art biography

Hardcover. NY/Boston, Little Brown, 3rd pr., 2018, Book: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 503 pages. From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth. But who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known -- in the late 1940s, no less -- to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? Dery draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Gorey. Small remainder dot on bottom edge, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Boston, Marshall Jones Company, Limited, 1923, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 165 pages. Limited edition, #988/1500. Tissue guard. B&W photographs throughout. Some minor surface wear to covers. Overall tight and clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, William Morrow, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 11.5' x 10'', 195 pages. A beautifully produced illustrated biography with high quality color reprints of artwork from Bradbury's novels, comics letters and papers as well as movie stills and posters, with examples from many eras and cultures.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin , 2nd pr., 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Authorized biography of the early baseball executive who originated the workable farm system, developed efficient scouting, pioneered revolutionary training devises and techniques, and introduced black players to major league baseball. 312 pages includes index.

NY, Abrams, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 367 pages. Brassai: The Eye of Paris is both the catalog of an exhibition of Brassai's photographs organized by the Houston Fine Arts Museum and a valuable biography of the artist. In 1932, only three years after he purchased his first camera (a Leica), Brassai published a portfolio of 64 photos titled Paris by Night that caused an immediate sensation. His lively eye (seen in an enigmatic photograph at the beginning of the book) captured fresh, unique images of the city and its citizens. Fascinated by the underworld, he moved easily among gangsters and prostitutes in bars and bordellos; he was equally at home among the fashionable and wealthy, and just as devastating in his depiction of them. He used magnesium flares for low-contrast shadows, catching his subjects in natural poses at significant moments. The wide range of Brassai's work is suggested by his formal nudes, which have an affinity with Edward Weston's, and his informal portraits, which remind viewers of Diane Arbus, who admired his work. Brassai was a central figure in the intellectual and artistic circles of Montparnasse that made Paris the most exciting city in the world during the 1930s. In a long essay that includes lively anecdotes of the photographer's relationships with Picasso, Henry Miller, Kertesz, and many other luminaries, the author re-creates the aesthetic and philosophical ferment of the period. Brassai: The Eye of Paris recognizes the artist's talents in five different media--photography, filmmaking, sculpture, writing, and drawing--but focuses on what he is best known for: lyrical and penetrating photographs of the City of Light.

Hardcover. Boston, Bulfinch Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 319 pages, mostly b&w photographs (some color), essays by 7 contributors including Henry Miller. Preface by Jean-Jacques Aillagon. Text essays excerpted from the work of Brassai himself as well as contributions from his wife Mme. Gilberte Brassi and close friends Roger Grenier, Henry Miller, Jacques Prevert and Werner Spies. End-matter includes Biography, Bibliography, Exhibitions and List of Illustrations. Illustrated with 308 photographs, 14 of which are in color. Stated first American edition. A presentation of Brassi's art from his nude drawings and sculpture to his fascination with graffiti but principally featuring on his photographs of nocturnal Paris and the demimonde creatures which inhabited its streets. Remainder mark to top edge, otherwise clean. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Color illustrations by Egielski. Very nice, clean condition. Wittily sending up the "child prodigy'' (if not biography, history, and high seriousness itself), Yorinks and Egielski trace the course of Minski's genius. A child of the 18th Century, Minski prankishly ``discovers'' gravity and electricity, soon followed by his serene introduction of the telephone, airplane, automobile, aspirin, light bulb, etc. Leonardo da Vinci appears in 18th-Century Vienna to applaud Minski's ``noodle.'' But when Minski hears the (historical) Farinelli sing, he labors feverishly on a formula to transform himself from scientist to artist, and achieves a triumphant apotheosis as ``unequaled singer.'' Egielski's exuberantly detailed, warmly colored pictures make the most of the anachronisms, the caricatures, and the Old World setting.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st thus, 2008, Hardcover, pictorial boards. no dust jacket issued. Originally published in a different form in 1977 by Belier Press, this collection of comics by Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author/artist of "Maus," presents the seminal works that changed how comics are made and appreciated today. Revised and re-issued in 2008, with an introduction that's almost as long as the book it introduces, and certainly autobiographically intimate and daring. Clean, very good.

Hardcover. New York , Pantheon, 1st thus, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. no dust jacket issued. Originally published in a different form in 1977 by Belier Press, this collection of comics by Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author/artist of "Maus," presents the seminal works that changed how comics are made and appreciated today. Revised and re-issued in 2008, with an introduction that's almost as long as the book it introduces, and certainly autobiographically intimate and daring. Clean, very good.

Hardcover. New York , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 260 pages, illustrations in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Lucian Freud's paintings are instantly recognizable: often shocking and disturbing, his portraits convey a profound yet compelling sense of discomfort. Freud was twice married and the father of at least a dozen children, and his numerous relationships with women were the subject of much gossip-but the man himself remained a mystery. An intensely private individual (during his lifetime he prevented two planned biographies from being published), Freud's life, as well as his art, invites questions that have had no answer-until now.In Breakfast with Lucian, Geordie Greig, one of a few close friends who regularly had breakfast with the painter during the last years of his life, tells an insider's account-accessible, engaging, revealing-of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating, enigmatic, and controversial artists. Greig, who has studied his subject's work at length, unravels the tangled thread of a life lived on Freud's own uncompromising terms. Based on private conversations in which Freud held forth on everything from first love to gambling debts to the paintings of Velazquez, and informed by interviews with friends, lovers, and some of the artist's children who have never before spoken publicly about their relationships with the painter, this is a deeply personal memoir that is illuminated by a keen appreciation of Freud's art.

Softcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 240 pages. This comprehensive biography presents the achievements of Brion Gysin, a multi-faceted artist whose work has influenced performers such as David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Recalling the heady atmosphere of the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris in the late 1950s and 1960s, it features first-hand reminiscences by contemporaries, plus a biographical essay and chronological listings. productive literary collaboration with William Burroughs. As well as looking at his work as a sound poet and performance artist, it features reproductions of his paintings and graphics, and examples of his permutated poems and other writings.

Softcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 240 pages. This comprehensive biography presents the achievements of Brion Gysin, a multi-faceted artist whose work has influenced performers such as David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Recalling the heady atmosphere of the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris in the late 1950s and 1960s, it features first-hand reminiscences by contemporaries, plus a biographical essay and chronological listings. productive literary collaboration with William Burroughs. As well as looking at his work as a sound poet and performance artist, it features reproductions of his paintings and graphics, and examples of his permutated poems and other writings.

Softcover. N. P., Privately Printed, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in stapled wrappers, 25 pages. 1/750 copies. Minor wear to covers, else a lovely little pamphlet in excellent shape. An address given to the Friends of the Brown University Libraries.

Hardcover. New York, Newmarket Press, 1st US, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 289 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. An tour of Buster Keaton's life and art. Mild rubbing to dust jacket. Creasing to dust jacket front flap. Includes 40 black-and-white photographs. Unmarked. Bright and clean; a tight copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages. In the voluminous scholarship that's been written on Paul Cezanne, little has been said about the twenty-four portraits in oil that Cezanne made of his wife, Hortense Fiquet Cezanne, over an extended twenty-year period. In Cezanne's Other: The Portraits of Hortense, Susan Sidlauskas breaks new ground, focusing on these paintings as a group and looking particularly at the differences that render many of them unrecognizable as the same person. She argues that Cezanne sidestepped the conventional goals of portraiture-he avoids representing a consistent, identifiable physiognomy or conventional feminine postures and does not portray the subject's inner life-making lack of fixedness itself his subject, which leads him ultimately to a radical reformulation of modern portraiture. Sidlauskas also upends the notion of Mme Cezanne as the irrelevant and absent spouse. Instead she reveals Hortense Fiquet Cezanne as a presence so crucial to the artist that she became the essential "other" to his ever-evolving "self." Coupling historical texts from philosophy, psychology, and physiology with more recent writings from women's and gender studies, cognitive psychology, and visual culture, Sidlauskas demonstrates that Mme Cezanne offered intimacy at arm's length for the painter who has been dubbed "the lone wolf of Aix."

Hardcover. NY, PublicAffairs, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The legendary television star tells the backstage stories of the classic comedy of Your Show of Shows, Caesar's Hour , and other landmark programs. It is no exaggeration to say that without Sid Caesar, comedy in America would have been a lot less funny. He was the star and guiding force behind Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour , two of the most innovative programs in the Golden Age of Television, and the writers and stars of those shows went on to create the plays, movies, and sitcoms that we now think of as classic American comedy. So many of our greatest comedy writers - Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen -were part of Sid Caesar's creative troupe. Sid was a master not only of comedic performance, but also of developing characters that the audience could relate to, finding the humor in ordinary situations rather than through vaudeville-type gags. His was a comedy truly drawn from the human condition. Caesar's Hours is Sid Caesar 's artistic autobiography, his account of how these great routines were fashioned and performed, and the interactions that gave birth to them. He takes us inside the famed writers' room, the rehearsal studios, and onto the stage itself, where some of the funniest moments in television history came to life. To read his book is to learn why his intelligent and sensitive brand of humor resonates so much with us, even half a century later. Remainder line to bottom edge otherwise clean.

Softcover. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1st pbk, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 376 pages, b&w illustrations. The personal history of Barney Josephson, proprietor of the legendary interracial New York City night clubs Cafe Society Downtown and Cafe Society Uptown and their successor, The Cookery. Famously known as 'the wrong place for the Right people', Cafe Society featured the cream of jazz and blues performers--among whom were Billie Holiday, Big Joe Turner, Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Big Sid Catlett, and Mary Lou Williams--as well as comedy stars Imogene Coca, Zero Mostel, and Jack Gilford, the boogie-woogie pianists, and legendary gospel and folk artists. Spanning half a century from the 1930s to the 1980s, Josephson's narrative depicts both the business and the artistic sides of Cafe Society while exposing the tensions between the club's own progressive interracial openness and the more restrictive social and political climate in which it evolved. Publisher's stamp on bottom edge otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 687 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Remainder mark on page block, otherwise clean, tight copy. Minor, if any, wear to covers.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell/ Phaidon, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 239 pages, large format. Profusely illustrated in color, b&w. Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697-1768), known as Canaletto, is one of the most popular of all old master painters. His views of Venice and London are much celebrated and admired. The author traces Canaletto's career from his beginnings as a scene-painter with his father to the work of his later years.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 417 pages, color and b&w illustrations. The Warhol superstar and transgender icon Candy Darling was glamour personified, but she was without a real place in the world. Growing up on Long Island, lonely and quiet and queer, she was enchanted by Hollywood starlets like Kim Novak. She found her turn in New York's early Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, in Warhol's films Flesh and Women in Revolt, and at the famed nightclub Max's Kansas City. She inspired songs by Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. She became friends with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, borrowed a dress from Lauren Hutton, posed for Richard Avedon, and performed alongside Tennessee Williams in his own play. Yet Candy lived on the edge, relying on the kindness of strangers, friends, and her quietly devoted mother, sleeping on couches and in cheap hotel rooms, keeping a part of herself hidden. She wanted to be a star, but mostly she wanted to be loved. Her last diary entry was: "I shall try to be grateful for life . . . Cannot imagine who would want me." Candy died at twenty-nine in 1974, just as conversations about gender and identity were beginning to enter the broader culture. She never knew it, but she changed the world. Clean copy.

Softcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 76 pages in color. The first half of Milo Manara's two-volume epic biography of the hot-tempered Italian master painter. It depicts Caravaggio's early years in Rome as he struggles to capture truth on canvas, only to have his art condemned to be burned by the Church. He then is forced to flee the city when he kills a man in righteous fury over the death of a prostitute. Discover the bawdy, swashbuckling life of one of the greatest painters in history through Manara's passionate, personal tribute to his artistic idol, Michelangelo Merisi, whom the world would come to know as Caravaggio.

Softcover. NY, Phaidon, 1st pbk, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 9 x 10". 448 pages. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was one of the most innovative painters of his time, and one of the most momentous artists of any era. Rescued from neglect, he has become a cultural icon in the late twentieth century, not only for his art but also because of his violent and tragic life. Catherine Puglisi's highly praised monograph, supersedes all previous studies of the artist by far. Making full use of the latest research and a series of dramatic recent discoveries, she has produced a concise, clear-headed and comprehensive work of scholarship that also provides a moving biography of the artist and an incisive deconstruction of the genius with which he absorbed and transformed the artistic tradition of his time. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Albuquerque, NM, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 195 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Blue cloth with gilt title to spine. Blue pictorial dust jacket. Light shelfwear to covers, else like new.Traces the life of the Navajo artist, including his experiences as a code talker for the Marines in World War II, and looks at his paintings and watercolors.

Hardcover. Columbia, S.C., University of South Carolina Press, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Columbia, S.C., University of South Carolina Press, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust jacket: Good, 344 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. B&w illustrations and photographs throughout. Illustrated frontispiece. Gilt titles on spine. Decorative stain to top edge. Light edge wear to dust jacket, otherwise clean, tight copy. . Record # 467670