art avant-garde

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, March 1, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 245 pages, illustrated throughout. Clean, bright pages and tight binding. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) was a towering figure in late nineteenth-century France. The country's greatest public painter, he created murals that decorated museums in Amiens, Rouen, and Lyons as well as major buildings in Paris-most notably the Pantheon, the Sorbonne, and the city hall. Critics from the political right, left, and center, the avant-garde, the Academy, and the state all agreed on the importance of Puvis's murals. Avant-garde artists greatly admired and drew from his work. There was much controversy, however, over the meaning of these murals. This handsomely illustrated book is the first full-length examination of Puvis's murals and their critical reception during the artist's lifetime. Jennifer L. Shaw explains that Puvis's paintings were imagined to embody a vision of France. Although his regional images, allegories of the French heritage, and evocations of the nation as an embracing motherland were all part of a grand tradition of public art, Puvis's painting style was more closely aligned with the avant-garde. Rather than providing a specific narrative or allegory of France, Puvis's murals provoked viewers to experience their own fantasies of Frenchness; rather than using the close brushwork favored by most of his contemporaries, Puvis used large flat areas of color to render his subjects. Shaw persuasively argues that Puvis was the only painter of the period to unite the traditions of public art and modernist form. Her original analysis of Puvis's art underlines his importance to the history of modernism; her examination of the public response to his art illuminates debates about art, subjectivity, and national identity in fin de siecle France.

Hardcover. Philadelphia PA/New Haven CT, Philadelphia Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 336 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. Published to commemorate the centenary of Levy's birth. With 300 photographs, including many unfamiliar works by well-known artists, the catalogue presents a stunning survey of this collection, long hidden from public view. Fading to dust jacket spine and fore edges. Unmarked. A clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. US, VH1 Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 160 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to boards.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 232 pages. The question "What is American art?" might conjure the hyperrealism of Raphaelle Peale and William Harnett, the bold graphic style of Stuart Davis and Jacob Lawrence, or the Precisionist forms of Charles Sheeler. Little known, however, is that such notions of American art are significantly owed to a Russian Jewish immigrant named Edith Halpert. The founder of the Downtown Gallery in New York, Halpert shaped an identity for American art, declaring that its thrilling heterogeneity and democratic values were what most distinguished it from the European avant-garde. For forty-plus years, Halpert's gallery brought recognition and market success to now-legendary American artists--among them Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O'Keeffe, in addition to the artists mentioned above. She relentlessly championed nonwhite, female, and unknown artists and was a formative advisor in the shaping of many of the nation's most celebrated art museums and collections, from San Francisco to Boston. Not content with those achievements, she also pioneered the appreciation and collecting of American folk art. Richly illustrated with works that passed through her groundbreaking gallery, this book tells the extraordinary and largely overlooked story of her career and legacy. The artists Halpert launched into the American canon are household names--and this book compellingly argues that hers should be, as well. In publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. In 1941, after being interned in a concentration camp, he left Europe for the United States, where he eventually became a citizen; during the 40s and 50s, he was to make his name here as one of the most sought-after fashion photographers in the world. But most people are unfamiliar with Blumenfeld's early work, the often bitingly satiric Dada photomontages and collages he produced between 1916 and 1933. This book, put together by Helen Adkins, renowned expert on the Berlin Dada movement, is the first to provide a study and a survey of these early works. Blumenfeld did not intend for these works to be shown publicly, as they were primarily personal gifts to his friends and acquaintance, or were enclosed in love letters to his fiancee. Nonetheless, they were conceived in the Dada spirit (Blumenfeld established the Dutch branch of Dada in 1918) and belong to its story. Approximately 100 works--including many previously unpublished, which Adkins discovered in the artist's family archives and in other public and private collections--are examined within the context of Blumenfeld's life, photographs, drawings and literary works.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 199 pages. The artists' books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets--including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky--collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning 'beyond the mind') that was distinctive in its emphasis on 'sound as such' and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval' (Explodity). In addition, Nancy Perloff examines the profound difference between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism. Still sealed in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. London, Thames and Hudson, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 384 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy with black and white photographs throughout. Light wear ton dust jacket. The life of Erwin Blumenfeld, one of the century's best-known photographers, was by no means conventional. By turns acerbic, self-mocking, playful, even absurd, his autobiography is a compelling, virtuoso account of an extraordinary man. All his subjects--his Jewish family, the Germans, the Vichy French, his models, New York publishers--are dealt equal measures of wit, mockery, and merciless irony. He spares himself least of all. Born in turn-of-the-century Berlin, Blumenfeld was drafted to serve in the First World War, first as an ambulance driver (although he couldn't drive) and then as a bookkeeper in a field brothel, and he was awarded the Iron Cross for giving his sergeant French lessons. Between the wars he was part of an avant-garde circle that included such artists as Else Lasker-Schler, George Grosz, and members of the Dada movement. During the Second World War, Blumenfeld was interned in a series of French camps but eventually arrived in New York, where he found work with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, producing many of their most memorable covers and becoming fashion's highest-paid photographer. From the creator of some of the most striking and influential photographs ever taken, Blumenfeld's autobiography--published here in English for the first time--is a biting and iconoclastic take on the century, and the insightful, gripping story of an exceptional life. Remainder line to bottom edge.

Hardcover. New York, Cowles Magazines Inc., 1st, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 240 pages, hardcover. Red cloth stamped gilt, with a cutout front panel around the phrase "Annual 1953." Tastefully illustrated in color and b&w, with cutouts, fold outs, booklets, etc. By the editor of the short-lived Flair; one of the more visually inventive magazines ever conceived. Designed by and with many drawings by Federico Pallavicini. Fading and slight edgewear to boards, milld tear to front panel at cutout. Rubbing and slight staining to boards as well. Fading to text block edges. Slight cocking to spine. Unmarked. A tight copy. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO SIZE & WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. London, Merrell Publishers, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 256 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Illustrated with over 250 photographs and sketches. Future Beauty is the first comprehensive survey of Japanese avant-garde fashion of the last 30 years. Such designers as Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo made an enormous impact on the world fashion scene in the late twentieth century, challenging established notions of beauty and turning fashion into art.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 282 pages, illustrated in b&w and color. Although Surrealism is usually associated with the 1920s and 1930s, it remained a vital force in Paris throughout the postwar period. This important book offers the first detailed account in English of the trajectory of the French Surrealists in the 1950s and 1960s, giving particular emphasis to the significance of myth for the group in its reception of science fiction and its engagement with fantastic art. Offering new readings of the art and writings of the later generation of Surrealists, Gavin Parkinson demonstrates how they were connected to the larger cultural and political debates of the time. Whereas earlier Surrealist art and writing drew on psychoanalytic practices, younger Surrealists engaged with contemporary issues, ideas, and themes of the period of the Cold War and Algerian War such as parapsychology, space travel, fantastic art, increasing consumerism in Europe, emerging avant-gardes such as Nouveau Realisme, and the rise of the whole genre of conspiracy theory, from Nazi occultism to flying saucers. Futures of Surrealism offers a unique perspective on this brave new world. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 206 pages. Famously unabashed, W. Eugene Smith was photography's most celebrated humanist. As a photo essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and '50s, he established himself as an intimate chronicler of human culture. His photographs of war and disaster, villages and metropolises, doctors and midwives, revolutionized the role of images in journalism, transforming photography for decades to come. When Smith died in 1978, he left behind eighteen dollars in the bank and forty-four thousand pounds of archives. He was only fifty-nine, but he was flat worn-out. His death certificate read "stroke," but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of "everything," from drug and alcohol benders to weeklong work sessions with no sleep. Lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smith's stupefying archive, Sam Stephenson began a quest to trace his footsteps. In Gene Smith's Sink, Stephenson merges traditional biography with rhythmic digressions to revive Smith's life and legacy. Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson profiles a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a Swiss chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; the jazz pianists Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whose music was taped by Smith in his loft; and a series of obscure caregivers who helped keep Smith on his feet. The distillation of twenty years of research, Gene Smith's Sink is an unprecedented look into the photographer's potent legacy and the subjects around him. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Merrell, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wrappers with silver lettering. 191 pages, color plates. The first representative overview of Tooker's work for thirty years, provides a much-deserved and comprehensive examination of the scope of his art. In essays comprising new research and offering fresh insights, it explores his passion for composition, his spirituality and his exploration of identity. Featuring superb reproductions of more than eighty of the artist's timeless images, the book also enables readers to see the unexpected ways in which Tooker's work echoes what has been considered avant-garde in American art and to appreciate the depth of his resonant, prescient imagery. A major new study of one of America's most influential modern painters. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. The 1960s saw a revolution in fashion that was born, like most things new and hip in that era, of youth rebellion in the streets. For the first time, designers didn't dictate the trends. Instead, the latest looks trickled up into the top fashion houses (Halston and Yves Saint Laurent among them), by way of bohemian boutiques and avant-garde labels with names like Granny Takes a Trip and Cosmic Couture, and musicians like the Beatles, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Defying easy definition but becoming an international phenomenon all the same, hippie fashion twisted and turned from trippy to retro and crafty to ethnic. The accompanying idea that one can express a personal style with clothing went against everything about the previous generation's notion of matching suits or ladylike ensembles dictated by social class or profession. Sumptuous photography, dynamic design, and far-out images from the era make Hippie Chic a must-have book that goes past peace signs and patchouli to unearth how hippies forever changed the way fashion functions. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. US, Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. From its founding in 1875, the firm of Liberty has been a byword for high-quality design. Arthur Lasenby Liberty, its founder, set out to transform the appearance of dress and interior decoration; that sense of energy and excitement remains integral to the house, making Liberty a world-recognized name. This account and celebration is divided into chronological sections. It begins with the early emporium and ends with a survey of the institution's influence on post-war aesthetics and design. The Arts and Crafts Movement found Liberty's associated with leading craftsmen-designers. After World War I its textiles continued the famous lines of prints. Now, in keeping with its role as innovator, the firm continues to commission designers and to promote both traditional and avant-garde furniture and artifacts. This history of a unique enterprise reflects in microcosm major developments in taste from the late 19th-century to the present.

Hardcover. NY, Da Capo Press, reprint, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with silver gilt lettering. First published in 1962 Jazz Panorama presents roughly forty short articles from the pages of The Jazz Review from the late 1950s and early 1960s, selected by respected jazz historian Martin Williams, the magazine's co-founder (with Nat Hentoff).This is the type of book that one can dip into from time to time and always find something both enjoyable and educational. Written in clear, understandable prose, the book collects short essays, record reviews (usually of multiple LPs), and two interviews. A wide range of jazz styles and movements is covered here, everything from Dixieland to "third stream" and the avant-garde of Ornette Coleman.The jazz musicians included for discussion range from King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton to Bix Biederbecke. Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Stan Getz, and Miles Davis. 318 pages, clean copy. No dust jacket.

Softcover. Paris / London, Paul Holberton, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 216 pages in color. Jean Helion (1904-1987) became a leading member of the international Abstraction-Creation group in the early 1930s. He then took abstraction to New York, where he advised the avant-garde collector A. E. Gallatin on purchases for his Gallery of Living Art, a crucial influence on the early phases of the developing New York School. In France after World War II, however, he evolved a unique language of painting, employing people and objects that are both contructivist and naturalistic--his own language of signs populated by shop-window dummies, newspaper readers, and startling nudes. In his return to figuration he may be compared to his close friends Balthus and Alberto Giacometti, even though his style is unique. This book is the first in English on the artist for some thirty years. Mild crease to front cover, otherwise a clean, bright copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Softcover. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 143 pages, 145 plates in b&w. Exhibition catalog, light sunning to bottom edge of front cover and spine. Otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Munich/NJ, Prestel, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 256 pages. One of the most important German postwar artists, Joseph Beuys is known for his drawings, performance art, activism, and teaching, influencing a generation of younger artists and expanding the concept of what art is. He had an ambitious goal for his art: to transform western culture into a more peaceful, democratic, and creative place. He also considered everyone to be an artist and that art and life should not be viewed separately. This book pulls together all of the avant-garde artist's posters from his entire oeuvre. His earliest posters often announced exhibitions of his own performance art, while later posters expressed his philosophical and political opinions, such as those for Germany's Green Party, which he was a founding member of. This book includes full page illustrations of Beuys' most important posters, essays about Beuys' influence, an extensive biography of the artist and a complete catalogue of all posters created under his guidance. Text in English and German. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 420 pages, illustrated with mostly b&w plates, 8 color pages. Small remainder stamp on bottom edge. "Tiege was at one and the same time both an agent provocateur and seismograph, at once provoking action and debate and yet simultaneously reacting with the utmost sensitivity to the shifting political spectrum of his time."--from the introduction by Kenneth FramptonKarel Teige (1900-1951), a leading figure of the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, participated in every important argument and controversy of those turbulent years. He edited the most influential avant-garde journals on Czech and international cultural affairs and wrote profoundly original essays and books on the theory and criticism of art and architecture. He also produced paintings, collages, photomontages, film scripts, book covers, and typefaces and participated in theatrical performances.

Softcover. NY, Guggenheim Museum, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 267 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. In 1915, Kazimir Malevich changed the future of modern art when his experiments in painting led the Russian avant-garde into pure abstraction. He called his innovation Suprematism--an art of pure geometric form meant to be universally comprehensible regardless of cultural or ethnic origin. His Suprematist masterpiece, White Square on White (1920-27), continues to inspire artists throughout the world. Focused exclusively on this defining moment in Malevich's career, Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism features nearly 120 paintings, drawings and objects, among them several recently discovered masterworks. In addition, the book includes previously unpublished letters, essays and diaries, along with essays by international scholars, who shed new light on this popular figure and his devotion to the spiritual in art.

Softcover. NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, profusely illustrated in both color and black and white. 300 pages. 4to, glossy pictorial wrappers. Extensive monograph of artist's life and work. Published to accompany the exhibition held in NY: Whitney Museum of American Art, February 29 to June 2, 1996; two additional venues. Two exhibition mailings laid in, one addressed to film director Bob Rafelson. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pale rose boards with photo label on front cover. Over one hundred of the most outstanding photographs taken by photographer, model, and surrealist muse Lee Miller, Introduced to photography at an early age, Lee Miller honed her craft in Paris, where she associated with the Surrealists and avant-garde artists including Jean Cocteau and Picasso. Together with Man Ray she accidentally discovered the distinctive technique of solarization to create mesmerizing halo effects. After establishing her own photographic studio in New York, where she became a prominent commercial photographer, she then moved to the Middle East and Europe before becoming the official war photographer for Vogue, a period during which she took many of her most iconic photographs. This evocative book collects Lee Miller's most famous documentary, fashion, and war works, as well as photographs of Miller, all carefully compiled by her son the photographer Antony Penrose, with a foreword by actress Kate Winslet, Cllean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grand Central Publishing, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 388 pages. Drawing on contributions from remaining members, contemporaneous musicians, critics, filmmakers, and the generation of artists who emerged in their wake, this "monumental origin story" celebrates the legacy of the Velvet Underground, which burns brighter than ever in the 21st century. Rebellion always starts somewhere, and in the music world of the transgressive teen--whether it be the 1960s or the 2020s--the Velvet Underground represents ground zero. Crystallizing the idea of the bohemian, urban, narcissistic art school gang around a psychedelic rock and roll band--a stylistic idea that evolved in the rarefied environs of Andy Warhol's Factory--the Velvets were the first major American rock group with a mixed gender line-up. They never smiled in photographs, wore sunglasses indoors, and invented the archetype that would be copied by everyone from Sid Vicious to Bobby Gillespie. They were avant-garde nihilists, writing about drug abuse, prostitution, paranoia, and sado-masochistic sex at a time when the rest of the world was singing about peace and love.