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.
1969, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 92 pages, 20 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jean-Jacques Pauvert / Paris
$69.00 - In stock -
Excellent copy of the first monograph ever published on the work of Pierre Molinier, published by the great Jean-Jacques Pauvert in Paris, 1969. The only book published on his work while Molinier was alive. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with Molinier's fetishistic gender-bending paintings, photomontages, drawings, and much more. Features texts by Andre Breton and Emmanuelle Arsan, also bibliography and biography. Texts in French.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap.
1979, English / French
Softcover (french folds), 78 pages, 27 x 21.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bernard Letu Editeur / Geneva
$55.00 - In stock -
First 1979 edition of this monograph on French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel), Pierre Molinier (1900—1976), published by Bernard Letu Editeur in Geneva. With accompanying text by Egyptian-French Surrealist author Joyce Mansour, this book is a retrospective survey of Molinier's provocative gender-bending paintings and drawings, illustrated throughout in colour and b/w. Texts in English and French.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy.
2001, English
Hardcover (w. galssine dust jacket), 254 pages, 22.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California / Berkeley
International Centre of Photography / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
First 2001 hardcover edition of Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, Therese Lichtenstein's highly original book studying the the life-size, adolescent-girl dolls created by German artist Hans Bellmer in the 1930s.
Disturbing and controversial, Bellmer's dolls with their uncanny, fragmented bodies and eroticized poseswere just as shocking during Bellmer's time as they are today. Until now there has been little available in English about Bellmer's dolls, and Lichtenstein's book will be welcomed for its fresh interpretation of the artist's work and his place in European modernism. Eighty striking photographs accompany the text. Working during a time when Nazism was on the rise, Bellmer created several dolls with fragmented bodies that could be dismantled and arranged in various configurations. Using a narrative format, he then photographed the dolls in a range of grotesque, often sexual, positions. The images he conveyed were of death and decay, abuse and longing, in stark contrast to Nazism's mythic utopian celebration of adolescence.Lichtenstein interprets Bellmer's complex expressions of eroticism as a protest against the Nazis and also against his father, a cold and repressive Nazi sympathizer. At the same time, she says, by hyperbolically flaunting a passive femininity in a theatrical manner, Bellmer's images allow us to consider how cultural representations can affect the formation of identity and alternative possibilities.
"Behind Closed Doors reveals the complex structure behind these photographs of violated female adolescence, a structure in which sadism, masochism, hermaphroditism, fetishism, utopianism, and nostalgia all play a role. Above all, Lichtenstein's study makes clear the political aspect of these transgressive images: the way in which they served to question and undermine the contemporary authoritarian Nazi image of sexual 'normalcy' by recourse to a violent return of the repressed." -Linda Nochlin, author of Representing Women "Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer is a compelling gathering of the narratives around psychoanalysis, visual culture, biology, and gender. Therese Lichtenstein rigorously examines Bellmer's picturing of the body as the site of desire, confusion, and sudden disaster, and in doing so produces a telling tale of history's secrets and lies."—Barbara Kruger
Therese Lichtenstein has taught art history and museum studies at New York University, Rice University, and Mount Holyoke College.
Very Good copy in Good original glassine dust jacket with some light wear.
2024, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 23 x 17 cm
Published by
Scheidegger und Spiess / Zürich
$90.00 - In stock -
A groundbreaking, richly illustrated book on Hannah Höch’s montages in the context of film and the visual culture of Modernism. Sheds light for the first time on Hannah Höch’s significance as a pioneering artist to confront the industrial age’s flood of images.
Hannah Höch (1889-1978) moved between differing worlds: as an editorial assistant with a major Berlin-based magazine publisher, and as the only woman who could hold her own in the German capital's vibrant Dada scene of the 1920s. Her works dissected a world marked by the catastrophe of the Great War and an intense consumer culture, and reassembled it in revolutionary, poetic, and often ironic ways. Scissors and glue were the weapons of her art of montage, of which she was a coinventor.
Cutting and montage also shaped film, still a new medium in the 1920s, which strongly influenced Höch's art: she understood her assembled pictures as static films. This richly illustrated and expertly annotated book explores comprehensively for the first time Höch's life-long fascination with film and the visual culture of the modern industrial age. Covering her entire career, It demonstrates how montage evolved in a field of tension between artistic experimentation, commercial exploitation, and political appropriation. A text on photomontage by Höch, written in 1948, and a text-collage on the history of montage, in which major protagonists of Modernism and Avant-garde have their say, round out this volume.
Contributors:
Martin Waldmeier is a curator at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.
Nina Zimmer is director of the Kunstmuseum Bern and its affiliate Zentrum Paul Klee.
1997, Japanese / English / Spanish
Softcover, 152 pages (plus ephemera), 26.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Tokyo Shimbun / Tokyo
$150.00 - In stock -
Seldom seen, scarce late 1990s monographic catalogue on the great Leonora Carrington, published on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition at The Tokyo Station Gallery in 1997. Profusely illustrated throughout with Carrington's fantastic paintings, with illustrated history, list of exhibited works, exhibition history, bibliography and essays in English, Japanese and Spanish. This fine copy, in brand new condition, comes with inserted advertising for the exhibition. One of the best publications on the artist.
Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011) was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
Leonora Carrington escaped a stultifying, upper class Lancashire childhood to run off away to France with her lover, the German Surrealist artist Max Ernst. After a spell in Paris, she and Ernst settled in the tiny village of Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, where they turned an inhospitable farmhouse into a lived-in art work. It was an idyllic and productive retreat that came to an abrupt end at the outbreak of WW2, with Ernst's arrest by the French as a "hostile alien". After months imprisoned (sharing a cell with fellow-German Surrealist, Hans Bellmer), Ernst was released and again arrested, this time by the Nazi Gestapo as a "degenerate". Devastated and fleeing the Nazis to Spain, Carrington experienced paralyzing anxiety and growing delusions culminating in a final breakdown at the British Embassy in Madrid. Her parents intervened and had her hospitalised. She was given "convulsive therapy" and treated with dangerous drugs. Carrington ran away and sought refuge in the Mexican Embassy. With the help of Renato Leduc, a Mexican Ambassador, Carrington began a new life in Mexico. There she found a new love, had two children, painted profusley, made new friends (most notably the Spanish-Mexican artist Remedios Varo). She lived, and on her own terms. The artist herself preferred not to explain the private visual language of her detailed, dream-like paintings to others, however she used magical realism, alchemy and autobiographical detail and symbolism as subjects. Carrington was interested in presenting female sexuality as she experienced it, rather than as that of male surrealists’ characterization of female sexuality. Carrington’s work of the 1940s is focused on the underlying theme of women’s role in the creative process.
Fine copy, beautifully preserved.
2017, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 14 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Dorothy Project / St. Louis
$38.00 - In stock -
"Her delirious fantasy reveals to us a little of the secret magic of her paintings" - Luis Buñuel
Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life.
Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONORA CARRINGTON collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), THE COMPLETE STORIES captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist's life.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$68.00 - In stock -
An illustrated biography of the pioneering British artist and writer, tracing her life and work through the many places around the world where she lived
The British-born artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) is one of the vanguards in the history of women artists and the history of Surrealism. The interests of this visionary--feminism, ecology, the arcane and the mystical, the interconnectedness of everything--are now shared by many. Challenging the conventions of her time, Carrington abandoned family, society, and England to embrace new experiences and forge a unique artistic style in Europe and the Americas. In this evocative illustrated biography, writer and journalist Joanna Moorhead traces her cousin's footsteps, exploring the artist's life, loves, friendships, and work.
Leading readers on a personal journey across Britain, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Mexico, Surreal Spaces describes the places and experiences that would become etched in Carrington's memory and be echoed, sometimes decades later, in her art and writing--whether her grandmother's kitchen with its giant stove; a remote Cornish hideaway where she holidayed with Max Ernst, Lee Miller, and Man Ray; the Left Bank of Paris; an asylum in Santander, Spain; New York, where she lived among other European exiles; or Mexico City, her final sanctuary. "Houses are really bodies," Carrington wrote in her novella The Hearing Trumpet. "We connect ourselves with walls, roofs and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood streams."
Featuring photographs, drawings, and paintings of the spaces that so richly influenced Carrington's work, Surreal Spaces is an intimate and vivid portrait of a fascinating artist.
1959, English
Softcover (staple bound), 20 pages, 19.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Matthiesen Gallery / London
$110.00 - In stock -
Gorgeous and very rare 1959 Francis Picabia exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the solo retrospective show at The Matthiesen Gallery, London, October—November 1959. A catalogue of 56 works, some illustrated with b/w plates, with accompanying text by André Breton. Includes biography.
Francis Picabia (1879—1953) was a Cuban-French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, typographist and provocateur closely associated with Dada. A friend to fellow iconoclasts Duchamp, Breton, Tzara, and Man Ray, Picabia's discordant, self-contradicting art, in which wispy watercolours, pin-up girls and mechanical pistons could hang side by side, had a clear conviction: to crush distinctions between high and low, elegance and kitsch, and to force us all to the limits of taste. When considering the many styles that Picabia painted in, observers have described his career as "shape-shifting" or "kaleidoscopic". After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. “The Cuban who out-cubed the Cubists”, his highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France, publishing his Dada periodical 391 with Duchamp before denouncing Dada in 1921 in favour of the development of Surrealism. "If you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirts."—Picabia. From 1922, Breton's relaunched Littérature magazine featured cover artwork every issue by Picabia that drew on religious imagery, erotic iconography, and the iconography of games of chance. In 1925, Picabia returned to figurative painting, his "Monster" period, followed by his "Transparencies" series (1927—1930) and his then abhorred pin-up girl/"Nazi porn" paintings, all highly influential on contemporary German painters such as Sigmar Polke. Picabia would soon turn his back on the art establishment altogether.
Very Good copy with light shadow from sticker to top-left of cover, two National Gallery of Victoria stamps.
2018, English
Hardcover (die-cut linen-bound), 64 pages, 22.9 x 29.9 cm
Ed. of 500,
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Small Press / New York
$115.00 - In stock -
Limited to 500 copies, and now out-of-print, Litterature pairs excerpts from Francis Picabia’s (1879–1953) novel Caravanserail with nine drawings and seventeen studies he created for the cover of André Breton’s Litterature journal between 1922 and 1924. This beautifully produced linen-bound book—whose front cover features circular die-cuts derived from one of Picabia’s dice drawings—offers a celebration of subversive play and fluid forms.
Originally produced as potential covers for André Breton's 1920s Surrealist literary journal, Littérature, the twenty-six subversive—at the time, even scandalous—Francis Picabia drawings that are collected in this remarkable new limited edition from Small Press Books had been sealed in an envelope (dated August 8, 1923) and forgotten for decades until Breton's daughter, Aube Breton-Elléouët, unearthed and exhibited them in 2008. Of the original group, only nine of these playfully insurgent works were actually published by Breton. According to a 1922 letter from fellow Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to Breton, American retailers considered Picabia's cover graphics far too salacious to be displayed on their newsstands. Thus Duchamp was forced to become the journal's only American micro-distributor, circulating it among likeminded friends until its demise in 1924.
Edited by Stephanie LaCava. Translated by Lauren Elkin. Design by Eric Wrenn Office.
1973, Japanese
Softcover, 182 pages, 25.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The Geijutsu Seikatsu / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
Magnificent "Doll Love" Special Feature issue of The Geijutsu Seikatsu, one of the leading arts magazines in post-war Japan, with a cover feature shot by Kishin Shinoyama on Japanese doll master Simon Yotsuya. From Hans Bellmer to Hajime Sawatari's doll photography to the Ayakashi Doll Museum shot by Shigeo Anzaï to the metaphysics of "Doll Love" written by the great Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, this issue is filled with photographic features and articles on doll artists, doll museums, western automatons, karakuri dolls... plus a photo feature on Nakamura Utaemon, considered the greatest onnagata (male actors who play female roles in kabuki theatre) of the post-War period ("a divine messenger given to kabuki from heaven"), performing the legendary Japanese ghost story "Yotsuya Kaida", and much much more (Kobayashi Kiyochika, Tadanori Yokoo, Hisako Nishino, Yasufumi Konishi, Yosuke Inoue...). Always a treasure-trove!
Good copy with some wear and creases to covers.
1982/1992, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$60.00 - Out of stock
"Corpse" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, first published in 1982, then re-printed in 1992, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Heavily illustrated with texts in Japanese that look at the theme of death and the dead in the arts, literature, occultism, ancient sciences, philosophy, mythology, poetry, film, crime, and much more. Features John Duncan, Tetsumi Kudo, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Masahisa Fukase, Franz Kafka, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joe Potts (LAFMS), Takashi Ishii, Rudolf II — Holy Roman Emperor, Akinari Ueda, Marcel Duchamp, Chris Burden, Paul Celan, Alain Resnais, Gilyak Amagasaki, Shusaku Arakawa, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Shuji Terayama, Andy Warhol, Charles Manson, Brian Wilson, Kyoko Endoh, Princess Yongtai, Salvador Dalí, Ono no Komachi, Kiyoshi Kasai, Caravaggio, Throbbing Gristle, Takizawa Bakin, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Manson Family, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Wu Zetian, Genesis P-Orridge, Yusuke Nakahara, Ranpo Lagrange, Mitsusada Fukasaku, Nakai Hideo, Richard Wagner, and many more.
Very Good copy.
1960, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 106 pages, 26.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Misuzu Shobo / Tokyo
$100.00 - In stock -
First edition of this lovely 1960 hardcover monograph published in Tokyo on the German Surrealist Max Ernst (1891—1976), as part of a Misuzu Shobo series on Modern European and American artists issued for Japanese readers. With accompanying text by Japanese poet, critic and fellow Surrealist artist Shūzō Takiguchi. A prolific and highly original painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet, Ernst's various works are surveyed (paintings, collages, and frottages dating upto the late 1950s) herein generously in colour and b/w reproductions. Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada and Surrealism movements.
Very Good copy with some internal blank stock paper tanning. Dust Jacket with some wear and tear to extremities, all preserved in mylar wrap. A lovely copy of this uncommon title.
2023, English / German
Hardcover, 400 pages, 27 x 22 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$90.00 - In stock -
Ursula's life and work offer an unconventional narrative of artistic independence. Her art exemplifies the idea that Surrealism is not a style, but an attitude. Ursula subverted reality and found the uncanny in the everyday, challenging the authorities of society and art by imagining new worlds in which old hierarchies are thrown overboard and new ways of life are conceivable. Ursula shared this utopian imagination with artists such as Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Unica Zürn. The aim of this catalogue is to present Ursula's captivating and self-assured work to a new generation of art lovers. It reveals that it is the individuality of Ursula's work that allows it to touch on so many fundamental and topical issues, including female self-determination and the challenging of established gender identities, with a worldview in which everything is interconnected and mutually dependent.
Edited by Stephan Diederich.
Contributions by Stephan Diederich, Yilmaz Dziewior, Helena Kuhlmann, Chus Martinez, Elizabeth A. Povinell.
English and German text.
"Cologne Museum Dives Into German Artist’s Once-Lost Fantastical World: Ursula Schultze-Bluhm, painter of unearthly visions was largely overlooked by the art world…"—New York Times, by Andrew Russeth, 2023.
1995 / 2001, English
Softcover, 314 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$49.00 - In stock -
This complete collection of writings published for the first time in English includes “Story of a Little Girl,” about the Catholic priest who sexually molested her sister; “The Sacred,” a collection of poems and fragments on mysticism and eroticism; notes on her association with contr-attaque and acephale, and her involvement with the Spanish civil war and the early years of the Soviet Union; a compendium of correspondence with her beloved sister-in-law and tortured love letters to Bataille; and an essay by Bataille about Laure’s death of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five.
“People describe Laure as pure, dissolute, dark, luminous. ‘I drank, I bathed in her radiant purity’ Jean Bernier says. Leiris writes about her lyrically in fourbis and frêle bruit as ‘the saint of the chasm.’ Bataille calls her uncompromising, pure, and sovereign. It is tempting to romanticize Laure – in the most sublime and violent sense – as consumptive poet, a fervent revolutionary, Bataille’s great love. But if she is radiant and dirty, she is also insolent. That, it seems, is what saves her.”—Jeanine Herman
“Colette Peignot, a.k.a. Laure, is one of the more fascinating and intense women writers of the past century. Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris described her as “one of the most vehement existences [that] ever lived, one of the most conflicted.” They summarized her volatile personality as “[e]ager for affection and for disaster, oscillating between extreme audacity and the most dreadful anguish, as inconceivable on a scale of real beings as a mythical being, she tore herself on the thorns with which she surrounded herself until becoming nothing but a wound, never allowing herself to be confined by anything or anyone.” In other words, Laure was the epitome of what Bataille would dub the “sovereign” individual.”—Jason DeBoer, Absinthe Literary Review
“By the time one emerges from this compilation of autobiographical and biographical sketches by and about her, of poems, scattered notes and fevered letters, one can’t help feeling that her true masterwork was her ability to make others react to and remember her.”—Mark Polizzotti, London Review of Books
Laure (1903-1938) was a revolutionary poet, masochist Catholic rich girl, and world traveler. Toward the end of her life she became the lover of French writer Georges Bataille. Her writings and her real life story were remarkable in their violence and intensity, and her relationships with Bataille and Michel Leiris clearly influenced their works.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21 x 26 cm
Published by
Prestel / Munich
$70.00 - In stock -
Now available in paperback, this book on the celebrated Dada artist Hannah Höch explores her use of collage as the artistic medium of choice for both satire and poetic beauty.
World-renowned for her work during the Weimar period, Hannah Höch was a pioneer in many aspects, both artistic and cultural. She was the lone woman of the Berlin Dada movement - the riotous form of art that deconstructed sound, language, and images to re-assemble them into new objects, texts and meanings. Höch was a pivotal force in the development of collage, paving the way for today's ubiquitous image editing techniques. A determined believer in women's rights, Höch questioned conventional concepts of partnership, beauty and the making of art, her work presenting acute critiques of racial and social stereotypes, particularly that of her native Germany.
Focusing on Höch's collages, this book examines the artist's career from the 1920s to the 1970s, charting her oeuvre from early works influenced by fashion and mass media, through to her later compositions of lyrical abstraction. It reveals her rapid development of a personal style, which was both humorous and often moving, but also offered critical commentary on society at a time of tremendous social change.
Included are essays that examine themes such as the concept of the "New Woman" and the legacy of German colonialism. Featuring international scholarship on a groundbreaking artist, this volume brings together important source texts and reference material, which were first translated into English for the original edition of this book.
Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, and Professor of Art History at the Royal Academy. She is a former Trustee of Tate and Fellow of the British Academy.
Daniel F. Herrmann is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects, The National Gallery.
Emily Butler is a curator, writer and translator, currently Mahera and Mohammad Abu Ghazaleh Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery.
1983, Japanese / German / English
Softcover, 164 pages, 24 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Yomiuri Shimbun / Tokyo
$60.00 - In stock -
Scarce Japanese catalogue on the work of German artist Max Ernst, published to accompany the major retrospective exhibition that travelled Japan 1983—1984.
With an introduction by German art historian Werner Spies, in German and Japanese, this profusely illustrated book is quite a valuable volume on Ernst as it concentrates its pages on a huge collection of his lithography, frottage, collage, etching, and other graphic works, rather than his more well-known works in painting and sculpture, bringing to the surface many lesser-seen works of the artist. Over 300 colour and black and white reproductions, including biography and bibliography. Texts in Japanese and German, with titles and introduction in English.
Max Ernst (1891—1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism.
Good copy with wear and creasing to corners, general wear and tear to cover extremities. Spine uncreased and tightly bound.
2024, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$34.00 - Out of stock
With the 2018 publication of Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings, Wakefield Press introduced the writings of Surrealist painter Remedios Varo into English for the first time. These texts, never published during her lifetime, presented something of a missing chapter, and offered the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief, and an ongoing meditation on the need for (and the trauma of) escape in all its forms.
This new, expanded volume brings together the painter’s collected writings, an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances (as well as to people unknown), dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, and exercises in Surrealist automatic writing, as well as prose-poem commentaries on her paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific On Homo rodans: an absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had built out of chicken bones). Written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, the essay utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways Myths are merely corrupted Myrtles.
Also included are newly discovered writings, among them three short stories, never before published in any language.
Edited and translated by Margaret Carson
Remedios Varo (1908–1963) was a Spanish-born painter who entered the Surrealist circle in Paris before the German occupation forced her into exile to Mexico at the end of 1941, where she would stay until the end of her life. Her dream-infused allegorical works combine the elements of classical training, alchemical mysticism, and fairy-tale science.
2019, English
Softcover, 286 pages, 15.24 x 22.86 cm
Published by
Schism Press / World
$48.00 - Out of stock
In France, the poetry of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte has long received the major press attention it deserves. Now, thanks to David Ball's fine translation, English readers can experience its fractured eloquence in full, from wry early sketches and experiments with prose poetry, to the stark, skeletal verse for which he is best known. Gilbert-Lecomte's adult life was spent gazing, wilfully, into the abyss. In his poetry, the voice that dominates is cold, ancient, and inhuman. It is the hum of the abyss gazing back.—Dennis Duncan, University College London, Author of Theory of the Great Game and The Oulipo and Modern Thought
While a handful of other translations of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte's poetry exist, David Ball's Coma Crossing is likely to be the one whose pages we'll be absorbed in for some time to come. Gilbert-Lecomte was one of those peripheral poets who went against the Surrealist tide to carve his own psychic path; René Daumal was one of his comrades in their effort called Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game). Now, because of Ball's expertise as a thinker and translator, we will have to pay attention to Gilbert-Lecomte at last.—Bill Zavatsky, author of Theories of Rain and Other Poems, and co-translator of Earthlight: Poems of André Breton.
2023, English / German / French
Softcover, 128 pages, 13.97 x 22.23 cm
Published by
World Poetry Books / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French.
Oppenheim's poetry—49 poems written between 1933 and 1980—moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, "express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life."
A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included André Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that "the singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated ... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking." The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
"I am in awe of Meret Oppenheim's poems, a seismic force heretofore unknown to me. Her aesthetic compatriots include Alejandra Pizarnik, Georg Trakl, Max Jacob, and Paul Celan—artists of deep symbol, deep void. Kathleen Heil's translations are themselves works of the highest literary refinement and ingenuity. To read Oppenheim's lyric bulletins, conveyed tactfully into English, is to feel that we are plunging for the first time into the pure waters of poetry itself, impervious to fad. No dross, no affectation: instead, Oppenheim gives us strangeness, tone, translucency."—Wayne Koestenbaum
"What an ingenious way of translating this superbly ingenious poet/artist! Over and over, Kathleen Heil selects a word which many would find out of the way, although I find this a true delight. To me, it feels as deeply surrealist as possible. Two examples may suffice: for the verb 'nimmt, ' she offers us the rare 'thieves' instead of the far more usual 'steals' or 'robs'; while for 'Wie rät ein Untergang dem nächsten?' she selects the far less ordinary phrase: 'How does one demise advise the next?' thus capturing a near-echo. Such a gift proves true throughout this all-in-all inventive rendering. The extraordinary Meret Oppenheim deserves no less!"—Mary Ann Caws
"The singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated ... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking."—Gary Indiana, Village Voice
"Oppenheim's poetry often feels as if a fairy tale and a bestiary were put into a blender."—John Bradley, Rain Taxi Review
1978, English
Softcover, 158 pages, 21 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dragon's Dream / Paris
$220.00 - Out of stock
First printing of this cult classic of magmatic erotic collage from 1978 by artist Penny Slinger and poet Nik Douglas, published by Dragon's Dream of Paris. Seized and burnt by British customs, Mountain Ecstasy is an explicit, kaleidoscopic work that melds the sacred with the profane — an ecstatic and cosmic journey to tantric utopia by way of Penny’s wild collages created from found images – many from Slinger’s own collection of erotica, saturated in colour and volcanic sensuality.
"'Mountain Ecstasy' was my celebration of Tantric alchemy, freed from any restrictions, out of the confines of the house ('An Exorcism') and into the wide-open Technicolor landscapes of the high Himalayas. I never really thought of the collages as being material for a book - as they were rather outrageous - but Dragon's Dream wanted to publish. Whereas 'An Exorcism' had been mostly my own photographs, the images for 'Mountain Ecstasy' were nearly all 'objects trouves'. I had traveled for the first time in exotic parts (India, Nepal, Thailand) and the work reflects this input. Thousands of copies of 'Mountain Ecstasy' were subsequently seized and burnt by British customs, my comment at the time was, "They thought it was pornography, they didn't realize it was its antidote"—Penny Slinger
"Magnificant erotic assemblages of nudes, flowers, masks and rocks against landscapes, they tease, they excite and they dazzle the eye and in the end the sheer voluptuous beauty of these erotic montages finally exist in their own right as works of art and nary a bullet or a bomb in them."—Arthur Moyse, Freedom Anarchist Review
Very Good copy, beautifully preserved with light cover wear/crease, tightly bound/unsunned — rare for this title.
1947, French
Softcover, 142 pages, 24 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Maeght Editeur / Paris
$650.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce copy of the legendary "Le Surréalisme en 1947 : Exposition Internationale de Surréalisme présentée par André Breton et Marcel Duchamp", published by Maeght Editeur, Paris, in conjunction with an important exhibition of Surrealist artists in 1947. Features the cover design by Marcel Duchamp - a photographic reproduction by Rémy Duval of "Prière de toucher (Please touch)", the famous Duchamp rubber breast edition, created with Italian-born painter Enrico Donati, that adorned the first 999 copies of the catalogue. This gorgeous catalogue features the work of artists from 24 countries including Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Jacqueline Lamba, Jacques Hérold, Wilfredo Lam, Joan Miró, Hans Bellmer, Marcel Jean, Maria Martins, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, Hans Arp, Frederick Kiesler, Alberto Giacometti, Hector Hyppolite, Serge Brignoni, Alexander Calder, Bruno Capacci, Elizabeth van Damme, Jacques Halpern, Julio de Diego, Enrico Donati, Francis Bouvet, David Hare, Iaroslav Serpan, Jacqueline Lamba, Taro Okamoto, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, Toyen, Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, Leonard Baskin, Jindrich Heisler, Jeanne Reynal, Isabelle Waldberg, Roger Brielle, Jindrich Styrsky, Bruno Capacci, Jean Guerin, Isamu Noguchi, Gerome Kamrowski, Frédéric Delanglade, Eugenio Granell, Francis Picabia, Remedios Varo, Hans Richter, Arshile Gorky, and many more, along with the folding sheet catalogue, and newspaper clipping about the show inserted.
Good copy considering age. Tanned edges and wear to corners, edges and spine. Some spine chipping.
1946, English / French
Hardcover (w. die-cut dust jacket), unpaginated, 23.5 by 15.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
View Editions / New York
$690.00 - In stock -
Very Rare first 1946 hardcover English edition of André Breton's poetry collection "Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares / Jeunes cerisiers garantis contre less lievres", with original die-cut cover art by Marcel Duchamp and internal illustrations by Arshile Gorky, published by View Editions. A beautiful publication with Breton's original French poems with facing English translations by Edouard Roditi. Breton asked Armenian-American painter Gorky, an essential bridge between European Surrealism and American Abstract Expression, to produce unique drawings in 1945. Marcel Duchamp contributed the cover design and the title was a chance find in a horticulture magazine that also contains a pun on Breton's private life, whose wife had recently left him for artist David Hare. Gorky produced drawings to accompany Breton's poems that did not so much illustrate the poems, as they applied free association mark making analogous with the poetry's evocation, similarly free from logic or narration. Gorky's “automatic drawings” were made without preconception and the creations are interpreted as subconscious thought.
Average—Good copy for a book rarely seen outside museum collections. Internally Good throughout, content pages Very Good. Ex-library of Royal College of of Art, London, with associated markings to front/back blanks (not covers), jacket laminated (die-cut free) adhered in place with wear to extremities, tanning, marking and spine damages. More images upon request.
1978, French
Softcover, 80 pages, 9.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Chez Yves Rivière / Paris
$150.00 - Out of stock
Very rare first (only) 1978 edition of Roland Topor's artist book, Laid Poulet, a unique book of illustrated oblique absurdist rebuses, beautifully lithograph printed on the presses of the Arte printing company (Adrien Maeght) with the legendary Yves Riviere and filled with Topor's colourful illustrations made specifically for this publication. Published by Chez Yves Rivière, Paris. Edition of 1950 copies, after an initial 50 numbered and signed.
Roland Topor (1938—1997) was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, and much more. A founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962, Topor was known for the surreal and absurdist nature of his work.
Fine copy with light tanning.
1996, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible and sadly long out-of-print Encyclopedia Acephalica, published by Atlas Press in 1996 as part of their mighty Atlas Arkhive : Documents of the Avant Garde series.
Bataille’s thought is complex, and his books make few concessions to the reader. The first series of texts here, however, were written for a wider audience by Bataille and his friends, in the form of a Critical Dictionary, and they provide a witty, poetic and concise introduction to his ideas. The Dictionary appeared in the magazine edited by Bataille, Documents, in the early 1930s, and includes entries from prominent ethnologists and cultural commentators of the day. The second series of texts here, the Da Costa Encyclopédique was published anonymously after the liberation of Paris in 1947 by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with the Surrealists. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, the festival and the politics of the tumult etc: a new description of the limits of being human. Humour, albeit, sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: Camel, Church, Dust, Museum, Spittle, Skyscraper, Threshold, Work – to name but a few.
While the Documents group was celebrated for joining together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists (among the most important of their time) in a literary and philosophical project, the Acéphale group was more mysterious. Until recently even its membership was only vaguely known, and its activities remained secret (these are explored in detail for the first time in English in The Sacred Conspiracy, published by Atlas Press, also available at World Food Books). The origins of the Da Costa only became known in 1993, the present volume revealed for the first time its principal compilers: Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg and Marcel Duchamp, but the identity of the authors of a large part of it is still unknown.
Texts by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos and writers associated with the Acéphale and Surrealist groups.
Introduced by Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Iain White, Dominic Faccini, Annette Michelson, John Harman, Alexis Lykiard.
Good—Very Good copy, with edge wear to covers and corners, otherwise VG throughout. No spine creasing.