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
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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.
2018, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 13.7 x 18.8 cm
Published by
The Song Cave / New York
$36.00 - Out of stock
On the 50th anniversary of its publication, The Song Cave has published the first English translation of Francis Ponge's Nioque of the Early-Spring. Ostensibly a book written to honor the season itself and the cycle of time, upon its release in France in May 1968, these notes took on a greater metaphorical meaning within this context, addressing the need for new beginnings and revolution.
Translated by Jonathan Larson.
Francis Ponge (1899-1988) was a French essayist and poet. Influenced by surrealism, he developed a form of prose poem, minutely examining everyday objects. During the Second World War, Ponge joined the French Resistance. He also worked for the National Committee of Journalists, and was literary and artistic director of the communist weekly newspaper L'Action. He left the Communist Party in 1947. From 1952 to 1967 he held a professorship at the Alliance Française in Paris, and was a visiting professor at Barnard College and Columbia University in the United States. Awards made to Ponge include the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Académie française's French National Poetry Prize, and the Grand prix of the Société des gens de lettres, and was a Commandeur of the Légion d'honneur. For the last 20 years of his life Ponge was reclusive, living at his country house in Le Bar-sur-Loup, where he died at the age of 89.
Jonathan Larson, poet and translator, was born in 1984. Nioque of the Early-Spring is his first full-length translation.
2006, Polish
Softcover, 95 pages, 18.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
$70.00 - Out of stock
Scarce Polish monograph on the work of Polish painter and member of the Krakow Group, Tadeusz Brzozowski (1918-1987). Profusely illustrated in colour throughout with Brzozowski's incredible paintings, alongside text by Polish art historian Wawrzyniec Brzozowski (b. 1953). Includes portraits, biography and bibliography.
Tadeusz Brzozowski (1918–1987) was a polish painter who studied art at Krakow's Academy of Fine Arts from 1936 and continued during the World War II occupation of Poland at the Kunstgewerbeschule (1940-42). Shortly after graduating, he became a teacher himself. He was a member of the Krakow Group, and also a member of the international group known as Phases, centred around French poet and art critic Edouard Jaguer's revue of the same name, which brought together painters working in Surrealism and non-geometric, aggressive, lyrical abstraction. Highly revered in Poland, Tadeusz Brzozowski received international success since the 1950s, with works in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Brzozowski twice represented Poland at the Sao Paulo Biennale (1959, 1975) and once at the Venice Biennale (1962). A retrospective exhibition of the artist's paintings and drawings was held at the National Museum in Warsaw in 1997.
Wawrzyniec Brzozowski (b. 1953, Krakow) is an award-winning Polish translator of French-language literature and art historian. He translated works by authors such as Alfred Jarry, Georges Perec, Marcel Proust, and the diaries of King Stanisław August Poniatowski (originally written in French).
Fine - Very Good copy.
2019, English
Hardcover, 207 pages, 19 x 28 cm
Published by
Art and Theory / Norrköpings Konstmuseum
$82.00 - In stock -
In the heyday of modernism, the Swedish artist Greta Knutson (1899-1983) was a respected member of the avant-garde in Paris. She was married to one of its most famous proponents, Tristan Tzara, and stayed on in France for the rest of her life. Although her exhibitions were favourably reviewed by her contemporaries, Greta Knutson's body of work has never been given the attention it deserves. In this timely publication, Martin Sundberg delves into the archives in an attempt to paint a more complete picture of the artist's life and work. She was a versatile draughtsman, painter, sculptor and writer who was influenced by her times but always sought to develop her own approach independently of the trends. Her creative output was prolific and is here presented comprehensively for the first time in this lavishly illustrated hardcover volume.
1986, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 14 x 20.4 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$42.00 - In stock -
Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality. Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective. He challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily Bronte to Sade, from St. Therese to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr. Kinsey; and the subjects he covers include prostitution, mythical ecstasy, cruelty, and organized war. Investigating desire prior to and extending beyond the realm of sexuality, he argues that eroticism is "a psychological quest not alien to death."
"... one of the most original and unsettling of those thinkers who, in the wake of Sade and Nietzsche, have confronted the possibility of thought in a world that has lost its myth of transcendence." - Peter Brooks, New York Times Book Review
"Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century." - Michel Foucault
Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon who wrote essays, novels, and poems exploring philosophical and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights published more of Bataille's works including The Impossible, The Tears of Eros, and Story of the Eye.
1975, French
Softcover, 170 pages, 27 x 21cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais / Paris
$55.00 - Out of stock
First printing of this comprehensive and profusely illustrated catalogue produced to accompany the survey major exhibition of the work of German artist Max Ernst, at Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais, in Paris in 1975.
Designed in landscape form, this curious and very generous catalogue is illustrated throughout with colour and black and white reproductions of Ernst's paintings, drawings, sculptures, collages, frottage, graphics, etchings, etc., running chronologically and featuring columns of autobiographical testimonies and theoretical writings of Max Ernst, memories of friends, poetry, reflections, and correspondences with other artists, their dedicated artworks/portraits, writings by critics, writers or other artists (Tristan Tzara, Hans Bellmer, Robert Motherwell, Hans Arp, Paul Eluard, Patrick Waldberg, Benjamin Péret, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Lebel, Dorothea Tanning, Hans Richter, Georges Bataille, Herny Miler, and many others), etc. set in parallel, relating to reproductions of his work, social photographs, and other imagery. Also features a bibliography, list of works, and texts by Werner Spies and others. Still one of the best catalogues on the artist. All texts are in their original French.
Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism.
Rubbed covers otherwise Very Good throughout.
1983, French / English
Hardcover (clothbound, w. dust jacket), 192 pages, 30.4 x 21.3 cm
Published by
Philippe Sers Éditeur / Paris
$420.00 - Out of stock
Man Ray "Objets de Mon Affection" is the original and only Catalogue Raisonné of Man Ray's sculptures and objects.
"The Object of my affection
Is to change complexion
From Pink, to rosey red...
"In whatever form it is finally presented: by a drawing, by a painting, by a photograph, or by the object itself in its original dimensions, it is designed to amuse, bewilder, annoy or to inspire reflection, but not to arouse admiration for any technical exellcence usually sought in other works of art." (Hollywood, September, 1944) - Man Ray
Wonderful first printing of this truly magnificent and very collectable Man Ray book. "Objets de Mon Affection" was first published in 1983 by Philippe Sers Éditeur, Paris. The book is page after page of Man Ray's objects, sculptures, assemblages, readymades. Amongst the well-known objects in here are countless reproductions of never before published sculptural works. This book includes a Catalogue Raisonné of Man Rays magnificent, poetic, humorous and provocative objects, alongside hand-written captions, reflections/anecdotes by Man Ray in English and French, and accompanying texts (in French) by Jean-Hubert Martin, Rosalind Krauss, and Brigitte Hermann. Also includes photography of exhibitions held by Man Ray, as well as domestic displays and studios documentation of his many objects. A really fantastic book, all wrapped up in bright pink cloth covers and dust-jacket - recommended to any fan of Man Ray's work.
2013, English / German
Hardcover, 660 pages, 13 × 23.5 cm
Published by
Edition Patrick Frey / Zürich
$199.00 - Out of stock
HR Giger worked in the Shepperton Studios near London from February to November 1978, creating the figures and sets for the film Alien (1979) directed by Ridley Scott. The film became an international success, earning Giger an Oscar. In the transcribed Alien Diaries, published here for the first time as a facsimile, HR Giger describes his work in the studios. He writes, sketches, and takes photographs with his Polaroid SX70. With brutal honesty, sarcasm and occasional despair, Giger describes what it is like working for the film industry and how he struggles against all odds — be it the stinginess of producers or the sluggishness of his staff — to see his designs become reality. The Alien Diaries (in German transcription with an English translation) show a little-known personal side of the artist HR Giger and offer an unusual, detailed glimpse into the making of a movie classic through the eyes of a Swiss artist. The book contains almost completely unpublished material, including drawings, Polaroids showing the monster coming to life, and several still shots from the plentiful film material that Giger took in Shepperton.
2021, English
Hardcover, 260 pages, 21.6 x 26.2 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$95.00 - In stock -
The first ever overview on Erna Rosenstein, surrealist, poet and creator of mesmerizing dreamscapes in painting and assemblage.
This is the first ever English-language monograph on the vast and complex oeuvre of Erna Rosenstein (1913-2003), a prolific artist whose varied output was informed by her experience as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust. Published on the occasion of the eponymous, upcoming exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York, and edited and with a text by exhibition curator Alison Gingeras, this book serves as an introduction to Rosenstein and her story. Alongside an extensive plates section, poems by Rosenstein are included in the book, as well as a special insert reproducing a fairy tale authored and illustrated by the artist. Art historian Dorota Jarecka has also contributed an essay, and the book additionally includes Rosenstein’s own narrative testimony of the war in Poland.
Erna Rosenstein (1913-2003) was an artist, writer and poet born in Lviv, a city that was located in Poland during her youth and is now in Ukraine. She was raised in Kraków, the daughter of a judge. Resisting her family’s desire that she follow her father into law, she studied art and belonged to a leftist art movement known as the Kraków Group. In 1938, she visited Paris and saw the International Surrealist Exposition organized by André Breton, which had a profound impact on her work. After the Nazi invasion of Poland, she and her parents returned to Lviv, where they were confined to the ghetto. The family managed to escape to Warsaw, but her parents were murdered in 1942 in the forest outside Ogrodniki, Poland; Rosenstein herself was gravely wounded but survived and used various assumed identities to remain hidden for the duration of the war. After the liberation, she remained in Warsaw and returned to making art, marrying the literary critic Artur Sandauer. Through continuing political adversity, Rosenstein remained at the forefront of the Polish avant-garde for the rest of her life, participating in several seminal exhibitions and eventually receiving national acclaim in her native country, though her work is only now gaining recognition outside Eastern Europe.
1974, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 452 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Oxford University Press / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the legendary Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde by P. Adams Sitney, published by Oxford University Press in 1974.
Critics hailed Visionary Film as the most complete work written on the exciting, often puzzling, and always controversial genre of American avant-garde film. This book has remained the standard text on American avant-garde film since the publication of its first edition in 1974. "Without question it is the first such book on the avant-garde film - the first one that probes this field in such depth, with such perspective and vision, with such insight and intelligence." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
From the book jacket:
The first book to provide a coherent view of the avant-garde film tradition in America, this is also the first book to assess in depth the work of the major film-makers in this tradition. Twenty-four film-makers are fully discussed and many films of each are analyzed, including Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, Jonas Mekas's Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, and Michael Snow's Wavelength. Liberal use of original and previously unpublished documents and statements by the film-makers themselves shows the theoretical contributions of these film-makers to the general theory of film and adds richness and weight to the study. Sixty-six still photographs from films further enhance the value of the text.
P. Adams Sitney's approach is historical as well as analytical. He relates the avant~garde film tradition to a larger native American tradition encompassing all the arts: that of visionary romanticism. He also connects it to the European avant-garde film of the 1920s, seeing the origin and development of a subjective cinema (and the forms it generates) in the kind of responses that the independent film-makers of the late 1940s made to their Dadaist and Surrealist sources. Sitney shows that far from being a chaos of different styles, the American avant-garde film tradition consists of an ordered progression of types: the 'trance' film, the 'mythopoeic' film, the 'graphic' film, the 'lyrical' film, the 'diary' film, and the 'structural' film. With hundreds of independent films being made each year, with the increased acceptance of avant-garde films by the nation's film archives and the academic community, the need for this kind of study has long been felt. It is sure to be widely read and discussed.
About the author:
P. Adams Sitney is Co-Director of the Anthology Film Archives in New York City and teaches cinema at New York University. He has also lectured extensively on film at museums of modern art, universities, and cinematheques in Europe and in South America. An editor of Film Culture magazine, he is the editor of the Film Culture Reader.
Chapters: 1. Meshes of the Afternoon 2. Ritual and Nature 3. The Potted Psalm 4. The Magus 5. From Trance to Myth 6. The Lyrical Film 7. Major Mythopoeia 8. Absolute Animation 9. The Graphic Cinema: European Perspectives 10. Apocalypses and Picaresques 11. Recovered Innocence 12. Structural Film 13. Notes 14. Index
2013, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 19.6 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$46.00 - Out of stock
In a novel of extremes, whose disgust with “things as they are” includes the whole idea of “novels”, Michel Leiris pursues his heroine, Aurora, through a visionary landscape shot through with catastrophes — and his lucid yet baroque language, with its incredible descriptions and ever more extravagant metaphors, is only just able to keep pace. Leiris himself, looking back on this novel from his youth, exactly described its tone:
… despite the “black” or “frenetic” style of its blustering prose, what I like about this work is the appetite it expresses for an unattainable purity, the faith it places in the untamed imagination, the horror it manifests with regard to any kind of fixity — in fact, the way almost every page of it refuses to accept that human condition against which some will never cease to rebel, however reasonably society may be ordered.
Aurora is one of the high-points of literary Surrealism, and Leiris was an early member of the group. Close to Georges Bataille, Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre, he was a pivotal figure in post-war Paris. A director of the Musée de l’Homme, Leiris wrote important studies in the fields of ethnology and anthropology, as well as a sequence of autobiographical works regarded as classics of modern French literature.
Aurora translated and introduced by Anna Warby, Cardinal Point translated by Terry Hale.
2019, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$48.00 - In stock -
That the nude painted by Manet (in a painting so conceptually new that it created a scandal in its day) achieves so much truth through such a minor detail, that ribbon that modernizes Olympia and, even more than a beauty mark or a patch of freckles would, renders her more precise and more immediately visible, making her a woman with ties to a particular milieu and era: that is what lends itself to reflection, if not divagation! - from The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat
In The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat, Michel Leiris investigates what Lydia Davis has called the "expressive power of fetishism": how a seemingly irrelevant aesthetic detail may cause the eruption of sublimity within the mundane.
Written in 1981, toward the end of Leiris's life, The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat serves as a coda to his autobiographical masterwork, The Rules of the Game, taking the form of both shorter fragments (poems, memory scraps, notes) that are as formally disarming as the fetishistic experiences they describe, and longer essays, more exhaustive critical meditations on writing, apprehension, and the nature of the modern. Rooted in remembrance, devoted to the kaleidoscopic intricacies of wordplay, Leiris draws from his own aesthetic experiences as writer and spectator to explore the fetish that "exposes and disarms the sinister passage of time, "conferring" an undeniable realness upon the whole by essentially causing it to crystallize in a reality it would never have possessed if that sturdy fragment hadn't acted as bait."
Foreword by Marc Augé
Translated by Christine Pichini
"A necessary and enlightening sequel to Leiris's earlier extended explorations of his mind and heart, of writing, life, and art, The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat allows us to continue in his stimulating company as he poses questions in all frankness and humility that are as fresh and personal, even politically timely, today as when he wrote them. This long overdue, fine translation by Christine Pichini recreates with grace and ease Leiris's often labyrinthine sentences--no less complex than the thoughts they express. A pleasure to read." - Lydia Davis, Author of Can't and Won't and translator of Michel Leiris's Rules of the Game, Volumes 1-3
Michel Leiris (1901–1990) was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer. Part of the Surrealist group in Paris, Leiris became a key member of the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and head of research in ethnography at the CNRS.
1973, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket in slipcase w. obi strip), 80 pages, 32 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kawade Shobo Shinsha / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this wonderful 1976 slip-cased hardcover monograph on German artist Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, considered one of the most important representatives of Art Brut or Outsider Art. Bound in green cloth and wrapped in illustrated original dust-jacket, this heavily illustrated book surveys Schröder-Sonnenstern's incredible paintings and drawings through beautiful colour and monochrome gravure reproductions, with alongside various texts, biography, bibliography and portrait of the artist. Published as volume 7 of the deluxe La Septième Face du Dé series by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in Japan in the 1970s, all later re-printed in the 2000s. All editions now out-of-print.
Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern was a draftsman, painter and poet-philosopher. Born in 1892 in East Prussia, one of thirteen children, all of whom apart from one other died shortly after birth. He was sent to a number of reform schools due to accusations of theft and violent behaviour and then, at the age of twenty-six, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a sanatorium. His experiences as a child contributed to his lifelong hatred of authority. One year later he showed up in Berlin, where he occupied himself with occultism, divination and healing magnetism. He founded a sect and distributed its income in the form of bread rolls to poor children, earning him the title "Schrippenfürst of Schöneberg". He created the name Sonnenstern (English: Sun Star) for himself while working as a con-artist, posing as a Quack doctor in "natural health", calling himself Professor Dr. Eliot Gnass von Sonnenstern. This career path was cut off by the Nazis' interdiction of occult practices, and after being confined in psychiatric institutes and in a penal camp, Schröder-Sonnenstern reemerged in 1944, scavenging firewood in the bombed-out German capital. Only in his late fifties, in 1949, did he begin to draw, using coloured pencils to create allegorical grotesques stocked with a personal iconography. Although his art was rarely shown, he was championed in Surrealist and art brut circles; Jean Dubuffet and Hans Bellmer were among his admirers, and a few drawings were included in Marcel Duchamp and André Breton's 1959 "Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme" in Paris. The demand for his pictures by collectors and gallerists rose rapidly and he resorted to employing assistants to produce his work for him. His success was short-lived when he began to paint less and less and became the victim of counterfeiting cliques by his assistants, destroying his position in the art market. He became increasingly dependent on alcohol following the death, in 1964, of his long-time companion, Martha Möller whom he called Aunt Martha. He died almost forgotten and impoverished in 1982 in Berlin.
Good-Very Good copy. General wear to protective slip-case and publisher's obi-strip. Book with light spotting to the back cover otherwise Very Good dust jacket and internally perfectly preserved, crisp and clean throughout.
1983, Japanese
Hardcover (clothbound w. dustjacket), 152 pages, 20.5 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Orion Press / Tokyo
$160.00 - Out of stock
Rare, exquisitely designed and produced book dedicated entirely to the photography of the German artist Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902 – 23 February 1975), best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. "Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he'd been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925)."
Produced in French by Editions Filipacchi, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Musee National D'art Moderne in Paris in 1983, this very scarce Japanese printing (produced and printed in Japan that same year) features a different cover, with translations to the Japanese language of the introductory essay and texts. Densely illustrated with amazing and beautifully printed colour and black and white photography of Bellmer's dolls, many studies of the female nude, and photography of objects and sculptural assemblages, this book is a wonderful volume capturing an important Surrealist visionary of our time through his stunning photography.
Very good copy in dust-jacket, age tanning to edges/cover,
wear/small chipping to jacket corners.
2012, English / Spanish
Hardcover, 160 pages, 24 x 28 cm
Published by
RM / Barcelona
$80.00 - Out of stock
Remedios Varo: The Mexican Years offers a definitive survey of the life and work of a singularly appealing and mysterious Surrealist painter. Born and raised in Spain, Remedios Varo received her earliest training in Madrid before fleeing the Spanish Civil War in 1937 to join Surrealist circles in Paris. The outbreak of World War II forced her to take refuge in Mexico, where she remained until her untimely death in 1963, and where she created her most enduring work. Known as one of the three “brujas” (witches) active in the Mexico City art milieu, Varo shared an interest in esotericism with fellow painter Leonora Carrington and a range of interests in science, philosophy and the literature of German Romanticism with the photographer Kati Horna. For some ten years, from the mid–1950s until her death in 1963, Varo devoted herself to creating an extraordinary dreamlike oeuvre, on the threshold between mysticism and modernity. Her beautifully crafted images of medieval interiors, occult workshops and androgynous figures engaged in alchemical pursuits evoke the eerie allegories of Hieronymus Bosch, esoteric engravings and the charm and lure of fairytales. This catalogue includes a complete illustrated chronology with never before published images and describes Varo’s role in the Mexican Surrealist movement and her relations with Luis Buñuel, Octavio Paz, Benjamin Péret, Alice Rahon, Wolfgang Paalen and many others.
Texts by introductory writer Masayo Nonaka, curator of the exhibition "Women Surrealists in Mexico" and author of numerous books on Mexican surrealism.
Remedios Varo (1908–1963) fled the Spanish Civil War and then World War II to settle in Mexico where she helped establish a Mexican Surrealist movement and painted visions that combined modernism with mysticism. She was married to the leading French Surrealist Benjamin Péret.
2020, English
Hardcover, 432 pages, 25 x 30 cm
Published by
Hirmer / Münich
$100.00 - Out of stock
Comprehensive hardcover catalogue published to accompany the first major presentation of women surrealist artists at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk. This groundbreaking exhibition shows that women played a more important and numerous role in Surrealism than in any other artistic avant-garde movement. Mostly connected through their association with Surrealist co-founder André Breton, Surrealism nurtured a prolific group of women artists who actively took part in the seminal exhibitions and publications of the day and expanded the formulations of the movement, taking on different roles in search for a (new) model of female and artistic identity. This expansive exhibition and catalogue revisits their diverse Imaginaries and underlines the consistency of their social and even political positions, spanning networks from Europe/UK to the US and Mexico.
“On the whole, the [Surrealist] movement in many ways strikes as decidedly ‘feminine’, since it rejected all traditionally masculine, patriarchal, and imperialist structures,” notes curator Dr. Ingrid Pfeiffer. This scholarly exhibition reveals how the movement was shaped by many more female artists than art historians have hitherto recognized.
Profusely illustrated throughout with essays by Patricia Allmer, Tere Arcq, Kirsten Degel, Heike Eipeldauer, Annabelle Görgen-Lammers, Rebecca Herlemann, Karoline Hille, Silvano Levy, Alyce Mahon, Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Laura Neve, Ingrid Pfeiffer, and Gabriel Weisz Carrington as well as biographies of the individual artists.
Artists featured : Eileen Agar, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Rachel Baes, Louise Bourgeois, Emmy Bridgwater, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Maya Deren, Germaine Dulac, Nusch Éluard, Leonor Fini, Graverol, Valentine Hugo, Frida Kahlo, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Greta Knutson, Jacqueline Lamba, Sheila Legge, Dora Maar, Emila Medková, Lee Miller, Suzanne Muzard, Meret Oppenheim, Valentine Penrose, Alice Rahon, Edith Rimmington, Kay Sage, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jeannette Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, Elsa Thoresen, Bridget Tichenor, Toyen, Remedios Varo, Unica Zürn
1966, German
Softcover, 52 pages, 20 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Haus am Waldsee / Berlin
$65.00 - Out of stock
Gorgeous first edition catalogue from 1966 published on the occasion of the exhibition "Phantastische Figuration" at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin. Featuring the work of Paul Wunderlich, Hans Bellmer, Gerhard Altenbourg, Richard Oelze, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm), this beautifully printed catalogue is illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with biographies and portraits for each exhibiting artist. With a foreword by Edouard Roditi.
Fine copy in stiff silkscreened covers.
1970, German
Softcover, 36 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerie Wolfgang Gurlitt / Münich
$55.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition "Phantastische Malerei" at Galerie Wolfgang Gurlitt in Münich in 1970. An rare and illuminating overview of German fantastic and Surrealist painters and graphic artists, many seldom documented in print. Illustrated throughout with examples of work by all exhibiting artists alongside a short bio and catalogue of exhibited works. Artists : Bele Bachem, Karlheinz Bauer, Gisela Breitling, Peter Collien, Edgar Ende, Ernst Fuchs, Thomas Häfner, Siegbert Hahn, Claus-Dietrich Hentschel, Siegfried Klapper, Gusti Knight-Stinnes, Karl Korab, Hans Kramer, Anton Krejcar, Wolfgang Lenz, Wolfgang Lettl, Helmut Lincke, Reny Lohner, Franz Luby, Pit Morell, Andreas Nottebohm, Franz Radziwill, C. Walter Rauh, Kurt Regschek, Heinz Rose, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Bernard Schultze, Rainer Schwarz, Manfred Sillner, Helmut Ullrich, Ursula, Mac Zimmermann, Rudolf Zündel.
Very Good copy with tanning to edges and light spine wear.
2002, Japanese
Softcover, 307 pages, 259 x 180 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tokyo Shimbun / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this scarce, visually generous Japanese catalogue that takes a deep look into the photographic work of Man Ray. Published on the occasion the exhbition 'Photographies de Man Ray' that opened at the Bunkamura Museum and then traveled to three other museums in Japan in 2002-03. Densely packed with 559 beautifully reproduced photographs, the well known and the seldom seen, catalogued into major subjects, often thematically sequenced. From his prolific, experimental portraiture, nudes, fashion, still-life, landscapes, and work within the Surrealist and Dada movements, this heavy volume provides an exhaustive study of this great photographer. Man Ray is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs," and many other experimental processes he brought into the photographic studio, all featured herein. Includes an illustrated biography, bibliography, catalogue listing and texts in Japanese and French.
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Man Ray was a renowned representative of avant-garde photography in the 20th century and is considered as the pioneer of Surrealist photography. A major contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media including drawings, objects and films, but considered himself a painter above all. one of the most significant contributors to the Dada and Surrealist movements, and to modern art in general.
Very Good-Fine copy.
2000, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
Published by
Creation Books / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
Out-of-print English edition of the erotic masterpiece Philosophy in the Bedroom (La philosophie dans le boudoir), a 1795 book by the Marquis de Sade written in the form of a dramatic dialogue. Though initially considered a work of pornography, the book has come to be considered a socio-political drama and perhaps the most representative of the Marquis de Sade's work and philosophy on religion and morality. Dedicated to "voluptuaries of all ages, of every sex", it tells of a young virgin ruthlessly stripped of virtue and schooled in the ways of sexual perversion and libertine philosophy. This revised adn expanded edition is coupled with The Lusts of the Libertines, a brand new, unexpurgated and explicit translation of the 447 complex, criminal and murderous lusts of the Libertines as documented by de Sade in his accursed atrocity Bible The 120 Days of Sodom, a catalogue of debaucheries, cruelties and perversions as yet unequalled in print.
Taken from the forward by James Havoc: The Marquis de Sade (1740 - 1814) was a self-proclaimed libertine. His doctrine of libertinage as expounded in "Philosophy in the Boudoir" - his masterpiece - now reads like a blueprint for those manifestos drawn up will over a century later by Andre Breton; indeed "Philosophy in the Boudoir" has often been regarded as being amongst the first Surrealist texts - the others also being works by De Sade. In the course of this book - erotic, comical, and terrifyingly bleak in turn - he contrives to heap scorn on Christianity, God, and the Church, religion in general, history, marriage and the nuclear family, morality, all love other than sexual love, faith, hope and charity, parenthood, vaginal sex; i.e. all forms of humanity and virtue. At the same time, he advocates atheism, murder and reflexive crimes, torture, cruelty, abortion, all kind of sexual perversion, incest, adultery, self-abuse, ad infinitum; his sexually violent visions mark him as a precursor of modern psychology.
The modern imagination starts here.
Very Good copy with general light wear.
2018, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$33.00 - Out of stock
While the reputation of Remedios Varo (1908-63) the surrealist painter is now well established, Remedios Varo the writer has yet to be fully discovered. This volume brings together the painter's collected writings and includes an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances, dream accounts, notes for unrealised projects, a project for a theatre piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, exercises in surrealist automatic writing and prose poem commentaries on her paintings.
Remedios Varo Uranga (1908 – 1963) was a Spanish surrealist artist. Born in Anglès (north of Catalonia), Spain in 1908, she studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. Varo spent her formative years between France and Barcelona and was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement. The summer of 1935 marked Varo's formal invitation into Surrealism when French surrealist Marcel Jean arrived in Barcelona. While still married to her first husband Gerardo Lizarraga, Varo met her second partner, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, in Barcelona. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris with Péret leaving Lizarraga behind (1937). It was through Peret that Remedios Varo met André Breton and the Surrealist circle, which included Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, and Max Ernst among others. Shortly after arriving in France, Varo took part in the International Surrealist exhibitions in Paris and in Amsterdam in 1938. She was forced into exile from Paris during the German occupation of France and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941 when the Mexican president, Lázaro Cardenas, made it a policy to welcome Spanish and European refugees. In Mexico, she met native artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but her strongest ties were to other exiles and expatriates, notably the English painter Leonora Carrington and the French pilot and adventurer, Jean Nicolle. However, because Mexican muralism still dominated the country's art scene, surrealism was not generally well received. She worked as an assistant to Marc Chagall with the design of the costumes for the production of the ballet Aleko, which premiered in Mexico City in 1942. In 1947, Péret returned to Paris, and Varo traveled to Venezuela, living there for two years. She returned to Mexico and began her third and last important relationship with Austrian refugee Walter Gruen, who had endured concentration camps before escaping Europe. Gruen believed fiercely in Varo, and he gave her the economic and emotional support that allowed her to fully concentrate on her painting. In 1955, Varo had her first solo exhibition at the Galería Diana in Mexico City. Buyers were put on waiting lists for her work. Even Diego Rivera was supportive. In 1960, her representative, Juan Martín, opened his own gallery and showed her work there, and opened a second in 1962. Only a year after that opening, at the height of her career, she died from a heart attack in Mexico City. Her work is well known in Mexico, but not as commonly known throughout the rest of the world.
2012, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 15 x 25 cm
Published by
Getty Trust Publications / Los Angeles
$56.00 - In stock -
Annette Leddy and Donna Conwell
Introduction by Dawn Ades
“Farewell to Surrealism” is the title of a 1943 essay by Austrian artist-critic Wolfgang Paalen published in the inaugural issue of the journal Dyn. The journal was founded by Paalen and an international group of writers and artists taking refuge in Mexico City during World War II, including Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Eva Sulzer. Several of them had been part of André Breton’s Parisian surrealist circle in the 1930s. When they arrived in Mexico, they were still proponents of surrealism. Two years later, however, this group had broken with Breton and set out to define a new direction for art. Their vision coalesced in the pages of Dyn.
While recent scholarship has treated individual artists in the circle, this study is the first to examine the new aesthetic found in Dyn itself. Transformed by the mysterious pre-Columbian artifacts, distressed by the failure of political ideology, and inspired by scientific discoveries of the day, these artists played a critical but under-recognized role in the transition from surrealism to abstract expressionism. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition of the same name on view at the Getty Research Institute October 2, 2012 to February 17, 2013.
Annette Leddy is a senior cataloguer and a consulting curator at the Getty Research Institute. Donna Conwell is an associate curator at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California. Dawn Ades is a semi-retired professor at the University of Essex.
2019, English
Softcover, 278 pages, 16 x 24 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$90.00 - In stock -
The extraordinary artist and intellectual Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959) moved too fast for art history, which is only now beginning to catch up with his many accomplishments. Born in Vienna, he moved to Paris in 1929, where he affiliated with the Surrealists. The artist’s original contribution to Surrealism were his so-called ‘Fumage pictures’. In these he painted hallucinatory motifs using candle smoke, some of which he continued associatively with oil paint, others he left in their own right. A member of the Abstraction-Création group in the mid 1930s, Paalen’s pictures and texts provided both support and inspiration for young representatives of American Abstract Expressionist painting such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. He went into exile in Mexico in 1939 (at the invitation of Frida Kahlo), where he promoted the surrealist cause and edited the influential art magazine DYN. After the war he moved to San Francisco, forming the Dynaton Group with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican.
This beautiful catalogue is dedicated to all of the artist’s creative periods. His long-standing interest in collecting and researching the indigenous art of British Columbia and Mexico as well as his literary work are also illuminated in more detail. Includes texts by Dawn Ades, Colin Browne, Timur Alexander ElRafie, Markus Hallensleben, Christian Kloyber, Andreas Neufert, Stella Rollig, Franz Smola.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Wolfgang Paalen (1905–1959): An Austrian Surrealist in Paris and Mexico at Belvedere, Vienna (4 October 2019 – 19 January 2020).
2011, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$34.00 - In stock -
Translated and with an introduction by Simon Watson Taylor.
Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, yet Exact Change's edition is the first U.S. publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author.
Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, “a mythology of the modern.” The book uses the city of Paris as a stage or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: café menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire.
André Breton wrote of this work: “no one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city. . . .”
1971, French
Softcover, 48 pages, 22 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Orangerie des Tuileries / Paris
$35.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this lovely, simple catalogue published in 1971 on the occasion of Max Ernst's 80th anniversary exhibition at Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris. 40 works illustrated in b/w with some colour. Full catalogue of exhibited works.
Good copy. Some age spotting to both covers, otherwise very good throughout.