art avant-garde

Hardcover. NY/, Taschen, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket with mild edgewear to bottom of dust jacket, 251 pages. Copiously illustrated in black and white. In French, German and English. Essays by Andre Breton, Emmanuelle de l'Ecotais and Katherine Ware. Ray was a charismatic figure with a knack for creating and energizing artistic movements, influencing and befriending many leading lights of the European Avant-Garde, from Dadaists to Surrealists and including Duchamp, Picasso, Satie, Cocteau and Breton. Ray's vast photographic oeuvre is often considered to be his most important and ground-breaking body of work. Clean copy. DUE TO WEIGHT, This is a heavy and oversized book and will require extra shipping. International customers please ask for a shipping quote before purchasing.

Softcover. Boston MA, Little, Brown and Company, reprint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 319 pages, paperback. Man Ray's extraordinary autobiography, which reveals the entertaining life and times of the remarkable artist. Color and black-and-white illustrations throughout. Mild rubbing and edgewear to wraps. Lower fore edge corner slightly creased. Light pen mark to front flyleaf. A bright and tight copy.

Hardcover. Steidl, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages. In 1935, when the influential New York collector Julien Levy conceived the exhibition Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs by Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans & Alvarez Bravo, no one could imagine the eminent place this trio would come to occupy in the avant garde of their time, nor the immense influence they would have on future generations of photographers. Collected here for the first time since the famous 1935 exhibition, this treasure of images by three great masters of twentieth-century photography places us face to face with the history of the medium in the making. The show was one of the first exhibitions Henri Cartier-Bresson ever had, and this book is the last project he considered before his death in 2004.

Softcover. Surrey UK, FAB Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 352 pages, b/w illustrations. The essential subterranean tract of 2005, Midnight Mavericks is a rollicking tour through the hearts and minds of today's most uncompromising artists from the lower depths of entertainment culture. Profiled are controversial underground icons, angry stand-up comedians, exploitation filmmakers, hardcore crime novelists and controversial cartoonists, including Abel Ferrara, John Waters, Andrew WK, Chris D, Mike Diana, Lydia Lunch and Jim Goad. Includes Sounds from the Underground, a bonus 70minute CD of interview excerpts and songs from the musicians featured in the book.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, Original black lettered cloth quarter laid on pictorial boards, 184 pages. A fascinating exploration of how photography, graphic design, and popular magazines converged to transform American visual culture at mid-century. This dynamic study examines the intersection of modernist photography and American commercial graphic design between 1930 and 1960. Avant-garde strategies in photography and design reached the United States via European emigres, including Bauhaus artists forced out of Nazi Germany. The unmistakable aesthetic made popular by such magazines as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue--whose art directors, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman, were both immigrants and accomplished photographers--emerged from a distinctly American combination of innovation, inclusiveness, and pragmatism. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 revolutionary photographs, layouts, and cover designs, Modern Look considers the connections and mutual influences of such designers and photographers as Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Herbert Bayer, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Cipe Pineles, and Paul Rand. Essays draw a lineage from European experimental design to innovative work in American magazine design at mid-century and offer insights into the role of gender in fashion photography and political activism in the mass media.

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. Lanham MD, Scarecrow Press, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 331 pages, b&w illustrations. Like most ground-breaking art forms, contemporary creative music is rarely understood or accepted in its own time, and for those reasons, can largely go unheard. Music and the Creative Spirit: Innovators in Jazz, Improvisation, and the Avant Garde aims to give today's brightest music innovators due recognition and respect, celebrating their work and creativity. Through personal interviews, artists such as Pat Metheny, Regina Carter, Joshua Redman, Fred Anderson, Dave Holland, Bill Frisell, David Murray, and John Zorn-to name just a few-offer clear, frank discussions about music, creativity, work, society, culture, current events, and more. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 72 pages. A true masterpiece of book design and illustration for beginning readers, this collection pairs well-known nursery tales with uniquely beautiful period illustrations that look as fresh and vital today as they did six decades ago, when the book was first published in Great Britain. Never before published in the United States, My First Nursery Book features four beloved stories: "Who Killed Cock Robin?," "The Gingerbread Man," "Three Little Pigs," and "The Three Bears." Franciszka Themerson, a Polish avant-garde artist and filmmaker who returned to children's book illustration as a refugee in London in the 1940s, is regarded as one of the great talents in classic children's book illustration. Finally, American children can experience and enjoy this remarkable volume, filled with stunning illustrations that will bring a new audience to Themerson's genius.

Softcover. London, Tate, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 208 pages. Softcover. Color and black and white pictures throughout. Light edgewear to wrappers.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 248 pages. b&w photos throughout. During his 50-year association with the Village Voice, Fred W. McDarrah (1926-2007) covered the city's downtown scenes, producing an unmatched and encyclopedic visual record of people, movements, and events. McDarrah frequented the bars, cafes, and galleries where writers, artists, and musicians gathered, and he was welcome in the apartments and lofts of the city's avant-garde cultural aristocracy. He captured every vital moment, from Jack Kerouac reading poetry, to Bob Dylan hanging out in Sheridan Square, to Andy Warhol filming in the Factory, to the Stonewall Riots. Through his lens, we see the legendary birth of ideas and attitudes that continue to shape the character and allure of New York today.

Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 283 pages. An examination of the pioneering Caribbean and Latin American artists who resided in New York prior to WWII and shaped the American avant-garde Between 1900 and 1942, New York City was the site of extraordinary creative exchange where artists could share ideas in a global context. The swiftly changing urban landscape before and between the World Wars inspired the erosion of artistic boundaries and fostered a new climate of modernist experimentation. Nexus New Yorkfocuses on key artists from the Caribbean and Latin America who entered into dynamic cultural and social dialogues with the American-based avant-garde and participated in the development of a new modern discourse. Featuring both celebrated and little-known figures of this period, including Carlos Enriquez, Alice Neel, Marius de Zayas, Francis Picabia, Joaquin Torres-Garcia,Jose Clemente Orozco, Matta, and Robert Motherwell, contributing authors also discuss the specific environments in which they flourished, including the Art Students League, the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, and the New School for Social Research. A fascinating look at 20th-century modernism, this book provides the first view of the important encounters between artists of the Americas.

Softcover. London, Tate Publishing, 1st, 2007, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. 136 pages, 40 color & 50 black & white illustrations. Helio Oiticia (1937-80) was one of the most influential artists of the late twentieth century. At the end of the 1960s Oiticica was invited to exhibit at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. This book captures not only a pivotal moment in the life and career of a unique artist but also in the development of the avant-garde in London.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 318 pages. In Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde, Xiaobing Tang studies the art and art theories of the first half of the twentieth century, when modern Chinese art and literature emerged. He argues that the most consequential expression of the avant-garde was the modern woodcut movement that thrived in China in the 1930s. In this innovative study--also the first comprehensive account of this Chinese movement available in English--Tang examines the aesthetic, intellectual, and social appeal of the modern woodcut and places the movement at the intersection of historical events, individual efforts, and competing discourses on art. He also shows how the woodcut movement drew upon international inspiration--from German Expressionism, Soviet wood engravings, and Japanese creative prints.

Hardcover. London, Reaktion Books, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, b&w photos. Ornette Coleman's career encompassed the glory years of jazz and the American avant-garde. Born in segregated Fort Worth, Texas, during the Great Depression, the African-American composer and musician was zeitgeist incarnate. Steeped in the Texas blues tradition, he and jazz grew up together, as the brassy blare of big band swing gave way to bebop--a faster music for a faster, postwar world. At the luminous dawn of the Space Age and New York's 1960s counterculture, Coleman gave voice to the moment. Lauded by some, maligned by many, he forged a breakaway art sometimes called "the new thing" or "free jazz." Featuring previously unpublished photographs of Coleman and his contemporaries, this book tells the compelling story of one of America's most adventurous musicians and the sound of a changing world. Clean copy.

Softcover. London, Phaidon Press, reprint, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Softcover, 255 pages, b&w and color photographs throughout. Light fading to dust jacket spine. Else a very clean, tight copy. "Paul Rand (1914-96) was a pioneering figure in American graphic design. Adopting what he called a 'problem solving' approach to design, he drew on the ideas of European avant-garde art movements, such as Cubism, Constructivism and De Stijl, and synthesized them to produce his own distinctive graphic language."

Hardcover. New York , Thames and Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 112 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Louis Stettner is one of the last living members of the avant-garde New York School of photography of the 1950s, which challenged many of the long-accepted foundations of art form. His Penn Station series of the late 1950s represents some of his most important work, gathered here in a single form for the first time. The series is less a portrait of the building than a study of people at once in transit and in suspension. 

Softcover. Paris, Musee de la Vie Romantique, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 143 pages. Softcover. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Black and white photographs throughout. French text.

Hardcover. Prestel Publishing, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 576 pages. Unlike many other artistic media, photographys origins are well documented, as are its ever-changing technologies and applications. Written by an international team of experts, this definitive history of photography looks at every step of the fields dynamic evolution, period by period and movement by movement. Each key genre is chronologically presented within its social, economic, and political context, along with close analysis of specially selected works that best exemplify the characteristics of the period. With more than 500 gorgeous examples in black and white and color, the book explores in-depth virtually every aspect of the medium since its first public demonstration in 1839 to the latest innovations: from early portraits and the birth of photojournalism to travel photography and the mapping of the world; from the Pictorialists to the avant-garde; from celebrity and fashion to documentary and landscape. Along the way readers will learn why some photographs are considered iconic, and why the medium as an art form continues to challenge and enthrall us. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st US, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 588 pages, several color plates. Before Picasso became Picasso-the iconic artist now celebrated as one of France's leading figures-he was constantly surveilled by the French police. Amid political tensions in the spring of 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services-the first of many entries in an extensive case file. Though he soon emerged as the leader of the cubist avant-garde, and became increasingly wealthy as his reputation grew worldwide, Picasso's art was largely excluded from public collections in France for the next four decades. The genius who conceived Guernica in 1937 as a visceral statement against fascism was even denied French citizenship three years later, on the eve of the Nazi occupation. In a country where the police and the conservative Academie des Beaux-Arts represented two major pillars of the establishment at the time, Picasso faced a triple stigma-as a foreigner, a political radical, and an avant-garde artist. Picasso the Foreigner approaches the artist's career and art from an entirely new angle, making extensive use of fascinating and long-overlooked archival sources. In this groundbreaking narrative, Picasso emerges as an artist ahead of his time not only aesthetically but politically, one who ignored national modes in favor of contemporary cosmopolitan forms. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise a bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Rizzoli, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Pictorial photography is noted for its artistic expressiveness, careful design and composition, and muted focus. In 1914 Clarence White (1871-1925) left Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession group, abandoned his ambitions to be a photographic illustrator, and opened the Manhatten-based Clarence H. White School of Photography. Lecturers at his school included Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Edward Steichen. White's unique teaching skills, especially his encouragement of women students, nurtured the careers of such talented photographers as Margaret Bourke-White, Laura Gilpin, and Dorothea Lange. Presented by the Detroit Institute of Arts and the George Eastman House, this companion volume for a traveling exhibition contains the elegant photographic imagery of White and his students. The clear text by two photography curators imparts how the revered teacher's romantic pictorialism became the foundation for the student's avant-garde modernism. By far the most substantial review of White's work and influence in print.

Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The work of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), whose orderly black-and-white squares, punctuated occasionally by primary colors are instantly recognizable, played a crucial role in shaping the avant-garde art of the twentieth century. Each section of this visual journey through his life and career takes its inspiration from the location of one of Mondrian's studios and traces his path from Amsterdam to Paris, and via the Dutch village of Laren to London and New York. Each of these locations represents a distinct stage in the development of Mondrian's art: from the naturalistic paintings of the 1890s and the experimental neo-Impressionist works of the early twentieth century to his involvement with the De Stijl movement and his famous grid paintings, and finally the bold dynamism of his late work in the United States, inspired by the rhythms of jazz and the buzzing metropolis. As Mondrian's art took the simplification of form to an extreme, the walls of his studios became an ever-changing surface made up of cardboard rectangles painted in primary colors, white, and gray. Illustrated by a wealth of paintings as well as personal photographs, documents, and texts written by Mondrian himself, the book captures every facet of this uncompromising artist's quest to represent the spirit of the modern world. Illustrated in color throughout

Hardcover. London, Tate, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages, color and b&w illustrations. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Provocative and entertaining, Pop Life examines how artists since the 1980s have cultivated their public persona as a product, and conjured a dazzling mix of media, commerce, and glamour to build their own "brands." Beginning with the grandfather of Pop, Andy Warhol, who manufactured mass-produced wares in The Factory in the 1960s, the book explores Jeff Koons' infamous Made in Heaven series-showcasing his marriage and sexual relations with Italian porn-star and latter-day politician Illona Staller (aka La Cicciolina)-and his stainless steel Rabbit sculpture; an iconic array of golden spot and butterfly paintings from Damien Hirst's recordbreaking 2008 auction; and a reconstruction of Keith Haring's Pop Shop in New York. Takashi Murakami's designs for Louis Vuitton are also included, along with works by Richard Prince, Martin Kippenberger, Tracey Emin, and many more.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 238 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Covering the period from the Revolution to the beginning of World War II, this book considers Soviet avant-garde photography and film in the context of political history and culture. Three essays trace this generation of artists, their experiments with new media, and their pursuit of a new political order. A wealth of stunning photographs, film stills, and film posters, as well as magazine and book designs, demonstrate that their output encompassed a spectacular range of style, content, and perspective, and an extraordinary sense of the power of the photograph to change the world.

Hardcover. Princeton University Press, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Original pictorial boards (in publisher's unopened shrinkwrap). 280 pages illustrated in b&w and color. Alice Friedman tells the fascinating story of the queer avant-garde of the 1920s and '30s in New York, Paris, and Venice, as seen through the eyes of Max Ewing (1903-1934), a young musician, photographer, and man-about-town who, although virtually unknown today, moved in extraordinary circles. Among his friends and acquaintances, he listed Carl Van Vechten, Gertrude Stein, Muriel Draper, Romaine Brooks, Tallulah Bankhead. In his photographs and letters, we meet the rising stars of modern art, music, dance, and literature and enter a world of interracial friendship, "queer space," and experimentation that shone brightly before being swept away by the Depression.