art biography

Hardcover. Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 207 pages with full colored plate illustrations, as well as black and white illustrations and photos. Remainder spray on bottom edge. Bound in blue cloth. Tightly bound, clean copy. Dust jacket shows a little bit of wear on corners, protected by a mylar cover.The first complete biography of a major American artist who devoted both his life & his immense talents to the realistic portrayal of the frontier West." Frank Tenney Johnson (1874 - 1939) was a painter of the Old American West, and he popularized a style of painting cowboys which became known as "The Johnson Moonlight Technique".

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. , 1st Edition, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 160 pages. Hardcover. Color and b/w illustrations throughout. Dust jacket unclipped, excellent. Cover boards bound in red cloth, gilt title on spine, all excellent. Binding tight. Spine straight. Pages and edges clean and unmarked. In beautiful condition. More than one hundred reproductions--58 in full-color--bring to life this quintessentially American artist and the dramatic and colorful imagery that has become part of America's epic story.

Hardcover. Garden City, Duobleday & Company Inc., First Edition, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 537 pages. Hardcover. Black cloth covered boards with white titles to spine. Black & white illustrations. Dust jacket with light, marginal wear, now protected with a plastic cover. Tight binding, clean & unmarked pages throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Abbeville Press, 1st thus, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Illustrated with drawings. Index. Bibliography. 487 pages. Remington, a prolific letter writer, was also an inveterate doodler. Many of these previously unpublished drawings are a part of this collection. Correspondence includes notes to his family and correspondence with President Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, Poultney Bigelow, Francis Parkman, Elizabeth Custer and others. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Flagstaff, AZ, Northland Press, 1st, 1972, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 115 pages. 30 color reproductions throughout. Beautifully illustrating the skills of this remarkable man, accompanying each of his paintings with notes describing techniques employed, many with revealing comments by the artist himself. Dark blue cloth, gilt lettering to spine and front cover, color slightly faded at edges. Pictorial dust jacket with light edge wear and faint smudges to front cover. Tight binding.

Hardcover. Syracuse University Press, 3rd. Ed., 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 276 pages. Color and b&w illustrations. Harold Weston's Freedom in the Wilds brings an informal history of the rugged Adirondack wilderness together with Weston's own adventures there as an artist. The vivid and spirited stories he gathered from guides, lumbermen, and visionaries continue to make the case for preserving the wild lands of the region. First published in 1971, the book became a classic of Adirondack literature notable for its exploration of the dynamic relationship between wilderness and creativity and its ever more relevant appeal to protect an area within ourselves forever wild. In this third edition, Rebecca Foster brings Weston's fascinating personal story to the foreground. A new section of the book with excerpts from Weston's rich storehouse of letters and diaries will be a revelation to fans of Weston's work or for anyone interested in the growth of an impassioned, artistic mind. Here too are new illustrations, explanatory notes, and an introduction tracing the irrepressible energy behind Weston's accomplishments, including the writings in this book.

Hardcover. D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers,Schirmer/Mosel, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 280 pages. The first 38 pages of this oversized book are devoted to a biography of Frida Kahlo's life and a discussion of some of her most famous paintings. Several vintage color and black & white photos are also included in this section. The remaining pages of this book are the plates...large full page images of her paintings reproduced in full color and detail. Each painting is titled and dated, the medium used and the current whereabouts of the original piece.

Hardcover. Boston, Bulfinch, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. In his beautifully illustrated survey of Frida Kahlo's work, Lozano (art history, Iberoamerican Univ., Mexico City) explores her life and paintings in a series of essays that range from a poetic study by noted Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiv is to a short, prosaic piece written in 1943 by her husband, Diego Rivera, to an academic essay by Lozano himself. The common thread is how Kahlo's pre-Columbian background helped her find her own identity in the world and in the artist circles she frequented. To create a portrait of a woman so talented yet so tortured, Lozano uses Kahlo's own stunning images, offering high-quality reproductions of some of Kahlo's most famous works as well as some of her lesser-known pieces. Previously unseen photos of Kahlo at work in her studio are also included. The detail and clarity of the images is incredible, allowing the reader to explore each painting thoroughly.

Softcover. Washington DC, Smithsonian, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 60 pages. 24 color plates, high quality printing, interview, short biography; part of Photographers at Work / A Smithsonian Series.

hardcover. NY, Knopf , 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 448 pages. Black & white photos and illustrations. Like new. Purely out of artistic ambition, Armenian-American abstract painter Gorky (1895-1948; born in Turkey as Vostanig Adoian) fabricated a new identity, complete with an Ivy League education and personal histories with master artists, on arriving in the United States. Spender (Within Tuscany), who is married to Gorky's oldst daughter, unhesitatingly exposes the painter's many "tall tales." He also assesses Gorky's difficulty in arriving at his own aesthetic until late in life in terms of both the artist's ties to the artistic patriarchs of the previous generation, the Surrealists (including Breton, Duchamp and Brancusi) and his complex status as a forerunner who eventually became alienated from the New York Abstract Expressionists (particularly de Kooning and Rothko). Spender derives much information from anecdotal sources, including an interview with de Kooning, and assumes a chatty tone in dealing with other artists. But he becomes increasingly less sympathetic to Gorky, whose last years are presented from the perspectives of Spender's wife and her mother. Nonetheless, painting constantly despite failing health, family problems and critical indifference, Gorky's frustrations are heartbreaking. Equally compelling is the window opened on New York's art scene when it was still a small clique. Gorky was so in love with the "artist" archetype that he not only lied about himself but also plagiarized anecdotes, artistic statements, love letters and possibly even his own suicide note. Spender preserves the personal dimensions of his subject while demonstrating that the painter should have adopted a youthful declaration. "I shall be a great artist or if not a great crook"as his motto. 90 b&w illustrations.

Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics Books, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 220 pages, color illustrations. A critical biography of Mort Meskin, one of the 20th century's most influential comic book artists. Clean copy in a bright dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 398 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Cloth covers with stamped decoration on spine. Light soil, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Da Capo Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Fug You is Ed Sanders's unapologetic and often hilarious account of eight key years of "total assault on the culture," to quote his novelist friend William S. Burroughs. Fug You traces the flowering years of New York's downtown bohemia in the sixties, starting with the marketing problems presented by publishing Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, as it faced the aboveground's scrutiny, and leading to Sanders's arrest after a raid on his Peace Eye Bookstore. The memoir also traces the career of the Fugs -- formed in 1964 by Sanders and his neighbor, the legendary Tuli Kupferberg (called "the world's oldest living hippie" by Allen Ginsberg) -- as Sanders strives to find a home for this famous postmodern, innovative anarcho-folk-rock band in the world of record labels.

Hardcover. New York, W.W. Norton, 2nd, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 627 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy with minor wear to edges. Color pictures in center.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 4th pr., 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Bechdel's celebrated autobiography in the form of a graphic novel. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family baby-sitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive. Interweaving between childhood memories, college life and present day, and through narrative that is equally heartbreaking and fiercely funny, Alison looks back on her complex relationship with her father and finds they had more in common than she ever knew. Clean copy.

Softcover. US, Somogy Art Publishers , 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 320 pages. Softcover with little to no wear on edges. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap. Bringing the famed Parisian illustrator to light, this biography centers on Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, who studied at the prestigious Royal Academy but failed to win the coveted Prix de Rome. The study relates that the subject reacted to this disappointment by throwing aside all hopes of a traditional artistic career and hastening out into the thoroughfares of Paris to sketch everything in sight, living an errant, bohemian existence and succumbing increasingly to an obsession with drawing. Detailed and engaging, this recollection demonstrates that, despite his personal eccentricities, Saint-Aubin was employed as an artist all his life.

Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Three hardcover volumes in a pictorial slipcase, 1056 pages. Few cartoonists ever had as lavish a tribute as a three-volume-slipcased collection, but few are as deserving as Wilson. Collecting 50 years worth of his monthly single page gag cartoons from Playboy, it's a definitive overview of a remarkable talent and viewpoint. Considering the timeframe, Wilson's fabled black humor and art style remain remarkably consistent--as time passes, the drawing renders into slightly blobbier shapes that retain all of their wit just the same--but the source and degree of the humor is a constant. Although best known for his slightly lugubrious subjects--monsters, witches, corpses, vampires and skeletons are frequent visitors to these pages--Wilson also targets consumerism, materialism, and other basic human foibles. As publisher Gary Groth writes in a biography in the third volume, He has constructed a world that is eerily family, unsettlingly recognizable and lethally consistent. Beautifully designed and printed, the books contain cut-out pages, and the slipcase itself becomes a window for a trapped photo of Wilson. Text extras include Wilson's prose short stories and an appreciation by Neil Gaiman.

Hardcover. New York, Stewart Tabori & Chang, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. Oversized. Green cloth cover with some bumping to edges and corners. Dust jacket has slight wear to edges. Color and b&w illustrations and photographs throughout. A clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 482 pages with index. The first sustained analysis of the cult of the legendary Italian hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian revolutionary leader and popular hero, was among the best-known figures of the nineteenth century. This book seeks to examine his life and the making of his cult, to assess its impact, and understand its surprising success. For thirty years Garibaldi was involved in every combative event in Italy. His greatest moment came in 1860, when he defended a revolution in Sicily and provoked the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy, the overthrow of papal power in central Italy, and the creation of the Italian nation state. It made him a global icon, representing strength, bravery, manliness, saintliness, and a spirit of adventure. Handsome, flamboyant, and sexually attractive, he was worshiped in life and became a cult figure after his death in 1882. Lucy Riall shows that the emerging cult of Garibaldi was initially conceived by revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the status quo, that it was also the result of a collaborative effort involving writers, artists, actors, and publishers, and that it became genuinely and enduringly popular among a broad public. 33 b&w illustrations.

Hardcover. New York, Beaufort Books, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 375 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout.

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. NY, Dial Press, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, 216 pages. Thirty-five color plates including frontispiece plus numerous black and white plates. Dust jacket worn, chipped.

Hardcover. New York, Macmillan Publishing, 1st , 1983, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 312 pages, illustrated throughout with drawings in b&w. Black blind-stamped boards, brown cloth spine with gilt title. White pictorial dust jacket. Light wear to covers and spine, else a very nice, tight copy.

Softcover. New York, Abbeville Press, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Volume of the definitive work of George Segal. Softcover, 128 pages, 118 b&w and color illustrations. In very good condition, shows some rubbing on cover. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. Discusses the full range of Segal's work. Includes photographs of the artist at work. Topics include early cast sculpture, fragments and painted plasters, public commissions, and more. George Segal (1924-2000) was an American painter and sculptor associated with the Pop Art movement.