abstract art

Hardcover. New York , Praeger Publishers, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 172 pages, profusely illustrated with nearly 200 color and b&w plates of Nevelson's work. Dark blue cloth, pictorial dust jacket. Slight edgewear and rubbing to jacket, else a very nice, tight, clean copy.

Hardcover. Santa Monica CA, RoseGallery/DAP, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Red and burgundy cloth boards with yellow stamped lettering. 144 pages. Color and b&w illustrations, portraits. Eyes in His Eyes reintroduces some of the artist's overlooked masterpieces, and reveals, for the first time, a broad selection of never-before-seen images from his private archives. In his 80-year career, Alvarez Bravo printed, published and exhibited only a thousand images. This portfolio, culled with the help of the artist himself, and completed after his death, is full of unfamiliar abstractions, portraits, landscapes and street photography.

Hardcover. London, Flame Tree Publishing, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 192 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Color photographs throughout. Only light edgewear. Matching laminated boards.

Hardcover. NY, Skira Rizzoli, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 176 pages. The first publication dedicated exclusively to Mark Rothko's art during the critical formative period of the 1940s. Examining the development and artistic exploration of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, this unprecedented volume presents the works of American artist Mark Rothko from the 1940s, a time when his most essential development as a painter occurred, dramatically and in a very compact space of time. During this period, Rothko moved from expressive figurative and surrealist canvases to more abstract multiform subjects and finally to his signature abstractions--luminous rectangles of color suspended in space. Richly illustrated with works by Rothko and his contemporaries, introduction by Todd Herman and essays by prominent Rothko scholars, this important new book deepens our understanding of Rothko's art during this vital period, and that of the mature works that emerged from it.

Hardcover. Munich, Williams College Museum of Art/Prestel, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 812 pages. Blue cloth slip case, 2193 illustrations including 100 color plates. Book still in shrink wrap, in excellent condition. If you think that Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924) only produced decorative park and beach scenes rendered in an abstract style, these two new volumes will set the record straight. Thanks in large part to the generosity of the Eugenie Prendergast Foundation, Mathews has produced a splendid exhibition catalog that surveys the career of the American Impressionist. She also labored for over six years as part of a team of art historians to create a monumental, ten-pound, slip-cased tome that documents the total artistic output of the two Prendergast brothers, Maurice and Charles, A Catalogue Raisonne. A good balance has been struck between the books. The exhibition catalog, of interest to both lay people and scholars, offers a chronological discussion of Maurice's ever-evolving style along with selected works represented by 130 glorious color plates. In contrast, the comprehensive catalogue raisonne , with its highly detailed essays by eight art historians, features 2200 illustrations, 100 of which are in color. All works discussed are represented by an image and catalog entry and range from the sketchbooks, monotypes, and applied graphics of Maurice to the carved and painted panels and sculpture of Charles (1863-1948). A Herculean achievement, the catalogue raisonne will long serve as a cornerstone in the arena of American art history reference.

Hardcover. US, Cameron & Hollis, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover. Remarkable British artist Merlyn Evans developed a highly personal abstract style, combining plant, crustacean and mechanical forms. His work was fundamentally shaped by his conviction that art should be an engagement with life, reflecting psychological, ethical and political concerns. This monograph focuses on the life and work of Evans.

Softcover. Frankfurt, Michael Laub, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 96 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Minor wear to covers. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art/Steidl, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Flexible boards, 264 pages. B/w and color illustrations throughout. Published to accompany exhibition at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Super clean. By repeatedly re-photographing her images, transferring them from video to film and back again, and manipulating them digitally, Michal Rovner creates photographic and video imagery that abstract familiar subjects like houses, animals, and people into ambiguous and iconic forms. Working with representation but against the traditions of narrative and documentary purpose, her artworks imply a tentative universe, one that is paradoxically peaceful and unsettled, vivid and shrouded, and completely counter-factual. If the changing nature of art has resulted in a general blurring of boundaries--between painting and photography, reality and memory, presence and absence--Rovner mines this haziness, refuses to respect borders, and exists completely in The Space Between.

Hardcover. London, Royal Academy Books, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 314 pages, color plates. From Jacob Epstein to Sarah Lucas, this magnificent book explores sculpture in Britain over the last 130 years. Including works by varied artists such as Frederic Lord Leighton, Alfred Gilbert, Eric Gill, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Anthony Caro, Richard Long, and Damien Hirst, the book highlights the dialogues between British and international sculpture, examines the importance of the country's landscape as a location and medium, and looks at the perennial choice faced by the sculptor between figuration and abstraction. Sculpture has changed dramatically in the last century. This compelling book documents these seismic shifts. Remainder dot on bottom edge, otherwise a clean copy.

Hardcover. Munch/London/NY, Prestel, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap. 656 pages. Published on the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Neue Galerie New York, this stunning volume celebrates the varied achievements of modern art history in the German-speaking world by examining historical developments in Austria and Germany from 1890 to 1940. Illustrated throughout with exquisite reproductions of the museum's holdings, this book considers the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and his writings on the fine arts and examines the founding of the Secessionist artists' organizations in Germany and Austria. Insightful essays trace the emergence of Expressionism and abstraction, as well as the development of such movements as Dada and New Objectivity. Evolutions in architecture and design are appraised through the legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as the establishment of the Darmstadt Artists' Colony and the Wiener Werkstatte. The book also examines the role of the German Werkbund and the founding of the Bauhaus school. Finally, the book briefly addresses the horrific impact of the National Socialists' degenerate art campaign, which resulted in incalculable damage and led to the exile and death of artists and designers of the era. From well-known artists such as Otto Dix, Josef Hoffmann, Vasily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, and Egon Schiele, to lesser recognized but equally important figures, including Albert Birkle, Alfred Kubin, Felix Nussbaum, and Dagobert Peche, this book offers an authoritative and kaleidoscopic look at a crucial moment in history and a portrait of radical thought that changed forever the way we experience art in our lives. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Frederick A. Praeger, 1st US, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket. 208 indexed illustrations. Several full color reproductions. Translated from the French by Thomas Walton. 255 pages. "Elgar has made use of valuable information from Mondrian's contemporaries in his account of this dedicated artist.The plates show all the phases through which Mondrian's art passed, from the traditional landscapes and still lifes of his early years, through the more personal and more abstract works conceived in series, to the eventual emergence of his fully mature style." Three color plates/postcards of his art laid / paster on inside covers. Small name on front fy leaf. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press , 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 192 pages, color and b&w illustrations. An extraordinary look at how the style of Piet Mondrian's abstract paintings was posthumously appropriated by 1960s fashion, Pop art, and consumer culture. Yves Saint Laurent's 1965 Mondrian dresses are among the twentieth century's most celebrated and recognizable fashions, but the context of their creation involves much more than meets the eye. In Mondrian's Dress, Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis offer a fresh approach to the coupling of Piet Mondrian's interwar paintings with Saint Laurent's couture designs by exposing the rampant merchandising and commodification that these works experienced in the 1960s. The authors situate the consolidation of Saint Laurent's fashion brand alongside the work of such Pop artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann, and show how conventional understandings of Mondrian's avant-garde abstractions were transformed by the mass circulation of his signature style. Beyond its attention to 1960s fashion, Pop art, and consumer culture, Mondrian's Dress offers critical assessments of Saint Laurent's so-called dialogue with art, the remarkable art collection that he built with his partner Pierre Berge, and the crucial role that photography plays in the marketing of couture.

Softcover. New York, George Braziller, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Softcover, 174 pages. This catalog, featuring 130 b&w illustrations and 40 color plates cover almost all of Graves major paintings. This is a very nice and clean copy.

Softcover. NY, PaceWildenstein, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 60 pages illustrated in color. Catalogue from the exhibit, Naum Gabo Pioneer of Abstract Sculpture November 4 - December 11, 1999. Essay by Graham Williams. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Rockland, Maine, William A. Farnsworth Library, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 88 pages. Exhibition catalog. Perfect binding, covers completely illustrated in full-color, foreword by Marius B. Peladeau. introduction by Dorothy C. Miller, profuse full-page color and b&w plates, biographical summary. Very mild rubbing to covers, else a clean, tight copy.

NY, Back Bay Books , reprint, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 926 pages, color and b&w illustrations. Five women revolutionize the modern art world in postwar America in this "gratifying, generous, and lush" true story from a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting -- not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Bill Hodges Gallery, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 96 pages. Profusely illustrated with color plates and figures. Accompanied a 2009 gallery exhibition; Includes an artist chronology and list of exhibitions; One of 2000 copies in this edition. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages. 106 illustrations 97 in color. Still in shrinkwrap. The first exploration of the art that Georgia O'Keeffe retained for her personal collection, including works that have never been publicly exhibited. Georgia O'Keeffe was one of America's preeminent artists and one of the first to experiment with abstract form, though she never abandoned her deep response to and observation of nature. An enormously popular artist, she became identified and respected as an independent American spirit through both her art and her life. At the time of her death in 1986, Georgia O'Keeffe owned more than half of the approximately 2,000 works she had produced during the eighty years she was active as an artist: some 400 works in oil, charcoal, pastel, pencil, and watercolor, as well as more than 700 sketches. For various reasons, she had always kept a portion of her art out of the public eye and these works were not published, exhibited, or available for purchase during her lifetime. Among the works that had been exhibited and sold over the years, some were repurchased by O'Keeffe as they became available. This book explores for the first time the significance of O'Keeffe's collection of her own work. Approximately 75 seminal works, dating from about 1910 through the 1960s and reproduced in full color, document the range and quality of the art that O'Keeffe either chose to retain in her estate or consciously distributed to institutions in her lifetime and as bequests.

Softcover. NY, Picador, reprint, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 318 pages. Calvin Tomkins first discovered the work of Robert Rauschenberg in the late 1950s, when he began to look seriously at contemporary art. While gazing at Rauschenberg's painting Double Feature, Tomkins felt compelled to make some kind of literal connection to the work, and it is in that sprit that "for the last forty years it's been [his] ambition to write about contemporary art not as a critic or a judge, but as a participant." Tomkins has spent many of those years writing about Robert Rauschenberg, whom he rapidly came to see as "one of the most inventive and influential artists of his generation." So it seemed natural to make Rauschenberg the focus of Off the Wall, which deals with the radical changes that have made advanced visual art such a powerful force in the world.Off the Wall chronicles the astonishingly creative period of the 1950s and 1960s, a high point in American art. In his in his collaborations with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and as a pivotal figure linking abstract expressionism and pop art, Rauschenberg was part of a revolution during which artists moved art off the walls of museums and galleries and into the center of the social scene. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 120 pages. Hypnotic flowering vines, black-and-white Op Art odysseys, and seas of patriotic warships are just some of the beautiful, strange, and fantastic patterns that have adorned the walls of homes the world over. In the tradition of best-seller Fabulous Fabrics of the 50s, this home decor reference book entertains while it inspires with flawless reproductions of 150 classic and unique wallpapers; many of which are drawn from the collections of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Covering every decade of the century, Off the Wall celebrates robust pattern and detail in all their manifestations. Lively text and captions help to capture the designers, trends, and world events relevant to each piece, and the broader evolution of the genre, from a 1948 mural of rural America, replete with plump livestock and ripening fields, to the boldly colored abstractions produced in the 1950s by Herman Miller for MOMA. A useful resource for collectors, designers, decorators, and artists, Off the Wall is a colorful and captivating tribute to a widely appreciated medium. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Assouline, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. This is the first comprehensive survey of the work of Paul Himmel (b.1914) and the first publication about his work in 40 years. The son of immigrant Bohemian intellectuals, Himmel took up photography as a teenager and studied graphic journalism under art director Alexey Brodovitch. He worked from 1947 to 1969 as a professional photographer for such clients as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and several of his photos were included in Edward Steichen's "Family of Man" exhibition. By 1969, he had become disenchanted with photography and retrained as a psychotherapist. An exhibit of his photographs in New York City in 1996 brought him back to public attention. Himmel's photographs are genuinely fresh and unusual. Many are high-contrast, emphasizing the design and patterns contained in an image; subjects range from New York City scenes to nudes reduced to grainy vestiges to color abstractions. This monograph richly reproduces Himmel's engaging pictures of humanity in all its variations and is recommended for all fine art and photography collections.

Softcover. NY, Taschen, reprint, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 256 pages, color photographs. Pictorial French fold wrappers. 'American photographer Paul Outerbridge created shimmering "artifical paradises.' From Cubist still life images to nudes, his sensitivity to light and shadow and pioneering use of color transformed everyday scenarios into near-abstract compositions. This unique aesthetic helped him seductively champion the expressionistic, as much as commercial, potential of color photography.' Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. Kerber, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 176 pages. In 1953, Peter Keetman spent a week at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg. The result was a series of exceptionally clear, almost abstractly detailed photographs that document the entire production process of the VW Beetle. Storage stacks of shiny metal bumpers look like so many Modernist sculptures; car bodies hovering above the assembly line retrospectively form a surreal Pop art montage. This oversize publication reproduces the Volkswagenwerk series in full, in their original size, together with texts that refer both to this series and to Keetman's greater oeuvre. Keetman was known throughout his career as photographer of systemically conceived picture series on themes that included close-ups of water and oil drops, a style of working he developed as a member of Fotoform. Fotoform, a German movement of the 1950s of which Keetman was a primary proponent, was critical in the development of German photography as it is today: the group's "subjective photography" combined scientific objectivity with abstraction. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO SIZE & WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Harry N Abrams, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 210 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Faint foxing to edges and end papers. Clean, tight copy. 60 color plates, 53 BW illus., 47 sepia duotone, one fold-out. Considers the work of Modern Realist Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924). With a foreword by the artist, known for his "...larger-than-life nudes [posed] under a cold light, motionless and abstracted, in slashing diagonal compositions, often veering off the canvas entirely." Includes one page of notes, chronology and list of exhibitions, selected bibliography and index.