art contemporary

Softcover. Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages. A photograph can serve as as both witness and catalyst, art object and call to action. In this catalog of a pivotal exhibition of works from the Ralph R. Parsons Photography Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, photographs capture the heartbeat and mindset of America. Works by French photographer Brassai set the stage; the bulk of the exhibition features photographs by Robert Frank, Helen Levitt , Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, among others. When many of these works were first shown, they were met with criticism and outrage, but today, we've accepted them as profound documents of our nation and era. Includes essays by exhibition curator Cornelia H. Butler, as well as Max Kozloff, A.D. Coleman, Liz Kotz and Emily Aer. Dimension: 9 1/4 x 11 1/2 inches, 125 duotone & 11 color reproductions, Exhibition Catalog.

Hardcover. NY, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 227 pages. Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket. Autobiography of the owner of the bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres in Paris, a center, between the World Wars, for the best contemporary French writing and for its authors. 536 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 736 pages. A rich and revelatory biography of one of the crucial cultural figures of the twentieth century. Lincoln Kirstein's contributions to the nation's life, as both an intellectual force and advocate of the arts, were unparalleled. While still an undergraduate, he started the innovative literary journal Hound and Horn, as well as the modernist Harvard Society for Contemporary Art--forerunner of the Museum of Modern Art. He brought George Balanchine to the United States, and in service to the great choreographer's talent, persisted, against heavy odds, in creating both the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet. Among much else, Kirstein helped create Lincoln Center in New York, and the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut; established the pathbreaking Dance Index and the country's first dance archives; and in some fifteen books proved himself a brilliant critic of art, photography, film, and dance. This stunning biography, filled with fascinating perceptions and incidents, is a major act of historical reclamation. Utilizing an enormous amount of previously unavailable primary sources, including Kirstein's untapped diaries, Martin Duberman has rendered accessible for the first time a towering figure of immense complexity and achievement.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 284 pages, color and b&w illustrations.Often featuring lighthouses, bridges, or quaint country homes, Thomas Kinkade's soft-focus landscapes have permeated American visual culture during the past twenty years, appearing on everything from Bibles to bedsheets to credit cards. Kinkade sells his work through his shopping-mall galleries, QVC, the Internet, and Christian stores. He is quite possibly the most collected artist in the United States. While many art-world and academic critics have dismissed him as a passing fad or marketing phenomenon, the contributors to this collection do not. Instead, they explore his work and its impact on contemporary art as part of the broader history of American visual culture. They consider Kinkade's imagery and career in relation to nineteenth-century Currier and Ives prints and Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, the collectibles market and the fine-art market, the Thomas Kinkade Museum and Cultural Center, and "The Village at Hiddenbrooke," a California housing development inspired by Kinkade's paintings. The conceptual artist Jeffrey Vallance, the curator of the first major museum exhibition of Kinkade's art and collectibles, recounts his experiences organizing that show. All of the contributors draw on art history, visual culture, and cultural studies as they seek to understand Kinkade's significance for both art and audiences. Along the way, they delve into questions about beauty, class, kitsch, religion, and taste in contemporary art. Clean copy.

Softcover. Brookville, NY, Hillwood Art Museum, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Side-stapled, 42 pages. Full-color catalog featuring essays and images of traditional and contemporary African textiles.

Softcover. London/NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 348 pages including transparent gels, 238 plates. Photographer Tim Walker draws audiences close to reveal fantasy's other, darker side. Delving deep into the art and mind of one of the most exciting and original fashion photographers working today, Shoot for the Moon showcases the gamut of Walker's weird, wild Wonderlands. In images that demand to be read as art as much as fashion, his signature opulence and decadent eccentricity encroach ever further beyond the 'real', exploring the mysteries of imagination and inspiration, and where it is they come from. Dazzlingly designed to a lavish spec, with images featuring some of the biggest names in fashion and contemporary culture, and texts and commentary by a collection of noteworthy contributors as well as Walker himself, Shoot for the Moon is set to be an landmark addition to the lexicon of fashion photography. Renowned for his surreal fashion photography, Tim Walker's new book challenges convention to explore the very concept of photographic imagination. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Skira, 1ST, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 224 pages. Insightful essays and gorgeous portraits by one of contemporary photography's most remarkable artists.

Softcover. Cincinnati, Contemporary Arts Center, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 113 pages, color illustrations throughout. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 220 pages. 176 b&w and color plates, fold outs. Biography of Ernst Trova, self-taught painter and contemporary sculpture artist, known especially for his series entitled Falling Man. White cloth, gilt lettering to spine, gilt design on front, Very nice, clean and well preserved copy. Looks as good as new.

Hardcover. New York , Mark Batty Publisher, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 374 pages. This beautifully typeset and illustrated book offers a singular collection of 35 in-depth articles on typography and the printing arts, from the earliest type design techniques to the latest in digital typeface and design development. Originally printed in Matrix, the renowned and highly respected journal of the printing arts, the articles cover a number of individual typefaces, techniques of making type using both historical and contemporary means, and arguments for the continuing use of obsolete printing technologies. Here too are detailed examinations of book design, ornamentation, and mathematical and other non-Latin typography.

Hardcover. Gloucester MA, Rockport Publishers, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages, illustrated throughout in color. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Work from a diverse pantheon of internationally known designers captures the fluidity, the sensitivity and the art of designing with type. These stylists and practitioners of typographic virtuosity provide a range o work which has individuality, attitude and graphic flair. Collectively they demonstrate the power of type in contemporary design.

Hardcover. Gloucester MA, Rockport Publishers, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages, illustrated throughout in color. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Work from a diverse pantheon of internationally known designers captures the fluidity, the sensitivity and the art of designing with type. These stylists and practitioners of typographic virtuosity provide a range o work which has individuality, attitude and graphic flair. Collectively they demonstrate the power of type in contemporary design.

Hardcover. NY, Dial Books, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket, 686 pages. The Uncle Remus tales, originally written down by Joel Chandler Harris, were first published over a hundred years ago, and serve as the largest collection of African-American folklore. In this four-book series, Julius Lester masterfully retains the flavor of the tales, while dropping the heavy dialect of the Harris originals and adding contemporary language and references-- ensuring that the stories will be understood and enjoyed by new generations of readers. The stories are beautifully illuminated by the slyly humorous full-color and black-and-white art of Jerry Pinkney.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 208 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. This is the first career-spanning monograph from one of the foremost contemporary realist painters. New York-based artist Harvey Dinnerstein creates hauntingly penetrating portraits and allegorical street scenes. His work over the course of five decades remains fresh and apt for our time, depicting New York as a microcosm of our society's rich pluralism, struggle, and resilience.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 232 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Black & white and color photographs throughout. City scenes have been chronicled in photographs since the early 1800s, but street photography as traditionally defined has captured a relatively narrow field of these images. Revolutionizing the history of street photography, Unfamiliar Streets explores the work of Richard Avedon (1923-2004), Charles Moore (1931-2010), Martha Rosler (b. 1943), and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951), four American photographers whose careers in fashion, photojournalism, conceptual art, and contemporary art are not usually associated with the genre.Bussard's lively and engaging text, a timely response to a growing interest in urban photography, challenges the traditional understanding of street photography and makes original and important connections among urban culture, social history, and the visual arts, constructing a new historical model for understanding street photography. Illustrated with more than one hundred images, this book provides an interpretation of a compelling genre that is as fresh as its consideration of the city streets themselves, sites of commerce, dispossession, desire, demonstration, power, and spectacle.

Softcover. Montclair NJ, Montclair Art Museum, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 36 pages, stapled exhibition catalog. 16 b&w plates by Sherman, many multiple images. Like new. The Unseen Cindy Sherman, curated by MAM's Chief Curator Gail Stavitsky, offers a little-known selection of works by this leading contemporary artist. Primarily culled from family collections, the exhibition comprises early photographs and photographic assemblages created by Sherman as a college student, when she had begun to use herself as the subject of staged photographs. These early works vividly illustrate Sherman's early explorations of the myriad constructions of self and female identities as a young woman, and her interest in challenging conventions of beauty and behavior.

Softcover. Montclair NJ, Montclair Art Museum, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 36 pages, stapled exhibition catalog. 16 b&w plates by Sherman, many multiple images. Like new. The Unseen Cindy Sherman, curated by MAM's Chief Curator Gail Stavitsky, offers a little-known selection of works by this leading contemporary artist. Primarily culled from family collections, the exhibition comprises early photographs and photographic assemblages created by Sherman as a college student, when she had begun to use herself as the subject of staged photographs. These early works vividly illustrate Sherman's early explorations of the myriad constructions of self and female identities as a young woman, and her interest in challenging conventions of beauty and behavior.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages illustrated in color. The sumptuous fashions of Valentin Yudashkin, the first post-Soviet designer to bring a contemporary Russian look to the international fashion world.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Studio, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This lavish, photo-laden tour of Tinsel Town's history is coffee-table condensation of 87 years of Vanity Fair coverage of the Hollywood scene. Visually, it's a thrilling compendium of images that have defined not only the film industry and its workers but how the American public has understood them. Ranging from Edward Steichen's iconographic black-and-white portraits of Louise Brooks, Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg, and Gloria Swanson (which defined the "look" of Hollywood in its first half-century) to the contemporary and often shocking color photographs of Annie Leibovitz (of nearly everyone from Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta to Cate Blanchette and Johnny Depp)Dand peppered with shots by Bruce Weber, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Griege Hurrell and othersDthe book traces how these stars have come to embody pop mythologies of everyday life. The photos are interspersed among 13 (mostly short) essays by writers as diverse as Carl Sandberg, Patricia Bosworth, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker, Peter Biskind and D.H. Lawrence, which range from the humorous to the illuminating. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. This collection of 46 richly reproduced color photographs is Laura Letinsky's study of contemporary lovers as they are seen, as they show, and as they see themselves making love and inhabiting domestic space. Entering what might be called the intimate sphere, Letinsky's camera explores a space too personal to be termed public and yet whose cultural and emotional shape is uncannily recognizable. Over a seven-year period, Letinsky visited lovers in their homes, hotel rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens and recorded in detail the promises, disharmonies, and disappointments that inhere in modern coupling.

Softcover. London, Art/Books Hastings Contemporary, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wraps, 128 pages illustrated in color. The husband of Paula Rego and a visionary artist in his own right, Victor Willing (1928-1988) creates work that is characterized by dreamlike and hallucinatory imagery. Published to accompany the first major retrospective of his career, this volume traces his life decade by decade, charting his history of creative block and ill health, and analysing his paintings, drawings and sculptures.

Hardcover. New York, Norton, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 458 pages, b&w illustrations. Sam Wagstaff, the legendary curator, collector, and patron of the arts, emerges as a cultural visionary in this groundbreaking biography. Even today remembered primarily as the mentor and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, the once infamous photographer, Wagstaff, in fact, had an incalculable-and largely overlooked-influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century. Born in New York City in 1921 into a notable family, Wagstaff followed an arc that was typical of a young man of his class. He attended both Hotchkiss and Yale, served in the navy, and would follow in step with his Ivy League classmates to the "gentleman's profession," as an ad executive on Madison Avenue. With his unmistakably good looks, he projected an aura of glamour and was cited by newspapers as one of the most eligible bachelors of the late 1940s. Such accounts proved deceiving, for Wagstaff was forced to live in the closet, his homosexuality only revealed to a small circle of friends. Increasingly uncomfortable with his career and this double life, he abandoned advertising, turned to the formal study of art history, and embarked on a radical personal transformation that was in perfect harmony with the tumultuous social, cultural, and sexual upheavals of the 1960s.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 316 pages. Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity. Clean, bright copy.