World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1993, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Whitney Museum / New York
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$300.00 - Out of stock
Still, and will probably always be, the best book on Mike Kelley. First edition, now very collectible. This definitive survey was published in 1993 in conjunction with "Mike Kelley", a travelling exhibition held at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LA; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, throughout 1994. Mike Kelley, one of the leading Californian artists of the 1990s, was a proponent of abject or pathetic art, an anti-aesthetic, anti-heroic movement, which criticized social and artistic issues through banality and humour. Exploring the work of this great and controversial performance artist and sculptor at the mid-way point in his career, this dense book presents thirteen essays, plus an introduction, discussing Kelley's projects, performances, and the ideas and diverse influences that motivate his work - contemporary art, rock and roll, social commentary and pop culture. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and black and white, with texts by Elizabeth Sussman, David Marsh, Richard Armstrong, Timothy Martin, Howard Singerman, Colin Gardner, Dennis Cooper & Casey McKinney, John Miller, Ralph Rugoff, Kim Gordon, Howard N. Fox, Diedrich Diederichsen, Jutta Koether, Martin Prinzhorn, Paul Schimmel, John G. Hanhardt. No less! Includes a bibliography and exhibition history. Catalogue designed by Lorraine Wild and ReVerb.
Highly recommended.
Very Good copy, tightly bound, no spine creases. Light cover edge wear.
1999, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 200 pages, 21 x 26.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MoMA / New York
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the long out of print Sigmar Polke "Works on Paper 1963-1974" catalogue from 1999.
Texts by Bice Curiger, Margit Rowell, and Michael Semff
One of the most significant artists of his generation, Sigmar Polke came of age creatively around 1963 in Düsseldorf. His earliest expressive idiom was crude and humorous, its images outrageous, and its content seemingly trivial, but embedded in these works were subversive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, German postwar politics, and classic artistic conventions. Few of Polke's works demonstrate more vividly his imagination, sardonic wit, and eclectic creative process than the drawings, watercolors, and gouaches of the 1960s and early 70s.
More than 300 works are illustrated, including small sketches in ballpoint and felt-tipped pen, larger sheets in watercolor and gouache, and still others stamped with a dot screen process, as well as pages from over a dozen small sketchbooks and several monumental works on paper. This book was published to accompany the first American exhibition of these drawings shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1999.
Very Good copy in preserved dust jacket.
1996, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 23 x 15.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
First 1996 edition.
The Sex of Architecture brings together twenty-four provocative texts that collectively express the power and diversity of women's views on architecture today. Edited by Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman, three leaders in their field, this volume presents a dialogue among women historians, practitioners, theorists, and educators concerned with critical issues in architecture and urbanism.
In their insightful essays the authors explore history, public space and the city, housing, con-sumerism, and discourse itself. They reexamine some long-suspect "truths"— that man builds and woman inhabits; that man is outside and woman is inside; that man is public and woman is private; that culture is male and nature is female. The texts are accompanied by a rich selection of over ninety illustrations, from Vitruvius to Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier to examples of current architectural work by some of the contributors themselves.
Contributors: Diana Agrest, Diana Balmori, Ann Bergren, Jennifer Bloomer, M. Christine Boyer, Lynne Breslin, Zeynep Celik, Beatriz Colomina, Margaret Crawford, Esther Da Costa Meyer, Diane Favro, Alice T. Friedman, Ghislaine Hermanuz, Catherine Ingraham, Sylvia Lavin, Diane Lewis, Mary Mcleod, Joan Ockman, Denise Scott Brown, Sharon E. Sutton, Susana Torre, Lauretta Vinciarelli, Leslie Kanes, Weisman Marion Weiss
1965, English
Softcover, 246 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First 1965 English edition of German Dada painter, graphic artist, avant-garde film producer, and art historian, Hans Richter's important book of the Dada movement. "Where and how Dada began is almost as difficult to determine as Homer's birthplace" writes Hans Richter, who was associated with Dada from its early days. The noted artist and film-maker records here the history of that boisterous and fantastic movement, from its beginnings in wartime Zurich to its collapse in the Paris of the 1920s Dada invited the world to misunderstand it and fostered all kinds of confusion; nearly fifty years later its contradictions still intrigue us.
By skilful quotation from manifestoes and other documents of the time Professor Richter re-creates the events of those turbulent days. Looked at in retrospect Dada's role in the development of modern art seems inevitable, and the creative force of its planned outbursts can now be perceived: Dada led on from Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, and in its turn prepared the way for Surrealism. Dada was enlivened by extravagant, bizarre personalities: Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray. Today the wheel has turned again; the gestures and provocations of the original movement reappear, hardly changed, in such forms as Pop art. The final section discusses this phenomenon.
"Mr.Richter, one of the original adherents of Dada, describes their attitude in a first-rate history, as objective and sober as the laughter was once derisive."—THE TIMES OF LONDON
Very Good copy, light wear to extremities, tanning to covers.
1979, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 20.2 x 20.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$200.00 - Out of stock
‘CIRCLE, SQUARE, TRIANGLE, RECTANGLE, TRAPEZOID AND PARALLELOGRAM IN RED, YELLOW AND BLUE ON RED, YELLOW AND BLUE’.
First edition of LeWitt's classic artist book, "Geometric Figures & Color" published in 1979, which is beautifully made up entirely of full-bleed colour illustrations of six geometric figures six (circle, square, triangle, rectangle, trapezoid and parallelogram) presented, sequentially, in duo-chrome primary colours (yellow and blue on red, red and blue on yellow, yellow and red on blue).
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt (1928 – 2007) was one of the most distinctive and influential American artists of the 20th century. He shaped and defined many of the century's most cerebral "isms", notably minimalism and conceptualism.
Near Fine copy with only light wear/tanning.
1966, English
Hardcover (Burlap covered boards), 342 pages, 32 x 31cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$400.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1966 burlap-bound edition of this seminal work by Allan Kaprow documenting the milieu of performance art and happenings in the early-mid 1960s. Published by H. N. Abrams, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings is a legendary photo-artist-book by “one of the grand antiheroes of contemporary art”, produced in way we would never see today. Wrapped in a heavy, debossed and screen-printed raw burlap hardcover, this massive and visually stunning volume features incredible typography, commentary and lay-out by Kaprow himself, accompanying countless photogravures (photos taken by Oldenburg, Robert McElroy, Peter Moore and others) featuring the work of artists (and non-artists) such as Claes Oldenburg, Tetsumi Kudo, Jean Tinguely, Clarence Schmidt, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Wolf Vostell, George Brecht, Kenneth Dewey, Milan Knizak, Jackson Pollock, Robert Whitman, Red Grooms, George Segal, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, together with images of works by the Japanese Gutai Group (Murakami Saburo, Shozo Shimamoto, Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, et al) and many more.
Allan Kaprow, “an artist who coined the term ‘happenings’ in the late 1950s and whose anti-art works contributed to radical changes in the course of late 20th-century art,” was a leading member-with artists George Segal, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenberg-of a group whose performance works were signally influenced by John Cage’s “reliance on chance as an organizing, or disorganizing element in art. Like Cage, Kaprow used a combination of choice and accident as a way of creating nonverbal, quasi-theatrical situations in which performers functioned as kinetic objects, the role of the single artist-genius was de-emphasized, audience members became creative participants and no-clear distinction was made between everyday actions and ritual…” (New York Times).
"Step Right In"
Very Good copy, spotless with tight-As New binding, perfectly preserved.
1979, English
Softcover, 159 pages, 28 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Published by Abrams in 1978, Images of Horror and Fantasy by art historian Gert Schiff expanded on a major group exhibition guest curated by Schiff at the Bronx Museum in 1977. The resulting publication is a perceptive critical and psychological analyses of a variety of nineteenth-and twentieth-century art that "unfolds simultaneously on the level of historical and social reality and on the level of dreams. Its purpose is to expose some of the principal anxieties of modern man and their resolution in utopian reveries and escapist fantasies." Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w throughout with the works of Alfred Kubin, James Ensor, George Grosz, Paul Thek, Sibylle Ruppert, Henry Fuseli, Paul Delvaux, Nancy Grossman, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Fernand Khnopff, Rudolph von Ripper, Max Klinger, H. R. Giger, Jonah Kinigstein, Edward Keinholz, Jean Delville, Lucas Samaras, Miriam Beerman, Willem de Kooning, Man Ray, Oskar Kokoschka, Salvador Dali, Paolo Soleri, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Georges Rouault, Otto Dix, Pablo Picasso, Philip Evergood, William Blake, Giorgio de Chirico, Ivan Albright, Yves Tanguy, Paul Klee, Jasper Johns, Germaine Richier, Francisco de Goya, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Max Ernst, Francis Bacon, Rene Magritte, Illya Repin, Antoine Wiertz, Odilon Redon, Edward Burra, Larry Rivers, George Segal, Thomas Cole, Léon Frédéric, Matthias Grünewald, Rico Lebrun, Bruce Connor, Edvard Munch, and many more.
Gert Schiff (1926 — 1990, b. Oldenburg, Germany) was an art historian, critic, lecturer and professor at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. A specialist in the Romantic movement, particularly the work of Henry Fuseli and William Blake, Mr. Schiff was also very much involved with 20th-century art, organising many major exhibitions around his interests whilst authoring important studies on the arts from his dwellings at the Chelsea Hotel.
Very Good copy.
1973, English
Softcover (soft boards), 204 pages, 29.6 x 21.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
Thames and Hudson / London
$25.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
English edition wide ranging and comprehensive survey of conceptual and other contemporary art movements circa 1973—1974, profiling 53 contemporary artists from 18 countries, edited and designed by the legendary Dutch typographer and museum curator, Willem Sandberg, with associates including Jean-Christophe Ammann, Harald Szeemann, Achille Bonito Oliva, Yona Fischer and many others. Original cover by Alighiero Boetti. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with collected works by each artist or original pieces made for the publication, aside from the occasional accompanying artist's text it is entirely made up of visuals. Artists featured include : Sergi Aguilar, Gilles Aillaud, Keith Arnatt, Gábor Attalai, Lothar Baumgarten, Ola Billgren, Alighiero Boetti, Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Boris Budan, Luciano Castelli, Mary Corse, William Crozier, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Braco Dimitrijević, Gino De Dominicis, Benni Efrat, Luciano Fabro, Robert Filliou, John-E Franzen, Hamish Fulton, Tibor Gayor, Avital Geva, Zbigniew Gostomski, Allan V. Harrison, Jeroen Henneman, Martha Jungwirth, Zdzislaw Jurkiewicz, Per Kirkeby, Christof Kohlhöfer, Harriet Korman, Piotr Kowalski, Richard Long, Urs Lüthi, Inge Mahn, Richard Nonas, Lev Nusberg, Panamarenko, Antonio Soler Pedret, Ireneusz Pierzgalski, Vettor Pisani, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Carl J. Plackrnan, Markus Raetz, Franz Ringel, Salvador Sauna, Kjartan Slettemark, Hugo Suter, Endre Tot, Jerzy Treliński, Carel Visser, Rolf Winnewisser...
Average—Poor copy, contents and interior in good shape and complete, cover and edges with decent wear and marking, spine 75% torn away, although all still thread-bound.
1984, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 32 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1984, this critical study of the life and work of the Polish-French artist Balthus serves as the catalogue of a major exhibition held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris. Heavily illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with Balthus' paintings, sketches and artistic references, alongside extensive texts by curator The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Balthus scholar, Sabine Rewald.
Balthus (1908—2001), was a Polish-French modern artist born in Paris to Polish expatriate parents. His given name was Balthasar Klossowski - his sobriquet "Balthus" was based on his childhood nickname, alternately spelled Baltus, Baltusz, Balthusz or Balthus. His father, Erich Klossowski, was an art historian who wrote a noted monograph on Daumier. His older brother was the philosopher and artist Pierre Klossowski. An unusual figure in the history of twentieth century painting, Balthus both traveled among and drew upon the work of other major artists of his time, while at the same time following a unique individual trajectory. He was mentored by, friends of, and/or even collaborated with seminal creative figures from different eras, including Antonin Artaud, André Breton, and Rainer Maria Rilke, while cultivating his own highly refined style of dreamlike, classically-informed painting. The scenes he usually depicted were very ordinary bourgeois interiors or outdoor settings, which nonetheless managed to reveal the heightened inner states of his subjects as well as the states of mind of those who might be viewing them.
"I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always with a slight touch of mystery in my paintings." - Balthus
Very Good copy with dedication to previous owner on title page.
2019, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 150 pages, 21.7 x 14.7 cm
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$39.00 - Out of stock
The award-winning French novelist pays tribute to a literary hero in this critical biography of the master of horror—with a foreword by Stephen King.
Best known for his acclaimed novels, such as the Prix Goncourt-winning The Map and the Territory, Michael Houellebecq devotes his single work of nonfiction to the pioneering author of horror and weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft. In a volume that is part biographical sketch and part pronouncement on existence and literature, France's most famous contemporary author praises his prewar American alter ego, whose style couldn't be less like his own.
With a foreword by Lovecraft admirer Stephen King, this eloquently translated edition is an insightful introduction to both Lovecraft’s dark mythology and Houellebecq’s deadpan prose.
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 352 pages, 24 x 16 cm
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
A revealing and beautifully open memoir from pioneering industrial music artist, visual artist, and transgender icon Genesis P-Orridge.
In this groundbreaking book spanning decades of artistic risk-taking, the inventor of “industrial music,” founder of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and world-renowned fine artist with COUM Transmissions Genesis P-Orridge (1950–2020) takes us on a journey searching for identity and their true self. It is the story of a life of creation and destruction, where Genesis P-Orridge reveals their unwillingness to be stuck—stuck in one place, in one genre, or in one gender. Nonbinary is Genesis’s final work and is shared with hopes of being an inspiration to the newest generation of trailblazers and nonconformists.
Nonbinary is the intimate story of Genesis’s life, weaving the narrative of their history in COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV. It also covers growing up in World War II’s fallout in Britain, contributing to the explosion of new music and radical art in the 1960s, and destroying visual and artistic norms throughout their entire life.
In addition to being a captivating memoir of a singular artist and musician, Nonbinary is also an inside look at one of our most remarkable cultural lives that will be an inspiration to fans of industrial music, performance art, the occult, and a life in the arts.
“Genesis had a profound impact on me as an artist and then a dear friend. Reading this illuminating and radically open memoir is an honor. The echoes of such a strong creative voice unveiling the experiences of the proverbial climb to becoming a true artist and later cultural icon is mesmerizing.” — actor, director, and author, Asia Argento
“Genesis was continually breaking new ground and developing new projects with the aim of short circuiting received ideas, chipping a hole in the carapace, questioning everything: religion, education, nationality, sexual identity to find the reality behind the society of the spectacle. Gen was always going forwards. It is fascinating to read the back story, finally told.” — bestselling author, Barry Miles
1965, English
Hardcover, 366 pages, 30.5 x 25.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
First 1965 edition of this stunning, over-sized hardcover book dedicated to the Japanese art of flower arrangement. Published by Harry N. Abrams in New York, and printed and bound in Japan, this landmark book began an obsession for Japanese flower arrangement in the West. Wrapped in it's green cloth covers and profusely illustrated throughout with lush laid-in photographic plates, "The Art of Arranging Flowers" showcases some of the finest examples of Ikebana captured in print, created by over 50 of the leading Japanese practitioners. The book's creator, Shōzō Satō, is an internationally renowned Japanese master of Zen arts and visionary theatre director, most known for adapting Western classics to Japanese Kabuki theatre. Satō arrived at the University of Illinois in 1964 as a visiting artist. In 1968, he founded the Japanese Arts and Culture Program, where his influence was far-reaching through his classes in traditional Japanese arts, such as calligraphy, sumi-e, ikebana, zen aesthetics, and tea ceremony.
"I have tried to make this the most carefully detailed and profusely illustrated guide of its kind, enabling the reader to create many beautiful arrangements while learning all the necessary techniques of the art. Finally, there is a section devoted to advanced techniques and designs, both classic and modern, and to the setting of mood."
Very Good handsome first edition copy, protected under publishers original plastic dust jacket. A very large book! One leaf loose in the back index section, but present.
2012, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 22.5 x 33.8 cm
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$76.00 - Out of stock
From 1965 to 1975, an array of journals, magazines, fanzines, and underground presses were the voice of a dramatic sexual revolution. In Europe and the United States, this "sex press" consisted of publications such as Other Scenes, Yellow Dog, Actuel, Suck, The Body, and Screw-some of which were fully dedicated to sex, while others also engaged with the time's most riveting topical issues, including politics, human rights, war, women's rights, and gay and lesbian rights. Showcasing art from the most revolutionary publications of the era, the book traces the exuberant sexual liberation of the 1960s and then moves into the mid-1970s, with its more codified form of pornography. Illustrated by a vivid collection of full-page facsimiles, Sex Press offers a compelling visual tour through an extraordinary period of experimentation, creativity, and sexual freedom.
1990, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 129 pages, 22.5 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of "Snoopy Around The World...", published in New York in 1990. The always incredible fashion photo album of Snoopy and his beagle sister Belle travelling world in original one-of-a-kind designer outfits created by the world's most progressive and famous fashion designers of the time, asking each of them to create an for Snoopy and his beagle sister Belle. There is even a cameo by Woodstock in Krizia! Designers include Givenchy, Chloé, Issey Miyake, Karl Lagerfeld, Sonia Rykiel, Martine Sitbon, Balenciaga, Missoni, Krizia, L.L. Bean, Marimekko, Jag, Popy Moreni, Pierre Balmain, Guy Laroche, Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi, Hermes, Dirk Bikkembergs, Cacharel, Bill Blass, Kenzo, Giorgio Armani, Vivienne Westwood, Diane von Fürstenberg, and so many more. Lavishly photographed throughout with endless fold out full-colour spreads!
From the blurb:
"Snoopy Around the World, which features commentaries by Peanuts's creator Charles Schulz, photographs by renowned fashion photographer Alberto Rizzo, and biographies of the designers, is sure to delight the millions of people who avidly follow the daily adventures of the world's most popular beagle. The book accompanies a major exhibition that began its own world tour by opening at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris to international acclaim. For no matter where their journey takes them, Snoopy and Belle always travel in high style - they really know how to put on the dog!"
Very Good copy.
1995, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 120 pages, 25 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
American painter Georgia O'Keeffe spent the last 40 years of her life in quiet isolation in New Mexico in the village of Abiquiu. In 1979 She permitted Colorado photographer Myron Wood to photograph at her properties in Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch. Over the following 2 1/2 years he made hundreds of photographs of the artist, the people close to her and of the house, gardens and surrounding landscape. Here are reproduced 79 of those photographs which evoke the spirit of the place as O'keeffe inhabited it.
First edition of this lovely, intimate hardcover photo book. Accompanying text by Christine Taylor Patten.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, preserved in mylar wrap.
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist. She was best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been recognized as the "Mother of American modernism".
1976, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket in cardboard slipcase), 231 pages, 29.5 x 28 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$85.00 - Out of stock
The stunning 1976 cloth-hardcover César monograph - English edition. With text by the great Pierre Restany and large beautifully printed illustrations of over 200 of César's sculptural works in colour and black and white, including a wealth of his incredible Compressions and Expansions, along with a list of all works, biography, bibliography. Designed by Peter Knapp and Walter Rospert and printed in France. This is the 1976 English edition with dustjacket, and original cardboard slipcase, and still the nicest book on this great artist.
César Baldaccini (1 January 1921 in Marseille - 6 December 1998 in Paris), usually called César, was a noted French sculptor. César was at the forefront of the Nouveau Réalisme movement with his radical compressions (compacted automobiles, discarded metal, or rubbish), expansions (polyurethane foam sculptures), and fantastic representations of animals and insects in bronze. His sculptural vision has heavy influenced the work of many for generations since.
1988, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages (47 Color & 350 b&w ill.), 250 x 280 mm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
What is a chair? More than 300 designers, architects, and furniture makers from around the world attempted to answer that question when they submitted chairs to an exhibition sponsored by The Architectural League of New York in 1986. Made from all manners of materials--steel, fabric, wood, plastic, aluminum, fiberglass--and running from serious solitary utilitarian seats to whimsical models, the range and variety of the designer's answers, all 397 of them illustrated here, are truly stunning.
Opening with American critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto's essay "The Seat of the Sole", this handsomely designed volume, printed and bound in Japan, features an incredible photographic survey of eclectic chairs from the early 1980s. Amongst them appears Mario Bellini, Enzo Mari, Phillipe Starck, Vignelli designs, Michael Graves, Herman Miller, Ward Bennett, Stomu Miyazaki, Alan Buchsbaum, Knoll, Michele De Lucchi, Marco Zanini, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Emilio Ambasz, Kazuo Kawasaki, Richard Meier, Herbert and Jutta Ohl, Simon Desanta, Vitra Seating, Shigeru Uchida, Giancarlo Piretti, Thonet Industries, Memphis Milano, Hartmut Lohmeyer, to name but a few.
2001, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 192 pages, 24 x 31 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$55.00 - Out of stock
The irony and antic sense of humor that animate the work of H. C. Westermann (1922–1981) and make it so accessible are evident on every page of this volume, the first comprehensive study of the artist in over 20 years. Published on the occasion of a traveling exhibition of Westermann's sculpture, the book looks at how defining themes central to 20th-century America—the horror and disillusionment of war, the mythology of the American utopia, and Hollywood and mass media—shaped his thought and his art.
Magnificent color illustrations accompany essays by Robert Storr, who evaluates Westermann in the context of 20th-century art; Lynne Warren, who looks at his years in Chicago in the 1950s; Dennis Adrian, a longtime friend, who surveys the artist’s entire oeuvre; and Michael Rooks, who examines his most elaborate achievement, the house and studio in Connecticut that the artist designed and built by hand from 1969 to 1981.
H. C. Westermann (Horace Clifford "Cliff" Westermann) (11 December 1922 – 3 November 1981) was an American printmaker and sculptor whose art constituted a scathing commentary on militarism and materialism. His sculptures frequently incorporated traditional carpentry and marquetry techniques. Westermann resisted providing interpretation of his works of art. In one interview, when asked what an object meant, Westermann replied "It puzzles me too."
In 1967, he was one of the celebrities featured on the cover of the Beatles' album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In 1978 he was given a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.