art criticism

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton/ Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 153 pages, b&w illustrations. "Mather and Weston first met in Los Angeles in 1913. They soon developed a close relationship, eventually working together as full-fledged artistic partners and even co-signing the photographs they produced. Weston was also madly in love with Mather, and the two engaged in an affair during his first marriage, even though Mather was more interested in women. This book which features art by both artists, chronicles their twelve-year association and sheds light on Mather, whose artistry, sexual identity, and mysterious past have been overshadowed by the massive reputation of Edward Weston and his subsequent association with Tina Modotti."

Hardcover. New York, NY, Rizzoli International Publications, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 304 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Martine Sitbon has become an icon among designers and fashionistas, earning her praise from Karl Lagerfeld as being "the only living French designer." With never-before-seen sketches and photographs, this book allows readers to gain a better understanding of the designer's personal universe and inspirations that have until now been largely hidden from view.

Hardcover. Flammarion, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 448 pages. This elegant, large-format volume presents twenty masters of photography via 300 extraordinary authorial photographs, providing a broad yet accessible overview of twentieth-century photography. From Man Ray's pioneering experimentations to the elegant and provocative fashion shots of Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts, the twenty master photographers featured in this handsome tome are masters of their craft across different photographic genres, from reportage and documentary to art and portraiture to fashion and glamour photography. A portfolio for each photographer features a selection of their legendary images, an introduction to the photographer's oeuvre, a brief biography, and commentary on each of the featured photographs. The volume features a striking, elegant design and large format, bringing these iconic photographs into sharp focus.Master Photographers features the work of Araki Nobuyoshi, Gabriele Basilico, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Elliott Erwitt, Walker Evans, Mario Giacomelli, Mimmo Jodice, William Klein, Peter Lindbergh, Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, James Nachtwey, Helmut Newton, Martin Parr, Herb Ritts, Sebastiao Salgado, and August Sander.

Hardcover. New York, George Braziller, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 231 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. 124 color prints. 13 gatefold illustrations especially valuable: nearly 5 feet wide when opened. Textual material includes descriptions of each screen reproduced, a glossary, and short biographies of the artists whose work is presented.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 289 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with minor wear to dust jacket edges. Klein surveys the history of Matisse's portraits and their sitters, with attention to the details of the financial transaction or other agreement that caused the painting to be made. An analysis of Matisse's self-portraits is also provided. Klein works chronologically, detailing the artist's developing style, but remains attached to his biography as well, with many quotes about Matisse or his works from contemporary sources. This volume is well illustrated with b&w and color plates.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University, 1st, 1986, Hardcover, 523 pages. Flam, who translated Matisse's writings in Matisse on Art (Phaidon, 1973), presents a thorough and scholarly examination of the artist's life and stylistic development. Each painting is given a complete analysis, revealing Matisse's encounters with the prevailing styles and theories of art to arrive at work distinctly his own. Glimpses of his personal life combined with discussions of his paintings show the inner turmoil with which he struggled to find a style that would satisfy both his instinct and his intellect. Flam provides new documentary material, corrects earlier misconceptions, and redates several paintings. Heavily illustrated, often with fine color reproductions, this volume is an excellent successor to Alfred Barr's Matisse .

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 394 pages. Collects responses to Spiegelman's monumental work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status. The writers approach Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions, inspired by the material's complexity across four decades, from 1985 to 2018. The book is organized into three loosely chronological sections-- "Contexts," "Problems of Representation," and "Legacy"--and offers for the first time translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus. The book includes work from twenty-one leading critics, authors, and academics--including Philip Pullman, Robert Storr, Ruth Franklin, and Adam Gopnik--on the radical achievement and innovation of Maus, more than forty years since the original publication. Remainder dot on bottom edge otherwise clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Meredith, NH, Intervale Publishing, 2nd, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 92 pages. Softcover with light wear to edges. Illustrations throughout by author. Tight.

Hardcover. Swan Isle Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 180 pages. Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel (1900-83), known for his surrealist themes and unflinching social criticism, was an artist defined by intellectual ambition and controversy. An exile who produced some of his most famous work in Mexico and France during Franco's dictatorship, he left a complicated imprint on the creative landscape of the twentieth century and on generations of younger filmmakers--including his Mexican friend Claudio Isaac. Drawn from Isaac's personal papers, Midday with Bunuel: Memories and Sketches, 1973-1983 is an intimate and unconventional portrait of this cinematic icon--and memoir of Isaac's own artistic development.The text includes sketches, vignettes, and anecdotes from Isaac's notebooks, revealing his perspective first as a precocious boy and then as a young man. Isaac reflects on Bunuel's presence among a community of exiles, artists, actors, writers, and intellectuals in Mexico City. These are at once touching, perceptive, and critical glimpses into Bunuel's roles as husband and father, friend and colleague, surrealist, philosopher, and iconoclast during his last years. Throughout, Isaac's words reveal his deep admiration and affection for an older friend full of contradictions. Intimate photographs from the Isaac family archive complement the writing, and Bryan Thomas Scoular's careful translation makes this text available for the first time in English.

Hardcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 143 pages. Minor White was one of the twentieth century's most influential B&W art photographers. Rites & Passages, is a compilation of his writings and photographs, with a biographical essay by James Baker Hall. The book is well writen and edited, and is a significant insite into the thoughts and motivations of a great artist. With a generous number of stunning photographs, expertly printed on quality paper, it is a book worthy of any discriminating collection.

Softcover. NY, The Museum of Modern Art, 1st pbk., 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, oblong format, 152 pages. 127 plates, 17 in color. Photographs by eighty-four artists, including such established figures as Paul Caponigro, Judy Dater, Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, Helen Levitt, and Garry Winogrand, as well as various artists who were less known at the time such as Gary Beydler, Frank Gohlke, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Misrach, and Eve Sonneman. Clean copy.

NY, Frederick Unger, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 383 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In the first fully illustrated work of his illustrious career, David Thomson re-examines a series of moments - which readers will experience in beautifully reproduced imagery - from seventy-two carefully selected films across a hundred-year time span. His moments range from a set of Eadward Muybridge's pioneering photographs to sequences in films from the classic - Citizen Kane , Sunset Boulevard and The Red Shoes - to the unexpected - The Piano Teacher , Burn After Reading - immersing the reader via a groundbreaking marriage of imagery and the author's accompanying narrative. David Thomson's evocative, unflinching prose and profound understanding of what makes film and art form identify him as one of the great film writers of our time, making it likely that Moments that Made the Movies will be widely viewed as an important classic on the subject of international cinema. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 304 pages. In essays that function at once as film criticism and autobiography, 23 writers recall the films that shaped them in this thoughtful and moving book that explores the mysterious interplay of art and life. Includes Russell Banks on Bambi, Joyce Carol Oates on Dracula, and Harold Bloom on The Fatal Glass of Beer.

Softcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 7 1/2" x 10 1/2", twenty-four page exhibition catalog is bound in stapled wrappers and is in VG+ condition. B&W reproductions and photographs. Foreword by William S. Lieberman, Curator of Prints for MOMA.

Hardcover. US, Museum of Photographic Arts, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 240 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. Black and white photographs throughout. This publication is the first comprehensive survey of Nancy Newhall, a prolific writer and major contributor to the history of photography. During the first half of the twentieth century, Newhall helped define photography and was one of the first to write about visual literacy- the importance of reading images and how text can change their meaning. Using her skills as designer, editor and collaborator, Nancy Newhall helped shape the concept of the modern photographic book. A Literacy of Images celebrates the 100th anniversary of her birth, exhibiting her photographs (many for the first time) and the work of her circle of friends, including well-known photographers such as Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Helen Levitt and Edward Weston.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two Volume Set. Volume I of the set, "Documentation: Reviews" is 485 pages in length and is divided into eight sections, one for each of the original impressionists. Volume II of the set, "Documentation: Exhibited Works" is 300 pages in length and consists of black and white photographic illustrations of the works that were presented at the eight exhibitions, along with annotations and references to the original reviews, as well as other sources of documentation.

Hardcover. NY, Samuel French, reprint, 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, blue cloth in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket. B&w illustrations. A leading theatrical designer of his day, the Russian-born author (whose credits included many important productions for the Group Theatre and the Theatre Guild in the 1930s) also designed costumes, was a lighting director, and, later in life, a teacher of theatre. In this volume, an acknowledged classic, he "presents a vivid panorama of stage and screen technique, showing how styles of production change constantly in response to new audiences." It is the first adequate study of the social meaning of stage production. It analyzes the artistic relation of the stage to the screen. It describes the effect of new political ideologies on dramatic life and thought.

Softcover. NY, Picador, reprint, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 318 pages. Calvin Tomkins first discovered the work of Robert Rauschenberg in the late 1950s, when he began to look seriously at contemporary art. While gazing at Rauschenberg's painting Double Feature, Tomkins felt compelled to make some kind of literal connection to the work, and it is in that sprit that "for the last forty years it's been [his] ambition to write about contemporary art not as a critic or a judge, but as a participant." Tomkins has spent many of those years writing about Robert Rauschenberg, whom he rapidly came to see as "one of the most inventive and influential artists of his generation." So it seemed natural to make Rauschenberg the focus of Off the Wall, which deals with the radical changes that have made advanced visual art such a powerful force in the world.Off the Wall chronicles the astonishingly creative period of the 1950s and 1960s, a high point in American art. In his in his collaborations with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and as a pivotal figure linking abstract expressionism and pop art, Rauschenberg was part of a revolution during which artists moved art off the walls of museums and galleries and into the center of the social scene. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st Edition, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 207 pages. Hardcover. Cover boards bound in dark gray cloth, gilt title on spine. Some light fading to covers at top and bottom of spine (shelfwear). Gray endpapers. Dust jacket price-clipped, some light tanning and chipping to edges of dj (see image). Pages clean and unmarked. Foreedge has some light spots of soil and a touch of tanning (see image). Binding tight. Spine straight. Sontag examines a wide range of problems, both aesthetic and moral, raised by the presence and authority of the photographed image in the lives of everyone today. Appendix "A Brief Anthology of Quotations" included.

Hardcover. NY, The New Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 182 pages, b&w illustrations. Lucy R. Lippard weaves together cultural criticism, anthropology, and community activism for an in-depth look at how tourism sites are conceived and represented, and how they affect the places they transform. Critic Andrew Ross calls Lippard "the most surefooted tour guide you could hope for" in her exploration of being a tourist in one's own home, of how advertising and photography define place, of how antique shops function as populist museums, and of the commodification of indigenous cultures. With her characteristic breadth and critical eye, Lippard discusses the political economies of leisure spaces, the tourist's fascination with tragic destinations (such as the sites of massacres and nuclear weapons tests, or Holocaust memorials), and our willingness to let national parks and heritage sites define nature and history. Clae copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, reprint, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn and lightly soiled dust jacket, unclipped with $4.50 price. Essays on a wide range of topics, including the assassination of Gandhi, Vassar, anti-Semitism, the Communist party, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, etc. No first printing indicated so assumed 2nd pr. No markings.

Hardcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 168 pages. In The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, Thierry Smolderen presents a cultural landscape whose narrative differs in many ways from those presented by other historians of the comic strip. Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted "sequential art" definition of the comic strip, Smolderen instead wishes to engage with the historical dimensions that inform that definition. His goal is to understand the processes that led to the twentieth-century comic strip, the highly recognizable species of picture stories that he sees crystallizing around 1900 in the United States. Featuring close readings of the picture stories, caricatures, and humoristic illustrations of William Hogarth, Rodolphe Topffer, Gustave Dore, and their many contemporaries, Smolderen establishes how these artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images--satirical images in particular--were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. Across eight chapters, he acutely points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies (photography, audio recording, and cinema) at the end of the nineteenth century led to a new twentieth-century visual culture. In tracing this evolution, Smolderen distinguishes himself from other comics historians by following a methodology that explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basis of its present state. This study remaps the history of this influential art form.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 318 pages. In Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde, Xiaobing Tang studies the art and art theories of the first half of the twentieth century, when modern Chinese art and literature emerged. He argues that the most consequential expression of the avant-garde was the modern woodcut movement that thrived in China in the 1930s. In this innovative study--also the first comprehensive account of this Chinese movement available in English--Tang examines the aesthetic, intellectual, and social appeal of the modern woodcut and places the movement at the intersection of historical events, individual efforts, and competing discourses on art. He also shows how the woodcut movement drew upon international inspiration--from German Expressionism, Soviet wood engravings, and Japanese creative prints.