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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2001, English
Softcover, 83 pages, 22 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Skira / Milan
The Drawing Center / New York
$400.00 - In stock -
Rare, first-ever English translation of this Michaux classic, very quickly out-of-print and sought after.
One of the key works of the poet and artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984) whose original approach intertwines the written word with his visionary paintings and drawings.
First published in 1972, this English language translation of Henri Michaux’s celebrated book Émergences- Résurgences has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux organized by The Drawing Center in New York.
Part essay, part poem—by turns lyric, ekphrastic, didactic, gnomic, and comic—it is also one of Michaux’s most sustained self-portraits.
Very Good copy. Tanned.
2015, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 22.86 x 3.18 x 31.12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
National Portrait Gallery / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
First edition hardcover catalogue — an acclaimed book published to accompany an acclaimed exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2015.
Since his death at the age of sixty-four in 1966, Alberto Giacometti has become recognised internationally as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century and sales of his sculptures now achieve record-breaking prices. Belonging to no particular artistic movement, he developed through cubist and surrealist phases and later attained a mature, individual idiom whose preoccupation with the depiction of a human presence in an enveloping space may be seen in relation to contemporary existentialist concerns with defining the place and purpose of man in a godless universe.
Taking its title from Jean-Paul Sartre, who described Giacometti's endeavor to give "sensible expression" to "pure presence," this book explores the artist's work in relation to existentialist ideas. Spanning painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking, Giacometti's oeuvre ranges from surrealist objects to images of the human figure, with portraits of particular individuals at the center.
This book looks at the various phases of the artist's career and explores in detail his depiction of his main sitters, including his mother; Diego his brother; his wife Annette; Jean Genet the playwright; Caroline, a prostitute; and his friends Yanaihara and Lotar. Early drawings, paintings and sculptures of family members and his own image demonstrate Giacometti's awareness of Post-Impressionist and Divisionist styles.
From 1946 Giacometti resumed painting and depicting individuals became central to his work. After 1954, when he began making sculpture from life, his portraits expressed a dialogue between painting and sculpture.
As New copy, first edition, out-of-print.
2017, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 22 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Tate Gallery / London
$80.00 - In stock -
Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) is one of the few artists of the last century whose work is almost more recognizable than his name. His distinctive elongated figures are well known, and appear in major museum collections worldwide. However, the story of Giacometti’s evolution, from his first professional works of art through his surrealist compositions to the emergence of his mature style, has rarely been explored fully and in depth. This comprehensive overview of his career focuses on the art, the people, and the events that influenced him, and on the original and experimental way in which he approached and developed his work. An illustrated glossary of texts on his life and art is accompanied by a plate section of strikingly beautiful illustrations of his sculptures, paintings, and drawings as well as sketchbooks, decorative works, photographs, and studio ephemera, much of which have never been published before. This accessible survey is the definitive resource for fans of the artist.
Out-of-print, first edition, Very Good copy with light cover wear.
2015, English
Softcover (letterpress boards), 214 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Univocal Publishing / Minneapolis
$55.00 - In stock -
Limited letterpress edition.
Those who are mad like Antonin Artaud, are they just as mad as he was? Madness, like the plague, is contagious, and everyone, from his psychiatrists to his disciples, family, and critics, everyone who gets close to Artaud, seems to participate in his delirium. Sylvere Lotringer explores various embodiments of this shared delirium through what Artaud called "mental dramas"-a series of confrontations with his witnesses or "persecutors" where we uncover the raw delirium at work, even in Lotringer himself. Mad Like Artaud does not intend to add one more layer of commentary to the bitter controversies that have been surrounding the cursed poet's work since his death in 1948, nor does it take sides among the different camps who are still haggling over his corpse. This book speaks of the site where "madness" itself is simmering.
Translated by Joanna Spinks.
1999, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
The Tears Corporation / London
$45.00 - In stock -
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains the most inspirational, provocative and challenging figure in world-wide contemporary culture. His trajectory extends from the Surrealist movement, to the Theatre of Cruelty, to the lunatic asylums of France, and finally back to Paris and the most astonishing period of his work.
For the first time, the book gives a full and authoritative account of Artaud's film projects, and his conception of Surrealist cinema. It examines his unique series of drawings of the fragmented human body, begun in the ward of a lunatic asylum and finished in a state of furious liberation. Finally, the book captures Artaud's ultimate experiment with the screaming body in the form of his censored recording To Have Done With The Judgement Of God - an experiment which is unprecedented in the history of art, and which ultimately decimates that history.
The Screaming Body is an essential resource and inspiration for those engaged in creating the definitive culture of our time, in film, art, music and writing.
Very Good copy, light wear.
1970—1980,
Offset poster (82 x 48 cm)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerie Alexandre Iolas / Paris
$220.00 - Out of stock
Gorgeous vintage Man Ray (1890—1976) exhibition poster from the 1970s of the artist at the legendary Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Paris, where the American artist spent much of his life as a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements. Issued by the gallery in a beautiful offset print on lovely wove paper featuring Man Ray's "Pêchage"Peaches"), 1969, painted wooden box, artificial peaches and cotton.
A stunning collector's item, ready to frame.
Dimensions : 82 x 48 cm
Very Good condition, well preserved.
1974, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 24cm x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Ballantine Books / New York
$20.00 - Out of stock
First 1974 edition of this volume on Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, reproducing many of his most famous paintings in colour, edited by David Larkin with an introduction by J.G. Ballard. Painter, designer, and filmmaker Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was one of the most colourful and controversial figures in twentieth-century art. A pioneer of Surrealism, he was both praised and reviled for the subconscious imagery he projected into his paintings, which he sometimes referred to as hand-painted dream photographs.
Average copy with ageing, tanning and some old moisture ripples creeping into back page edges. Otherwise still bright internally throughout with tight binding.
2022, English
Hardcover, 168 pages, 24 x 30 cm
Published by
RM / Barcelona
$110.00 - Out of stock
A significantly expanded hardcover edition of Carrington's acclaimed Tarot series, featuring new archival images and research.
The British-born Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) spent a lifetime exploring the esoteric traditions of diverse cultures, and incorporated their ideas and symbols into her artistic and literary oeuvre. Tibetan Buddhism, the Kabbalah, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic, Celtic mythology, witchcraft, astrology and the Tarot were filtered through her feminist lens to create a visionary, woman-centered worldview.
Carrington created a spectacular Major Arcana Tarot deck sometime during the 1950s, laying gold and silver leaf over brilliant color. Exhibited for the first time during her centennial exhibition Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales in 2018, this extraordinary work was a revelation for the public and inspired the publication of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington.
This second, considerably expanded edition--encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive reception of Fulgur's publication in 2020--explores further the central position that the Tarot held in Carrington's work. The volume includes an introductory text by her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington, who recalls his mother's long involvement with the Tarot, followed by a revised and more extensive essay by scholar Susan Aberth and curator Tere Arcq, including detailed analysis of each card: their color symbolism, their relationship to other works and their iconographic origins in ancient esoteric beliefs, including the Mesoamerican influences of her adopted country.
This new edition also reproduces previously unpublished photographs and images, as well as exciting new research into Carrington's influences, emphasizing the authors' claim that her work on the Major Arcana represents an esoteric roadmap to Carrington's feminist vision and wish for a new global gender equality toward a better ecological future for our planet.
2021, English
Hardcover, 120 pages, 30 x 24cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Fulgur Press / UK
$450.00 - In stock -
The immediately out-of-print Tarot of Leonora Carrington. As New sealed copy.
The British-born artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is one of the more fascinating figures to emerge from the Surrealist movement. As both a writer and painter, she was championed early by André Breton and joined the exiled Surrealists in New York, before settling in Mexico in 1943. The magical themes of Carrington’s otherworldly paintings are well-known, but the recent discovery of a suite of tarot designs she created for the Major Arcana was a revelation for scholars and fans of Carrington alike. Drawing inspiration from the Tarot of Marseille and the popular Waite-Smith deck, Carrington brings her own approach and style to this timeless subject, creating a series of iconic images. Executed on thick board, brightly coloured and squarish in format, Carrington’s Major Arcana shines with gold and silver leaf, exploring tarot themes through what Gabriel Weisz Carrington describes as a ‘surrealist object’. This tantalising discovery, made by the curator Tere Arcq and scholar Susan Aberth, has placed greater emphasis upon the role of the tarot in Carrington’s creative life and has led to fresh research in this area.
The Tarot of Leonora Carrington is the first book dedicated to this important aspect of the artist’s work. It includes a full-size facsimile of her newly discovered Major Arcana; an introduction from her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington; and a richly illustrated essay from Tere Arcq and Susan Aberth that offers new insights — exploring the significance of tarot imagery within Carrington’s wider work, her many inspirations and mysterious occult sources.
2022, English / French
Softcover, 48 pages, 22 x 31 cm
$40.00 - Out of stock
The portfolio of the eponymous exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2022, the first major retrospective in France on the filmmaker and biologist specializing in underwater fauna Jean Painlevé (1902-1989), considered one of the founding fathers of scientific cinema and a source of inspiration for the avant-gardes and the surrealist movement.
A filmmaker with an international reputation for his filmic experiments, Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) was a specialist in scientific documentary and film techniques. During the inter-war period, his work was shown outside the scientific field, in avant-garde cinemas and film clubs. Painlevé was quickly recognised and his publications in the illustrated press of the 1930s contributed to his fame. His non-conformist attitude and his affinity with the surrealist spirit are undoubtedly at the origin of the privileged link he has with independent documentary cinema. The ease with which he crossed the boundaries between science and art was rooted in his artistic associations: Jacques-André Boiffard, Alexander Calder, Ivan Goll, Fernand Léger, Éli Lotar, Pierre Naville, Pierre Prévert, Jean Vigo…
From the 1950s onwards, Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, his partner and collaborator, made a large number of research films, while their personal work continued, nourished by the research of the zoologists and biologists for whom they worked.
Texts by Pia Viewing, notes by Sergi Álvarez Riosalido, Ève Lepaon, Pia Viewing.
1994, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Manchester University Press / Manchester
$30.00 - Out of stock
First 1994 edition, out-of-print.
This book presents an analysis of the phenomenon of the aesthetics of sexual and political violence, a central theme in European culture of the early 20th century. Presenting a synthesis of a wide range of material across disciplines and an analysis of the sources of such ideas in their political, historical and cultural context, this volume presents a broad treatment of the theme of violence during this turbulent period. The major cultural movements and individuals of the early 20th-century avant-garde are examined for their use of violence as inspiration in their artistic production. Themes explored include violence and the body; machinery and technology; Vorticism; Dada; Italian Futurism; Surrealism; violence in the avant-garde cinema; military defeat and the representation of war; the relationship of creativity and violence. Exploring the work of English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and Russian painters and writers, including Georges Sorel, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, Brecht and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the contributors provide an insight into the early 20th-century European avant-garde.
Very Good copy.
2000, English
2 clothbound hardcover books in slipcase, 448 / 132 pages, 33 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Scalo Publishers / New York
$300.00 - Out of stock
Rare first limited edition slipcased two-volume publication, Louise Bourgeois — The Insomnia Drawings, published by Scalo, New York—Zürich in 2000. Long out-of-print and collectible.
Insomnia has been a lifetime companion of Louise Bourgeois' night hours. Between November 1994 and June 1995, she has committed to paper whatever thoughts, memories, and images surfaced during her long sleepless nights. The resulting 220 drawings are the quintessence of all the impulses, sources, and motifs inspiring her work. "The Insomnia Drawings" show the artist's mind at work: drawings and sketches alternate with poems and aphorisms in both French and English, interspersed with notes referring to the hustle-bustle of everyday life. The series is a unique mirror of an extraordinary woman's life and work: beautiful, disquieting, passionate, inquiring, and imbued with a quirky sense of humor. As soon as the artist agreed to entrust "The Insomnia Drawings" to the Daros Collection, it was clear that this extraordinary work should be presented as a book. The result is a handsome slipcased two-volume publication, edited by Daros Services, Zurich. The first volume contains facsimiles of both the recto and verso of the 220 drawings. The second volume provides the reader with valuable background information on this complex and exhilaratingly beautiful work of art. Marie-Louise Bernadac, a leading Bourgeois scholar, places "The Insomnia Drawings" in context of Bourgeois' oeuvre, providing biographical references for many notes, and pointing out the leitmotifs of Bourgeois' imaginary universe. In a lucid and beautifully written essay, Elisabeth Bronfen traces the nocturnal mysteries of insomnia and places this work of art in a larger cultural context. Furthermore, the second volume offers a chronology and annotated transcriptions of all texts and notes. This landmark publication is a must for everyone wanting to take part in the imaginative journeys of one of today's most important artists. "The Insomnia Drawings" are part of the Daros Collection.
"She presents herself as a lady-in-waiting, silent and patient, with the night promising to save her from the array of desires such as love, faith, faithlessness, tenacity, ambition, while here sleeplessness prevents any salvation from her psychic distress. If in these drawings and texts the night is metaphorically conceived of as an expanse of water that might engulf her, while sleep would restore her, insomnia is what prevents any voyage into inundation. (...) Because her insomnia brings states of ambivalence to the fore, she keeps returning to the question of being suspended between two emotions-between plentitude and lack, proximity and absence, agreement and contradiction."—Elisabeth Bronfen
"L'art / ou est / la vie, / toi et vous / inspire / unafraid: Art / est le / contraire / du acting. Les paysages de nuit on / envahi les jours. Water is the / opposite of continuity / water can be the best but it can be worse / / M is for mother / in the water / it is subject / to change / or even to reversal."—Louise Bourgeois
Fine—Near Fine volumes, red and navy hardcovers, both volumes clean and unmarked, slipcase VG—Fine, only very light shelf wear to corners.
1974, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 22.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Random House / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
The first edition of Amos Vogel's seminal book, Film as a Subversive Art, one of the greatest books on cinema, published in 1974. Reprinted in 2005 by D.A.P./C.T. Editions, that edition also quickly went out of print and this landmark book has not been available since. 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 for this classic volume are still relevant today. 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.
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.
1990, English / French
Softcover, 297 pages, 135 x 20.6 x 23 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$46.00 - Out of stock
"Michaux excels in making us feel… the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things."—André Gide
Henri Michaux is one of the great figures in modern French poetry. This selection is from L’Espace du Dedans, which collected eight books of prose poems, sketches and free verse. Brilliantly translated by Richard Ellmann, Michaux asks readers to join him in a fantastic world of the imagination. It is a world where wry humor plays against horror––where Chaplin meets Kafka––a world of pure and rare invention.
Henri Michaux (1899–1984) was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. Through travel journals, prose poems, and incantatory exorcisms, Michaux built an unsettling world of aggression, fear, hostility, and paranoia, whose fantastical landscapes and fabulist beings delineate a space of psychological and cognitive discomfort all too contemporary. In 1956 he continued his controlled explorations of the self with a series of mescaline experiments, which he documented in a series of books over the next decade. Michaux’s writing was paralleled by his lifelong commitment to painting and drawing.
1979, German
Softcover, 419 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kunsthaus Zürich / Zürich
Bentelli Verlag / Bern
$80.00 - In stock -
Wonderful over-sized catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Malerei und Photographie im Dialog / Painting and Photography in Dialogue, Kunsthaus Zürich, May 13 to July 24, 1977. Profusely illustrated, this heavy volume documents this historical survey of the relationship between photography and painting from 1840 to the present (late 1970s); with a full catalogue of works, artists' biographies, bibliography. Edited by Erika Billeter with texts throughout by art historian Josef A. Schmoll. Includes the work of Edvard Munch, Urs Lüthi, Wols, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Eadweard Muybridge, Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Oskar Schlemmer, Francis Bacon, Hilla and Bernd Becher, Les Levine, Constant Puyo, Clarence Hudson White, Jan Groover, Jochen Gerz, Duane Michels, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Ruth Francken, Theo Von Doesburg, Kurt Schwitters, Ferdinand Hodler, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Alighiero Boetti, Klaus Rinke, Giuseppe Penone, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Gerhard Richter, Monika Baumgartl, Yves Klein, Wolf Vostell, Heinrich Kühn, Georges Mathieu, Peter Roehr, Sarkis, Jiro Takamatsu, Michael Heizer, Umberto Boccioni, Hans Bellmer, William Wegman, Raoul Ubac, Margrit Jäggli, André Kertész, Jiri Kolar, Kasimir Malevich, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Dennis Oppenheim, Christian Boltanski, Dan Graham, Jan Dibbets, Jürgen Klauke, Bruce Nauman, Jean Tinguely, Vettor Pisani, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Allen Kaprow, Arnulf Rainer, Mieczyslaw Berman, Jim Dine, George Brecht, Man Ray, Paul Wunderlich, Karin Székessy, Tom Wesselmann, Chuck Close, Eugène Delacroix, Duane Hanson, Heinrich Zille, Félix Vallotton, Carl Durheim, Gilbert and George, Joseph Beuys, Thomas Eakins, Robert Rauschenberg, Édouard Vuillard, Carlo Carrà, Alphonse Mucha, Les Krims, Albert Steiner, Giorgio de Chirico, Keiji Uematsu, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Heinrich Zille, Franco Fontana, Richard Long, Ben Shahn, Edmund Kesting, László Moholy-Nagy, Anton Stankowski, Paul Nash, Rene Magritte, Paul T. Frankl, John Heartfield, El Lissitzky, Georges Hugnet, Gordon Matta-Clark....
Very Good copy, crease to top cover corner.
2003, English
Hardcover, 256 pages, 21 x 25.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Tate Gallery / London
$110.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this lovely hardcover catalogue, published on the occasion of a special travelling exhibition of drawings at The Drawing Centre, New York; Tate, London; MCA, Sydney, 2003 — over 140 important works from the Tate Collection organised, from William Blake to Andy Warhol, selected by the British artist Avis Newman and curated Catherine de Zegher. Newman chose these works because they demonstrated her interest in drawing as an exploratory or discursive act - ie as 'the nearest equivalent to the operation of thought'. The presentation of rarely-seen drawings by so many major artists gives way to fresh and startling connections between their work and new insights into their creative processes. Edited by Catherine De Zegher, this lavishly illustrated book features so many rarely seen drawings by artists, alongside interviews and essays.
Artists : Eileen Agar, Carl Andre, Jean Arp, Heneage Finch Aylesford, Francis Bacon, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beckmann, William Blake, Pierre Bonnard, Constantin Brancusi, André Breton, British School, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Paul Cézanne, Alexander Cozens, Jean Crotti, George Dance, Nathaniel Dance-Holland, John Charles Denham, Marcel Duchamp, Jacob Epstein, Luciano Fabro, Jean Fautrier, Barry Flanagan, John Flaxman, Lucio Fontana, Henry Fuseli, Naum Gabo, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Alberto Giacometti, Natalya Goncharova, Juan Gris, Richard Hamilton, Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse, William Henry Hunt, Giles Hussey, John William Inchbold, Gwen John, Jasper Johns, John Latham, Fernand Léger, Sol LeWitt, El Lissitzky, René Magritte, Piero Manzoni, Brice Marden, André Masson, E.L.T. Mesens, Henri Michaux, John Hamilton Mortimer, Barnett Newman, William Young Ottley, Blinky Palermo, Giuseppe Penone, Francis Picabia, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Elizabeth Rigby, Edward Ruscha, Kurt Schwitters, Albert Seba, Thomas Stothard, James Thornhill, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, George Montard Woodward, Joseph Wright.
Very Good copy.
1992, French and English
Softcover, 141 pages, 13.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$30.00 - In stock -
René Char (1907-88) is acknowledged as one of the greatest French poets of all time. His work speaks in tones both universal and grounded in his native Provence, where during World War II he commanded the Resistance maquis. Originally allied with the Surrealists, his poems afterward evolved from the “fury and mystery” of the war period to his later existential and metaphysical reflections. His poems are violent and tender, passionate and cool, massive and of small scope-at once local and cosmic. The Selected Poems of René Char is a comprehensive, bilingual overview reflecting the poet’s wide stylistic and philosophical range, from aphorism to dramatic lyricism. In making their selections, the editors have chosen the voices of seventeen poets and translators (Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Cid Corman, Eugene Jolas, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and James Wright, to name a few), in homage to a writer long held in highest esteem by the literary avant-garde.
1978, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. dust jacket), 160 pages, 24.5 x 32 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Octopus / London
$65.00 - In stock -
English edition of the great "Surrealist Drawings", edited by František Šmejkal, designed and printed in Czechoslovakia. A beautiful clothbound hardcover folio of drawings by artists affiliated with Surrealism. What makes this lovely collection special is the inclusion of many of the Czech Surrealists, and a generally broad European scope of artists. Czech art historian František Šmejkal has collated a wonderful selection of works on paper by Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, Wolfgang Paalen, Giorgio de Chirico, Hans Bellmer, Alfred Kubin, Francis Picabia, Jacques Hérold, Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Josef Istler, Max Ernst, André Breton, František Muzika, Paul Delvaux, Wilfredo Lam, Richard Oelze, Mikuláš Medek, Joan Miró, Josef Sima, Kurt Seligmann, Odilon Redon, Andre Masson, Max Walter Svanberg, Salvador Dali, Arshile Gorky, Victor Brauner, Rene Magritte, and many more.
Highly recommended.
Very Good copy with light edge wear. Very Good dust jacket.
2010, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 24.9 x 29 cm
Published by
Lund Humphries / London
$85.00 - Out of stock
This book remains the definitive survey of the life and work of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011).
Carrington burst onto the Surrealist scene in 1936, when, as a precocious nineteen-year-old debutante, she escaped the stultifying demands of her wealthy English family by running away to Paris with her lover Max Ernst. She was immediately championed by Andre Breton, who responded enthusiastically to her fantastical, dark and satirical writing style and her interest in fairy tales and the occult. Her stories were included in Surrealist publications, and her paintings in the Surrealists' exhibitions.
After the dramas and tragic separations of the Second World War, Carrington ended up in the 1940s as part of the circle of Surrealist European emigres living in Mexico City. Close friends with Luis Bunuel, Benjamin Peret, Octavio Paz and a host of both expatriate Surrealists and Mexican modernists, Carrington was at the centre of Mexican cultural life, while still maintaining her European connections.
Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art provides a fascinating overview of this intriguing artist's rich body of work. The author considers Carrington's preoccupation with alchemy and the occult, and explores the influence of indigenous Mexican culture and beliefs on her production.
Susan L. Aberth received her PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; her dissertation was on the art of Leonora Carrington. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at Bard College, New York, where she specializes in Latin American Art.
1984/5, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 48 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$60.00 - In stock -
Rare early 1984/5(?) issue of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France and Rockin’on magazine in Japan. SALE2 was active for about 14 years during the 1980s—1990s, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. With Orui's distinct design SALE2 later developed an exclusive curated editorial set on ‘erotisism and its spiritual philosophy’, with each issue exploring different themes and features, heavy on fetishism and erotic art. These early issues however, although featuring erotic and fetish themes, were also an incredible showcase of a new wave of Japanese illustrators, graphic artists and photographers. They also covered punk and avant-garde music, with many interviews, articles and illustrations collaged together in the fanzine tradition with Orui's wonderful touch. A wonderful example of the finest in underground arts publishing in Tokyo in the 1980s.
SALE2 No. 4 Vol. 16 is a special 1984/5 new year calendar issue that features articles on Nobuyoshi Araki, Man Ray, Ryuchi Sakamoto, an interview with John Lydon, an illustrated article on eroticism (with Helmut Newton, Pierre Molinier, Allen Jones, and others pictured), artwork by Terry Johnson, Sachiko Nakamura, Dan Takasuge, Yu Fujimoto, Hiromasa Katoh, Tadamasa Yokoyama, and much more...
All texts in Japanese.
Good copy with cover wear and spine pinches of stiff board covers.
1986, English
Softcover, 319 pages, 175 x 229 mm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$69.00 - Out of stock
Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.
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).
"All of her observations are unfailingly original and provocative."—Art Documentation
Very Good copy of original 1986 edition, 1993 printing.
1970, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
E P Dutton / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the Dada volume of Studio Vista / Dutton's great paperback series. Published in 1970 and written by Kenneth Coutts-Smith, this heavily illustrated overview spans Dada's activities via central locations and protagonists such as Picabia, Janco, Duchamp, Schwitters, Ernst, Grosz, Man Ray, Arp, etc.
Chapters : "Zürich - the beginning", "Anti-art and the irrational", "The roots of Dada", "New York - Duchamp and philosophical irony", "Berlin - political commitment", "Cologne - Ernst and the hallucinatory vision", "Hanover - Schwitters, freedom through lyricism", "Paris - last fling and obsequies", "Dada is dead-long live Dada", "Book list", "Index".
1978, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bonfini Press / Switzerland
$48.00 - Out of stock
First English-language edition of this hardcover monographic volume on Belgian painter and printmaker James Ensor (1860 —1949), published by Bonfini Press in Switzerland in 1978 and printed in Italy. Profusely illustrated with Ensor's paintings and graphic works in colour and black and white, accompanied by text by Jacques Jansenns. Includes biography and bibliography.
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (1860 —1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX. While Ensor's early works, such as Russian Music (1881) and The Drunkards (1883), depict realistic scenes in a somber style, his palette subsequently brightened and he favoured increasingly bizarre subject matter. Such paintings as The Scandalized Masks (1883) and Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man (1891) feature figures in grotesque masks inspired by the ones sold in his mother's gift shop for Ostend's annual Carnival. Subjects such as carnivals, masks, puppetry, skeletons, and fantastic allegories are dominant in Ensor's mature work. Ensor dressed skeletons up in his studio and arranged them in colourful, enigmatic tableaux on the canvas, and used masks as a theatrical aspect in his still lifes. Attracted by masks' plastic forms, bright colours, and potential for psychological impact, he created a format in which he could paint with complete freedom. James Ensor is considered to be an innovator in 19th-century art. Although he stood apart from other artists of his time, he significantly influenced such 20th-century artists as Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wols, and many expressionist and surrealist painters of the 20th century.
Very Good in VG dust jacket preserved under mylar wrap.
1960, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. dust jacket), 166 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arts Inc. / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this, the first and only comprehensive collection of Grosz' works ever published in the English-language, by Arts Inc. in New York, 1960. It presents the paintings and drawings of his two worlds—Germany after World War I, and the America of New York, Cape Cod and Huntington, Long Island—in all their fascinating variety and complexity. Many of these, especially from the artist's American period, are published here for the first time. Illustrated in colour and b/w. Known for his politically charged paintings and caricatural depictions of Berlin life in the 1920s, included are not only those items which fully reveal his familiar, passionate, social-protest artistry, but also works which for pure draftsmanship rank him with the masters. An essay by Grosz himself illuminates brilliantly the philosophy behind his works, particularly those of his later, American, period. Includes a bibliography, catalogue of plates, biography, memoirs, autobiography, introduction by Ruth Berenson and Norbert Muhlen. Edited By Herbert Bittner.
Long out-of-print and the less common English-language edition, good copy with some wear, tanning, good dust-jacket with a few small chips and tears.