, sculptures, costumes and furniture are accompanied by his own commentary and portraits of the artist at work and with Dali, Fuchs, Harry and other colleagues.
Fantastic Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger was born in 1940, the son of a chemist. He spoke of a father who viewed art as a "breadless profession", and strongly encouraged his son to enter into pharmaceutics. Despite this, in 1962, he moved to Zürich, where he studied Architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts until 1970. Giger's style and thematic execution have been hugely influential. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence. Giger is also well known for artwork on several music recording albums. His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as "biomechanical". His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery. His main influences were painters Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary. Giger suffered from night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder, making his first paintings as a means of art therapy. In 1998 Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now houses the H. R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work.
Good—Very Good copy of the first 1997 English edition with light general corner/cover wear.
2024, English / French
Hardcover, 128 pages, 24 x 29.5 cm
Published by
Arsenicgalerie / Paris
$78.00 - Out of stock
The first monograph on the Japanese artist of desire.
In this lavishly illustrated book, Xavier-Gilles Néret analyzes the work of Yoshifumi Hayashi from an existential and philosophical as well as artistic perspective, drawing on his interviews with the Japanese artist who, for almost half a century, has shamelessly asserted the importance of sexual desire and the body in all its material dimensions.
From his erotic drawings of callipagous women to his sexualized landscapes, from his vulvar and ithyphallic flowers to his "still lifes" teeming with life, Hayashi pursues his quest for the mysteries of matter through the subtle play of light in the gradations of lead pencil, of which he has become a virtuoso alchemist, to fuel irrepressible desire and "repassionate life".
Yoshifumi Hayashi (born 1948 in Fukuoka, Japan) is an artist specializing in scenes of female erotica. In 1974 he moved to Paris, where he began to produce pencil drawings. At first his main influence was the metaphysical world of De Chirico, but soon his focus shifted to the lower half of the female anatomy… Hayashi's art comes straight from the darkest depths of his subconscious and the artist lays his innermost paranoias, fetishes and obsessions. Despite this profoundly personal quality his work is also highly and objectively erotic.
Text by Xavier-Gilles Néret.
Foreword by Catherine Robbe-Grillet.
2000, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 178 x 229 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$30.00 - In stock -
Out of print first 2000 softcover edition of Rosalind E. Krauss' Bachelors, published by October / MIT Press.
Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors, and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists' concerns with the major currents of postwar visual culture. These essays on nine women artists are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?" In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement's misogyny. Krauss resists that claim, for these "bachelors" are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. Some of this work (such as that of Louise Bourgeois or Cindy Sherman) could be said to find its power in strategies associated with such concepts as écriture feminine. Bachelors attempts to do justice to these and other artists (Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler, Francesca Woodman) in the terms their works demand.
Rosalind E. Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University and an editor and cofounder of October magazine, is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), The Optical Unconscious (1993), The Picasso Papers (1999), and Bachelors (1999), all published by the MIT Press, and coauthor (with Yve-Alain Bois) of Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books, 1997).
"[S]timulating, difficult, and often dazzling...Bachelors is a smart and often profound book that makes avaluable contribution to the gendered field it abhors." Carol Zemel, Women's Review of Books.
Contents: By way of introduction, Claude Cahun and Dora Maar; portrait of the artist as "fillette", Louise Bourgeois; the "cloud", Agnes Martin; contingent, Eva Hesse; untitled, Cindy Sherman; problem sets, Francesca Woodman; bachelors, Sherrie Levine; souvenir memories, Louise Lawler.
VG copy with only a corner bump/bend to the top-right.
1993, English
Softcover, 346 pages 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$50.00 - In stock -
In her seminal study, first published in 1981, Marjorie Perloff argues that the map of Modernist poetry needs to be redrawn to include a central tradition which cannot properly be situated within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition dominating the early twentieth century. She traces this tradition from its early "French connection" in the poetry of Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as in Cubist, Dada, and early Surrealist painting; through its various manifestations in the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound; to such postmodern "landscapes without depth" as the French/English language constructions of Samuel Beckett, the elusive dreamscapes of John Ashbery, and the performance works of David Antin and John Cage.
Very Good copy of 1993 second edition.
2003, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
First 2003 English Edition of Antonin Artaud’s evil simulacrum of The Monk, the only work of sustained fiction by the infamous literary provocateur. Taking Matthew Gregory Lewis's gothic novel of 1794 as the raw material for an astonishing exploration of the far edges of death, sexuality, terror, language and the body, Artaud conducted an aberrant evisceration of the original novel, discarding entire chapters, recreating others and stamping his own distinctive identity on the work in his avowed aim to accentuate the story's violence and atrocity to the maximal degree.
In Artaud's The Monk, sexual obsession is irrepressibly crushed together with murder, cruelty and blasphemy. The result is a searing narrative of massacred nuns, raped virgins and satanic retribution which will leave the reader simultaneously ensnared, gratified and abused.
Best known for his Theatre of Cruelty manifestoes, experimental film projects and corporeal poetry, Artaud created The Monk in France in 1930, to the acclaim of such figures as Jean Cocteau, at a time when Artaud's explicit purpose in his work was to cancel out all existing social and moral systems. This is the first time ever that the book has appeared in English. With an introduction by Stephen Barber.
"A great masterpiece of fantastic literature... marvels burst out at the reader, burning with a thousand fires... the spirit of the supernatural inflames this book to the very core"—André Breton
Very Good—NF copy.
1972, Japanese
Softcover (french folds w. slipcase), approx 150 pages, 19 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rosicrucian Society / Tokyo
$140.00 - Out of stock
First 1972 Japanese slipcased edition of Roland Topor's classic collection 'Les Masochists', published by Rosicrucian Society, Tokyo, and edited by renowned Japanese critic, author, scholar of demonology, and translator Tatsuhiko Shibusawa. First published in Paris in 1960 by controversial Belgian-born French publisher Éric Losfeld (Éditions Le Terrain Vague), 'Les Masochistes' presents one of Topor’s most acclaimed early collections of illustrations of people engaged in acts of masochism. A perfect precursor to the dark humour that Topor would make a fantastic career of. A beautiful production of this series, this Japanese edition in illustrated cardboard slipcase features the full 'Les Masochists' series plus a further Topor masterpiece collection of incredible works that followed 'Les Masochistes' and were the feature of his first art books, all edited together with an afterword by Shibusawa. Includes introduction by Jacques Sternberg, translated from French to Japanese.
Roland Topor (1938—1997) was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, and much more. A founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962, Topor was known for the surreal and absurdist nature of his work.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
Very Good copy in VG slipcase, some tanning to spine edge.
1983, English
Hardcover, 184 pages, 24 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
UMI Research Press / Ann Arbor
$50.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 hardcover edition of Jane Block's Les XX and Belgian Avant-Gardism 1868-1894, published by UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor.
"This study attempts both offer a comprehensive view of Belgian avant-garde art from 1868 to 1894 and to relate its artistic aims to the political and social milieu while charting the path of Les XX in the avant-garde groups, its reaction to the academic tradition, and its internal aesthetic evolution which ranged from Impressionism to the decorative arts. This research should also serve to illuminate the strong reciprocal nature of the ties between artistic centers, especially Paris and Brussels, and reveal the unique contribution of Les XX modern art. What the study does not do is follow the careers of the 32 individual artists who were members of Les XX nor even attempt to identify all the works actually shown at Les XX. This would be impossible because of the insufficient descriptions in the Les XX catalogs and in the contemporary press. Instead, this study seeks to discuss the contribution of the group as a whole and its impact on Belgian art and the artistic establishment. It describes how and why Les XX came to be one of the most avant-garde groups in Europe during its time."
Very Good copy with light wear to cloth covers and light tanning.
2024, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 22 x 17 cm
Published by
Thin Man Press / London
$74.00 - In stock -
Cancelled Confessions reveals Claude Cahun to be a major surrealist writer and pioneering queer theorist almost a century ahead of her time.
"The re-appearance of this glittering and dissenting semi-lost epic is a gift… Cahun’s writing is stylish, playful and prescient, peopled with angel slang, flowering disavowals, God’s lipstick and an infinite layering of masks."—Daisy Lafarge, author.
In 1930, Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and her partner, artist Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe) published their surrealist masterpiece, Aveux non Avenus, translated here as Cancelled Confessions and available in English for the first time in twenty years. Susan de Muth’s revised translation of Cancelled Confessions has a new introduction by art historian Amelia Groom which contextualizes it within contemporary queer discourse.
"It’s a surrealist, trans, queer, autofiction, (anti)memoir, and also none of those things. It’s a text, and a life, felt as connection and at the same time completely singular."—McKenzie Wark, author.
'The kaleidoscopic text is pieced together from diverse fragments… there are philosophical and subversive theological musings, aphorisms and fables, letters and dialogues, dreams and hymns, nightmares and jokes,' writes Groom. The book’s nine sections are prefaced by dreamlike photomontages (reproduced in high definition here) which reflect, illuminate and converse with the verbal content. Upon publication, Aveux non Avenus simply baffled all but a few of Cahun’s friends and admirers, leading Cahun to describe herself as, ‘An unwanted Cassandra’. Now, however, is the time of the remarkably prescient Cahun and Moore.
"Cahun was a pioneer of gender-bending role-playing…eerily ahead of her time she has attracted an almost cult-like following."—The late David Bowie
Cahun and Moore’s appeal is wide and universal. They were adventurers in life as in art. Cahun famously terrified Andre Breton in the 1920s when she appeared in a Paris café with her head shaved and painted gold. Having moved to Jersey in 1938, Cahun and Moore waged a mischievous two-person resistance campaign against the occupying Nazi forces from 1940. Finally caught and imprisoned in 1944, they were sentenced to death in 1945, saved at the very last moment by the armistice.
1964, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 24.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Melbourne University Film Society / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
This scarce brochure was published by Melbourne University Film Society on the occasion of a special season of screening of Early French Cinema Classics in 1964. Edited by Laurie Clancy and Peter Hourigan, features texts and illustrations on the films of Luis Bunuel, Jean Vigo, and Jean Cocteau, along with filmographies and a screening programme. Published in Melbourne in 1964 (we estimate, not dated).
The Melbourne University Film Society published periodicals (Annotations on Film) and guides to accompany their film programme, aimed at presenting films in Melbourne in the medium they were created and providing a critical reading of them for an independent, membership-based film society. Starting in 1948, the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) changed its name to Cinémathèque in 1984 and continues to this day in Melbourne. A written accompaniment to their programme can be seen in the form of the current-day online journal Senses of Cinema.
Very Good copy, light wear.
2017, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 14 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Dorothy Project / St. Louis
$38.00 - In stock -
"Her delirious fantasy reveals to us a little of the secret magic of her paintings" - Luis Buñuel
Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life.
Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONORA CARRINGTON collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), THE COMPLETE STORIES captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist's life.
2001, English
Softcover, 103 pages, 14 x 20.4 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$28.00 - Out of stock
"The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." - G.B.
A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. Called a "metaphysician of evil, Bataille wrote the 1928 novella "Story of the Eye (French: L'histoire de l'œil) as a psychoanalytical task. In this explicit erotic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.
Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French essayist and novelist, was born in Billom, France. He converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism, forming a secret society dedicated to glorifying human sacrifice. Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, founding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death.
1994, Czech / English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 276 pages, 23 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Foto Mida / Czech Republic
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this now long-out-of-print and most comprehensive hardcover monograph the work of Czech surrealist photographer Vilém Reichmann. This exceptional volume is profusely with over 200 full-page colour and b/w plates of Reichmann's photographic works, including his incredible experimental photogram works, and a selection of rarely seen drawings and paintings. Texts throughout by accomplished curator and Czech photography specialist Antonín Dufek (b. 1943) in Czech with an inserted booklet of all texts translated to English. Includes biography, bibliography. A scarce resource on this great artist.
Vilém Reichmann (1908-1991) was one of the premiere Czech surrealist photographers. Reichmann comes from the German-Jewish community in Brno and began photographing in 1930, whilst working as a graphic artist for numerous left-wing magazines in Czechoslovakia. Influenced by the Depression and war years, he developed a Surrealist style modelled on lyrical interpretations of reality through visual metaphors. After World War II he became a member of ‘Ra’, a Czech Surrealist art group, and his work shows the influence of textural abstraction and absurdist humor. Antonín Dufek, an erudite specialist in the field of the Czech photography, confirms Reichmann’s fundamental position in the history of the Czech photography, especially its surrealist movement.
VG copy in VG dust jacket. Few marks to block edge, top of cloth, light waving to block.
1989, German
Hardcover, 136 pages, 25.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ex Pose Verlag / Berlin
$90.00 - In stock -
First edition of the out-of-print hardcover monograph on the work of Czech Surrealist photographer Vilém Reichmann, published on the occasion of a major survey exhibition at the Museum Bochum in 1989 and the Austrian Photo Archive in the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna in 1990. Extensive documentation of Reichmann's photographic works, including his incredible experimental photogram works. Includes portrait, biography, bibliography and texts by Antonín Dufek and Peter Spielmann in German.
Vilém Reichmann (1908-1991) was one of the premiere Czech surrealist photographers. Reichmann comes from the German-Jewish community in Brno and began photographing in 1930, whilst working as a graphic artist for numerous left-wing magazines in Czechoslovakia. Influenced by the Depression and war years, he developed a Surrealist style modelled on lyrical interpretations of reality through visual metaphors. After World War II he became a member of ‘Ra’, a Czech Surrealist art group, and his work shows the influence of textural abstraction and absurdist humor. Antonín Dufek, an erudite specialist in the field of the Czech photography, confirms Reichmann’s fundamental position in the history of the Czech photography, especially its surrealist movement.
Very Good copy, only very light wear to spine ends, cover, internally perfect.
1961, Czech
Softcover, 64 pages, 17.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
SNKLU / Prague
$80.00 - In stock -
Wonderful and long out-of-print Vilém Reichmann monograph, published in Prague in 1961 as part of the distinctive series of Czech monographs on photographers published by SNKLU, a wing of the great Odeon publishing house. Edited by fellow photographer/painter Václav Zykmund, this beautifully printed book presents a selection of 64 of his best lyrical surreal images, printed in gravure.
Vilém Reichmann (1908-1991) was one of the premiere Czech surrealist photographers. Reichmann comes from the German-Jewish community in Brno and began photographing in 1930, whilst working as a graphic artist for numerous left-wing magazines in Czechoslovakia. Influenced by the Depression and war years, he developed a Surrealist style modelled on lyrical interpretations of reality through visual metaphors. After World War II he became a member of ‘Ra’, a Czech Surrealist art group, and his work shows the influence of textural abstraction and absurdist humor. Antonín Dufek, an erudite specialist in the field of the Czech photography, confirms Reichmann’s fundamental position in the history of the Czech photography, especially its surrealist movement.
Good copy with some moisture ripple and general wear. Moisture stain at back but not affecting contents.
1989, English
Softcover, 174 pages, 21.2 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
Rare first English translation of this 1897 novel by French symbolist writer and 'pataphysician Alfred Jarry (1873—1907). Translated by Alexis Lykiard, with introduction by Alastair Brotchie and additional verse translations by Stanley Chapman. Preceded by Alfred Jarry’s The Other Alcestis, translated by John Harman. Illustrated by Peter Blegvad, with an afterword by Alastair Brotchie.
Alfred Jarry is chiefly known for his creation of Ubu, in a play which is acknowledged as the first "absurd" drama, but this was only one facet of a writer who is now seen as one of the most important influences on the whole of the French literature of this century. Jarry wrote his great visionary novel Days and Nights when he was only 24, and it has much in common with the works of two other youthful geniuses: Rimbaud and Lautréamont. The book is hard to describe. Its hero, an army conscript, uses various means to escape his intolerable everyday life. Eventually he is swallowed up by dreams, hallucinations, "artificial paradises." He abandons reality altogether. He also pursues a strange erotic quest: "The Double." Jarry describes this desertion in a dense prose that is lucid, complex, paradoxical and humorous. The narrative is intercut with nightmares, parables and theoretical passages where logic spirals into self-destruction.
Never translated before, due to the evident problems it poses, this novel is certainly Jarry's greatest achievement.
Days and Nights also has an historical importance. Although written in 1897, it was years ahead of its time. It was the culmination of French Symbolism, yet foresaw many of the characteristics and concerns of the "modern novel" — it profoundly influenced both Joyce and the Surrealists.
Very Good copy but with some laminate peeling from back cover corners.
1977, Japanese
Softcover, 56 pages, 26 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gallery 8 / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
Very scarce Japanese publication on German painter and photographer Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known as Wols, published by Fuji Television Co. in 1977 on the occasion of an exhibition at Gallery 8, Tokyo. Beautifully illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with over 40 works, including chronology, exhibitions history, and bibliography. Exhibition work-list inserted.
Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin – 1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement. He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.
Near Fine copy.