art biography

Softcover. Rootstock Publishing, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 316 pages, b&w illustrations. Circle of Sawdust is a uniquely personal story of the wild characters, fascinating personalities, remarkable histories, and behind-the-scenes world of traditional traveling circuses. Here is a true-life tale about a boy's impulse to run off and join the circus and then-through doubt, failure, loss, and tragedy-pursue the implausible vision of starting his own circus! With humor and passion, founder of Circus Smirkus Rob Mermin writes about the precarious life of a creative artist, the ups and downs of taking risks, and the idealistic struggle to hold onto a dream. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1st US, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 423 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Very clean and tight copy. With "humanism, generosity, and a passionate, beating heart" (The Times, London), Janice Galloway's Clara reignites, from between the lines of history, the great love of Robert and Clara Schumann. In her lifetime, Clara was a celebrated concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms -- as well as mother of the eight Schumann children and caretaker of her husband through a series of crippling mental illnesses. In its luminous integrity the novel brings Clara Schumann to life as a woman of genius. Galloway is at once a meticulous researcher of her subjects' remarkable and highly dramatic artistic careers and a virtuoso storyteller whose imagination and empathy lead her to that place off limits to history and biography -- inside the human mind. Distilling the memories, poetry, and musical notes therein, she examines the ways artists divine patterns out of life's chaos. "Passion," writes Galloway of Clara's performance philosophy, "one might take for granted -- its control is the mechanism through which all else flows." Though music may have bent to Clara's will, love served her far more tragically. Dismissing the cliches of Great Art and rejecting the romantic conflation of Madness and Creativity, Clara boldly ventures that in a life marred by alienation and isolation, "Work alone endures."

Princeton University Art Museum, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 408 pages. Clarence H. White (1871-1925) was one of the most influential art photographers and teachers of the early 20th century and a founding member of the Photo-Secession. This beautiful publication offers a new appraisal of White's contributions, including his groundbreaking aesthetic experiments, his commitment to the ideals of American socialism, and his embrace of the expanding fields of photographic book and fashion illustration, celebrity portraiture, and advertising. Based on extensive archival research, the book challenges the idea of an abrupt rupture between prewar, soft-focus idealizing photography and postwar "modernism" to paint a more nuanced picture of American culture in the Progressive era. The illustrations are well reproduced and comprehensive.

Softcover. Boston MA, Museum of Fine Arts, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 98 pages, softcover with illustrated wrappers, 98 pages with 126 b&w photos. Essay by Kathryn Buhler.

Hardcover. Cleveland, Ohio, The Arthur H. Clark Company, reprint, 1910, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth, 434 pages. Minor cover corner and spine edge wear. Gilt top edge and titles on spine. Tissue guard on frontispiece portrait of Commodore Rodgers. Very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. New York , Pantheon, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 296 pages, b&w illustrations by Spiegelman. Maus is a holocaust survival story, a biography, and an autobiography. Written as a graphic novel (and winner of a Pulitzer Prize), Art Spiegelman captures the process of interviewing his father while simultaneously telling his father's story. In that sense, the text is very self-reflexive - there are parts in it showing Spiegelman working to create the very page you read, as previous parts of the his father's story are reintroduced from previous portions of the text. The story is complex. It not only details the horrors of the holocaust and the extreme lengths to which people went to survive, but it also captures the harrowing guilt survivors faced, and the lifelong aftereffects of the war. It also shows the struggle between father and son, both through the lens of a typical familial challenge, and of those unique between a survivor and child born afterwards.

Hardcover. New York , Pantheon, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 296 pages, b&w illustrations by Spiegelman. Maus is a holocaust survival story, a biography, and an autobiography. Written as a graphic novel (and winner of a Pulitzer Prize), Art Spiegelman captures the process of interviewing his father while simultaneously telling his father's story. In that sense, the text is very self-reflexive - there are parts in it showing Spiegelman working to create the very page you read, as previous parts of the his father's story are reintroduced from previous portions of the text. The story is complex. It not only details the horrors of the holocaust and the extreme lengths to which people went to survive, but it also captures the harrowing guilt survivors faced, and the lifelong aftereffects of the war. It also shows the struggle between father and son, both through the lens of a typical familial challenge, and of those unique between a survivor and child born afterwards.

Hardcover. Kent, OH, The Kent State University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 348 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Conrad Wise Chapman (1842-1910) is unique among Civil War artists: he painted and sketched while on duty as a Confederate soldier who served in three theaters of the war. Chapman's first-hand knowledge is evident in his work. Ben Bassham has written both a critical study of Chapman's art and a biography, incorporating Chapman's correspondence and Civil War memoirs.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 256 pages. Much has been written about John Constable and his innovative paintings that inspire every succeeding generation of naturalistic artists, but there are few straightforward accounts of this English artist's life and works. Cormack's monograph links biographical detail and scholarly appraisal together in a way that goes beyond the previously most pertinent biography, Graham Reynold's Constable (London: Grenada, 1977). He focuses on the growth of Constable's career rather than new revelations. The book benefits from the inclusion of almost 300 illustrations, with one-third in color. All the major works are shown, plus many that have not been published much in the past. A few flaws are noted: some color reproductions are overbright, there is no chronology to assist readers. Yet this is a solid work and should be considered for large public and all academic libraries covering 19th century art and/or British painting. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 528 pages, b&w and color photographs throughout. A very clean, tight copy in great condition. This book is the first comprehensive account of Gabo's life, career, and artistic theory and practice. Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder explore in detail the evolution of the artist's work and his aesthetic concerns, creative processes, assimilation of such new materials as plastic, and approach to public sculpture. Drawing on Gabo's extensive and largely unpublished archives of letters, diaries, notebooks, models, and sketchbooks, they discuss the sculptor's work in the context of his relations with other avant-garde artists, architects, and critics, including his brother Antoine Pevsner.

Hardcover. NY, Assouline, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 240 pages. Celebrates its centennial in 2004 with a global operation in more than 25 countries. With wit, spirit, and luminous images, Orla Healy tells the inspiring story of Coty, both the man and the company..

Hardcover. Boston, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 516 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. This volume documents Fenn's prolific career from the 1860s until his death in 1911. Sue Rainey also recounts his adventurous sketching trips in the western United States, Europe, and the Middle East, which enhanced his reputation for depicting far-flung places at a time when the nation was taking a more prominent role on the world stage.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 516 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. This volume documents Fenn's prolific career from the 1860s until his death in 1911. Sue Rainey also recounts his adventurous sketching trips in the western United States, Europe, and the Middle East, which enhanced his reputation for depicting far-flung places at a time when the nation was taking a more prominent role on the world stage.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 267 pages, b&w photos. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. This book examines the often-neglected role played by immigrant artists and critics in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, including Japanese-German author Sadakichi Hartmann, Mexican-born caricaturist Marius de Zayas and English Sri-Lankan curator Ananda Coomaraswamy, as well as better-known U.S.-born painters, including Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe.

Hardcover. NY, Shoemaker and Hoard, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 222 pages. INSCRIBED BY CASTRONOVO on the title page. Edmund Wilson, 20th century America's most direct and readable critic of literature and society, was a man of many loves. In his half century as a major force in American letters he had an outsize romantic career that reflected the complex depths of his personality. Each woman whom he came to love was an alluring interpretative problem, an erotic and analytic challenge, a presence that fired his imagination. They came from the Greenwich Village of the 1920s, from his own upper middle class world of privilege, from New York's working class, from the high reaches of literary New York as well as from the workaday world of Talcottville in upper New York State. Who were they? Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; actress Mary Blair; friends and drinking buddies Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Dawn Powell, and Elinor Wylie; poet Leonie Adams; writer and intellectual Mary McCarthy; Mamaine Paget, later the wife of Arthur Koestler; and screenwriter and journalist Penelope Gilliatt were the best known. They appear here as personalities in their own right as well as in the roles they play in Wilson's biography. His Rabelaisian appetites, ardors and vulnerabilities, and conceptions of love and sex are a story in themselves. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Long Beach CA, Long Beach Museum of Art, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover with a nice dust jacket. Since 1970, Mizuno's work has evolved from functional dinnerware to abstract sculptural forms, from playful and humorous trompe l'oeil plates to richly layered sculpture informed by his evocative personal history, paralleling the development of the ceramics field itself in the late 20th century as it evolved from functional forms to a medium of full artistic expression. The exhibition is the first major museum exhibition to survey the work of this artist whose superbly crafted works, while firmly grounded in the traditions of the ceramic arts, extend to new forms in clay that defy traditional categories. This exhibition catalogue designed by Takaaki Matsumoto includes a forward, interview with the artist, a biography and exhibition history, and the exhibition checklist of 48 artworks. The exhibition and publication trace the work of this Japanese-born, Los Angeles-based ceramist from 1971 through 2003. Interview of the artist by Deborah McLeod, foreword by Museum Director Harold Nelson Format: hardcover Dimensions: 8-1/2 x 6-1/4 inches, 96 pages plus cover / 51 color plates. in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title at the Long Beach Museum of Art November 18, 2005 through January 15, 2006.

Hardcover. Long Beach CA, Long Beach Museum of Art, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 95 pages, illustrated with 45 color plates. Like new in publisher's shrinkwrap. Since 1970, Mizuno's work has evolved from functional dinnerware to abstract sculptural forms, from playful and humorous trompe l'oeil plates to richly layered sculpture informed by his evocative personal history, paralleling the development of the ceramics field itself in the late 20th century as it evolved from functional forms to a medium of full artistic expression. The exhibition is the first major museum exhibition to survey the work of this artist whose superbly crafted works, while firmly grounded in the traditions of the ceramic arts, extend to new forms in clay that defy traditional categories. This exhibition catalogue designed by Takaaki Matsumoto includes a forward, interview with the artist, a biography and exhibition history, and the exhibition checklist of 48 artworks. The exhibition and publication trace the work of this Japanese-born, Los Angeles-based ceramist from 1971 through 2003. ISBN 0-97127772-3-0 Published by the Long Beach Museum of Art Interview of the artist by Deborah McLeod, foreword by Museum Director Harold Nelson Format: hardcover Dimensions: 8-1/2 x 6-1/4 inches 96 page plus cover / 51 color plates.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 458 pages. Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, delivers a "gripping and essential account" (The Boston Globe) of how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact. Braiding biography with "cultural history and criticism...that honors the complexity of [its] subject, even, perhaps particularly, when it gets ugly" (Los Angeles Times), Crumb is the story of a richly complex life at the forefront of both the underground and popular cultures of post-war America. Including forty-five stunning black-and-white images throughout and a sixteen-page color insert featuring images both iconic and obscure. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner, 2nd pr., 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 458 pages. Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-Century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, delivers a "gripping and essential account" (The Boston Globe) of how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact. Braiding biography with "cultural history and criticism...that honors the complexity of [its] subject, even, perhaps particularly, when it gets ugly" (Los Angeles Times), Crumb is the story of a richly complex life at the forefront of both the underground and popular cultures of post-war America. Including forty-five stunning black-and-white images throughout and a sixteen-page color insert featuring images both iconic and obscure. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Vidal Sassoon Inc., 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 169 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Original receipt from Vidal Sassoon Shop in London, England laid-in. Book has damp odor. Light foxing to edges. Light wear.

Hardcover. Austin, TX, University of Texas, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 143 pages. b&w and color illustrations throughout. Captures the best of Windberg's work with 50 of his finest paintings splendidly reproduced and illustrates the tranquity of the hillsides, meadows, harbors and shores of his beloved Lone Star State. Brown leather-like cover, gilt lettering to spine. Beautiful pictorial dust jacket with some edgewear. Very clean, tight and crisp copy.

Softcover. Urbana IL, University of Illinois Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 295 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY BECK on the title page. A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner became a living repository of history. The family narrative entrusted to her--"a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved"--began among the Yoruba in West Africa and continued with her own century and more of life. In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck began a series of interviews with Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. Beck uses Turner's storytelling to build the Turner family saga, using at its foundation the oft-repeated touchstone stories at the heart of their experiences: the abduction into slavery of Turner's African ancestors; Daisy's father Alec Turner learning to read; his return as a soldier to his former plantation to kill his former overseer; and Daisy's childhood stand against racism. Other stories re-create enslavement and her father's life in Vermont--in short, the range of life events large and small, transmitted by means so alive as to include voice inflections. Beck, at the same time, weaves in historical research and offers a folklorist's perspective on oral history and the hazards--and uses--of memory. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Zurich, Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 182 pages. Illustrated in b&w and some color. An account by art historian and controversial author Catherine Millet of a highly personal encounter with the artist s celebrated paintings and self-reflective writings. One of the first studies of the notoriously idiosyncratic artist s essays, this revolutionary book reveals all the narcissism, anxiety, and visual genius of the most famous and infamous of the surrealists. In a bright dust jacket.

Hardcover. London, Arthur Baker, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with partial fading, 449 pages, b&w illustrations. The definitive biography of the larger-than-life figure of the French Revolution who was found guilty of loyalist inclinations and executed at the guillotine. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean.