art contemporary

Hardcover. NY/London, Tate Publishing, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 144 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Clean, tight copy. In this richly illustrated and accessible survey, acclaimed author Paul Gravett considers the vast output of comics culture from the late 19th century to today, including syndicated comics, graphic novels, and contemporary art and illustration. From foundational masterpieces such as Rodolphe Topffer's and Wilhelm Busch's albums, George McManus's Art Deco "Bringing Up Father," and Alex Raymond's "Flash Gordon" to the later retro stylings of Robert Crumb, Gravett considers lines of influence from around the world and examines how comics have shifted from supporting the status quo to becoming the voice of alternative subcultures. Gravett traces the major themes taking place in contemporary comics, noting the rise of publications that function as questioning, transgressive outlets for outsider stories and ideas, and includes the ways that folk art traditions are reinvigorating the form.

Softcover. London, Merrell Publishers, 1st pbk, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 240 pages, mostly b&w photos, some color. Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Feb. 16 - Apr. 29, 2001. The 94 African American photographers whose works appear in this volume, have used their equipment as tools of social commentary and personal and artistic exploration, bearing witness to the changes in American society over the past 50 years. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Tokyo, Kodansha, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 187 pages. Large format. Illustrated with full color and black & white examples of of fine contemporary prints from Japan. Dust jacket shows wear with dime sized chunk missing at top of spine and piece missing at bottom left corner of rear flap. Clean, tight copy. May require additional postage. "Contemporary Japanese Prints" is a fine, beautifully printed folio book--just the way art books should be. Written by a key art historian and critic as well as museum director, it serves as an excellent and eye-opening overview of just what the straightforward title indicates, artistic prints by Japanese artists then currently active as of 1967. Kawakita's introduction is clear and concise but properly informative, defining this art form's general characteristics and then outlining its modern history, starting with its rise in the early twentieth century. Contrary to what one might expect, these prints are almost totally unrelated to Japan's rather famous ukiyo-e prints of the early modern period, these modern "hanga" instead representing the creative vision and artistic labor of one individual artist. And well, a picture's worth a thousand words, so the bulk of the book presents a selection of 150 prints by 119 artists--47 color plates and 103 monochrome plates.

Hardcover. NY, Rizzoli, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, More than a century ago, when Abbot Kinney built his Venice-of-America with its network of canals and fanciful buildings, cultural aspirations were high. Over the years, this aura of fantasy and imaginative possibility endured as integral to the zeitgeist of the place. Today, this spirit of innovation and creativity is richly expressed in the vintage bungalows and cottages that have been embraced and brought back to life by homeowners more in love with place than size. Stalwart survivors of the ebb and flow of the area's fortunes over a century, these small homes channel the creative spirit of the place and provide a welcome counterpoint to oversize houses. Color, landscape, treasured collections, personal narrative, contemporary overlays and additions, art and craft, and inventive design--all combine in various ways to produce domestic environments with unique and deeply personal points of view.

Softcover. US, Laurence King, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 318 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. The album cover is a subject of perennial interest among graphic designers. Sleeve design remains a popular subject for college projects, and many young working designers aspire to design for the music industry. Revealing state-of-the-art contemporary music graphics, Cover Art By: is packed with more than 400 examples of sleeve art. As well as CD and album covers, the insides of CD booklets and the backs of vinyl sleeves are shown. The book opens with an in-depth essay reviewing the current scene, then focuses on the work of 30 international designers/labels who are the most influential in the field, making this a must-have for designers and students, as well as music industry professionals and fans.

Softcover. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, yellow wrappers, 287 pages. Light fading to spine. In ancient Mediterranean cultures, diamonds were thought to endow their owners with invincibility. In contemporary United States culture, a foreign-made luxury car is believed to give its owner status and prestige. Where do these beliefs come from In this study of craft production and long-distance trade in traditional, nonindustrial societies, Mary W. Helms explores the power attributed to objects that either are produced by skilled artisans and/or come from 'afar.' She argues that fine artisanship and long-distance trade, both of which are more available to powerful elites than to ordinary people, are means of creating or acquiring tangible objects that embody intangible powers and energies from the cosmological realms of gods, ancestors, or heroes. Clean copy.

Softcover. Albuquerque, NM, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 237 pages. Softcover. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Color photographs throughout.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 156 pages. Create and Be Recognized is the first survey of a compelling, always surprising art form -- outsider photography. Presented here is the work of seventeen largely self-taught artists who have used photography or photographic elements in their creations, including such luminaries as Adolf Wolfli, Howard Finster, and Henry Darger, as well as discoveries from little known, equally dramatic artists. As with most outsider art, the work here is fuelled by singular passions, marginalized mindsets, and extreme circumstances, falling outside mainstream picture-making. Employing collage (affixing photos or reproductions to a background), photocollage (photographs cut and pasted together to form a new whole), and tableaux (works based on manipulation and staging), the artists here present work that is, by turns, lyrical and frightening, and always fascinating. Published to coincide with a major touring exhibition of the same name originating at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Create and Be Recognized documents an emerging and important facet of contemporary photography.

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 240 pages. Swiss artist Daniele Buetti is notorious for his defaced photographs of supermodels, which feature scars, tattoos and disenchanted fragments of text. Buetti has been questioning the socially determined constructs of beauty and the commodification of sexuality and glamour since the 1980s. His altered photographs--large-scale C-prints on aluminum or light-boxes--have messages like "How much is my body worth?" and "What shall I hope for?" scrawled across them in electric colors. Buetti also often energetically scratches out or draws over portions of the image in a manner that recalls the destructive doodling of a truculent adolescent. Maybe You Can Be One of Us focuses on Buetti's recent drawings, videos, sculptures and installations. In these newer pieces, the fashion models give way to enigmatic illustrative symbols, such as two disembodied hands conjuring a puff of smoke. This publication accompanies an exhibition of new work at the Swiss Institute for Contemporary Art in New York.

Hardcover. Washington, D.C., Prestel, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 408 pages, illustrated throughout in color. Large oversized book. Devi, the Great Goddess of India is beautiful, beneficent, terrifying, all-powerful, and glorious. Ubiquitous in India's social and spiritual fabric, she has, over the millennia, been painted, sculpted, carved, and wrought from silver and bronze in a myriad of shapes and forms. Devi: The Great Goddess brings together one hundred and twenty of these diverse examples of Devi and a group of distinguished essayists who explore facets of Devi worship and tradition, including ritual, architecture, literature, history and contemporary issues such as feminism and gender politics. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO SIZE & WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Softcover. NY, Praeger, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 189 pages, b&w illustrations. This ground-breaking work brings dance into current discussions of the African presence in American culture. Dixon Gottschild argues that the Africanist aesthetic has been invisibilized by the pervasive force of racism. This book provides evidence to correct and balance the record, investigating the Africanist presence as a conditioning factor in shaping American performance, onstage and in everyday life. She examines the Africanist presence in American dance forms particularly in George Balanchine's Americanized style of ballet, (post)modern dance, and blackface minstrelsy. Hip hop culture and rap are related to contemporary performance, showing how a disenfranchised culture affects the culture in power. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York , Skira Rizzoli, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 224 pages, many illustrations, 72 in color. Bibliography, chronology. Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX, October 1, 2011 to January 8, 2012. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap.

Hardcover. Koln GDR, Walther Konig, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 242 pages 152 illustrations 87 in color. Text is in German and English Preface by Dietrich Karner. Introduction by Sabine Breitwieser. Published on the occasion of the exhibition from the Generali Foundation, Vienna 11 May-12 August 2001. List of Works in Exhibition. Biographies and Bibliography. To be able to take one's self off like a jacket and put on another self--who hasn't occasionally wished it were possible? Identity and transformation are among the central issues for contemporary art making, and Double Life pulls together a diverse selection of artists whose work embraces the possibilities of personality and appearance, racial and sexual stereotype, role-playing and reality. The artists in Double Life--from Marina Abramovic, Adrian Piper, and Andy Warhol to Ion Grigorescu, Eleanor Antin, Pierre Huyghe and Cindy Sherman--have all employed various strategies in their desire to assume different roles. Whether ironic, eccentric, utopian or critical, their methods have ranged from the subtle to the extreme. Zoe Leonard's pin-up calendar is filled with sexy portraits of her bearded self. Early black-and-white photographs by Cindy Sherman show the artist casually dressed as a random sampling of everyday people. Pierre Huyghe's Ann Lee is an anime extra, a digital character completely lacking any discernible identity. But artist Lynn Hershman perhaps best articulates the issue when she writes, "I always told the truth for the person who I was, but the person kept fluctuating."

Softcover. San Diego CA, Smart Art Pr, 1st, 1998, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two softcover volumes. Light shelf-wear, rubbing and sunning to wrappers. Text in English and Spanish. Catalogue of the exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 3 Mexican and 2 Spanish institutions, June 1998 - February 2000; notable for the interview of the collector, Tom Patchett, by Rugoff (volume 2) as well as the illustrative matter.

Softcover. New York , Museum of Modern Art , 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Unpaginated (86 pages), maroon illustrated wrappers. This is an album of early photographs taken of the New York red light district around 1912 by Bellocq. Friedlander took prints from the original plates for this book and they provide a fascinating documentary on bordellos at this interesting time in history. Reputedly never taking 'dirty' pictures of the girls, Bellocq confined his endeavors to recording for posterity these ladies in both clad and unclad poses. The foreword takes the form of a conversation between Friedlander and Dan Leyrer, who was also a photographer and a contemporary of Bellocq.

Softcover. NY, Christie's, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, illustrated wraps, 34 pages. BW & color illus. Issued in conjunction with an auction of Edward Hopper's painting "Blackwell's Island." Offers historical background with substantial text and archival and contemporary photographs Includes related works by fellow artists Robert Henri, Georgia O'Keeffe, George Wesley Bellows, and additional paintings by Hopper. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages, 242 photographs reproduced in four-color process. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Edward Steichen was already a famous painter and photographer in America and abroad when, in early 1923, he was offered the most prestigious position in photography's commercial domain: that of chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Over the next fifteen years, he would produce a body of work of unequaled brilliance, dramatizing and glamorizing contemporary culture and its achievers. Here are icon images of Gloria Swanson, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, and Charles Chaplin, as well as numerous other celebrities drawn from an archive of more than 2,000 original prints.

Hardcover. Seattle, WA, University of Washington Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 224 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. A tight copy. Contemporary portraits of key personalities aboard the ship, scale models and plans of the ship itself, scientific instruments taken on the voyage, commemorative medals and sketches, the objects (over 140) featured in this book tell the story of the Endeavour voyage and its impact ahead of the 250th anniversary in 2018 of the launch of this seminal mission. Artwork made both during and after the voyage will be seen alongside actual specimens. By comparing the voyage originals with the often stylized engravings later produced in London for the official account, Endeavouring Banks investigates how knowledge gained on the mission was gathered, revised, and later received in Europe. Items that had been separated in some cases for more than two centuries are brought together to reveal their fascinating history not only during but since that mission. Original voyage specimens are featured together with illustrations and descriptions of them, showing a rich diversity of newly discovered species and how Banks organized this material, planning but ultimately failing to publish it. In fact, many of the objects in the book have never been published before.

Softcover. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, 1at, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 253 pages, b&w and color illustrations, illustrated end paper. Bottom front left corner slightly bumped. Light marks to bottom edge. Else a very clean, tight copy. The book includes essays by five noted authorities: Linda Norden discusses Hesse's early career in New York following her years as a student of Josef Albers; Maria Kreutzer writes on Hesse's work in Germany in the mid-sixties, when she moved from two to three dimensions; Robert Storr places Hesse in relation to the central American artistic concerns of the 1960s, focusing on her links to such artists as Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, and Claes Oldenburg; Anna Chave analyzes Hesse's mature work in light of contemporary feminist theory on authorship and subjectivity; and Maurice Berger examines Hesse's radical and personal approach to the sculptural object following her rejection of painting. In addition, Helen Cooper draws on the artist's extensive diaries, notebooks, and correspondence for a chronology detailed as much as possible in Hesse's own words.

Hardcover. NY, Ecco, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 454 pages, b&w, color illustrations. Los Angeles in the 1960s: riots in Watts and on the Sunset Strip, wild weekends in Malibu, late nights at The Daisy discotheque, openings at the Ferus Gallery, and the convergence of pop art, rock and roll, and the New Hollywood. At the center of it all, one inspired, improbable, and highly combustible couple--Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward--lived out the emblematic love story of '60s L.A. The home these two glamorous young actors created for themselves and their family at 1712 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills became the era's unofficial living room, a kaleidoscopic realm--"furnished like an amusement park," Andy Warhol said--that made an impact on anyone who ever stepped into it. Hopper and Hayward, vanguard collectors of contemporary art, packed the place with pop masterpieces by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and Warhol, and welcomed a who's who of visitors, from Jane Fonda to Jasper Johns, Joan Didion to Tina Turner, Hells Angels to Black Panthers. In this house, everything that defined the 1960s went down: the fun, the decadence, the radical politics, and, ultimately, the danger and instability that Hopper explored in the project that made his career, became the cinematic symbol of the period, and blew their union apart--Easy Rider.

Hardcover. NY, Ecco, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 454 pages, b&w, color illustrations. Los Angeles in the 1960s: riots in Watts and on the Sunset Strip, wild weekends in Malibu, late nights at The Daisy discotheque, openings at the Ferus Gallery, and the convergence of pop art, rock and roll, and the New Hollywood. At the center of it all, one inspired, improbable, and highly combustible couple--Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward--lived out the emblematic love story of '60s L.A. The home these two glamorous young actors created for themselves and their family at 1712 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills became the era's unofficial living room, a kaleidoscopic realm--"furnished like an amusement park," Andy Warhol said--that made an impact on anyone who ever stepped into it. Hopper and Hayward, vanguard collectors of contemporary art, packed the place with pop masterpieces by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and Warhol, and welcomed a who's who of visitors, from Jane Fonda to Jasper Johns, Joan Didion to Tina Turner, Hells Angels to Black Panthers. In this house, everything that defined the 1960s went down: the fun, the decadence, the radical politics, and, ultimately, the danger and instability that Hopper explored in the project that made his career, became the cinematic symbol of the period, and blew their union apart--Easy Rider.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 2nd pr., 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 342 pages. In Extended Play, one of the country's most innovative music writers conducts a wide-ranging tour through the outer limits of contemporary music. Over the course of more than twenty-five portraits, interviews, and essays, John Corbett engages artists from lands as distant as Sweden, Siberia, and Saturn. With a special emphasis on African American and European improvisers, the book explores the famous and the little known, from John Cage and George Clinton to Anthony Braxton and Sun Ra. Employing approaches as diverse as the music he celebrates, Corbett illuminates the sound and theory of funk and rap, blues and jazz, contemporary classical, free improvisation, rock, and reggae. Using cultural critique and textual theory, Corbett addresses a broad spectrum of issues, such as the status of recorded music in postmodern culture, the politics of self-censorship, experimentation, and alternativism in the music industry, and the use of metaphors of space and madness in the work of African American musicians. He follows these more theoretically oriented essays with a series of extensive profiles and in-depth interviews that offer contrasting and complementary perspectives on some of the world's most creative musicians and their work. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Victoria & Albert Museum, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. "This collection of illustrations from the National Art Library at the V&A contains well-known and unfamiliar fables accompanied by contemporary texts and translations, often with a topical or satirical content. It gives a cross-section of illustrative styles from the 15th to the 20th centuries. Fabulous color and b/w illustrations throughout. A wonderful reference volume, with a small bibliography and an "Analysis by Theme" at rear (plus Index)." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Leicestershire, England, Matador, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 262 Pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Light edgewear to dust jacket. Previous owner's bookplate on front fly leaf, otherwise, clean, tight copy. Black and white pictures throughout.