Pacific Standard Time : Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980
by: Rebecca Peabody , Andrew Perchuk, et al.

Hardcover. US, Getty Publications, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 352 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Documents the burgeoning Southern Californian post-war art scene, with several essays following a more or less chronological order, and hundreds of illustrations of artworks, but also of art people (a wonderful 1963 photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked Eve Babitz in front of a replica of his Large Glass in Pasadena, photographs of artists working in their studios, etc). Some names are well known, others less so, but it is the versatility, the creativity and, above all, the richness and depth of this LA art scene that strike the reader-viewer through these richly illustrated pages. The birth of a genuine pop art in California (thanks to some of the most gifted artdealers in the US), of conceptual art, the creation of a new way of making sculpture, all those aspects are tackled in an informative and erudite (sometimes too erudite, though...)text that makes this book a more than valuable addition to the literature on post-war American art.