art history

Softcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st pbk, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 296 pages, b&w illustrations. The apt subtitle of this award-winning biography, Photographer & Revolutionary, sums up the creative tensions that characterized Tina Modotti's life and brief photographic career. Active as a photographer for only nine years, Modotti was pulled between formal and social concerns. Producing striking modernist compositions of everyday objects, photojournalism of poverty and conflict, and portraits of celebrities and common people alike, Modotti balanced political concerns with formal rigor.First published in 1993 and long out of print, Tina Modotti: Photographer & Revolutionary is the definitive portrayal of Modotti's life and work. Few photographers are more deserving of a biographical treatment than Modotti, whose work as an actress and artist's model introduced her to Edward Weston, who was to become her lover. Soon after she arrived in Mexico City with Weston, Modotti became increasingly politicized, working for the communist newspaper El Machete and establishing herself as the go-to photographer for the Mexican Muralist movement. The book includes extensive archival material, interviews with Modotti's contemporaries and many rare photographs. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boulder CO, Westview Press, 2nd pr., 1999, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 264 pages, color and b&w illustrations. This introduction to the life and works of one of the giants of Western painting also surveys the golden age of Venetian painting from Bellini to Veronese and its place in the history of Western art. Sometimes referred to as the founder of modern painting Titian's legacy and influence was immense and continuing?: Italian Baroque painting, El Greco, Rubens, Rembrandt and Dutch painting, French 18th century painting, Velazquez, and Picasso. There are 119 black and white illustrations integrated with the text and 8 plates in full color, a selected bibliography and index. Clean copy.

Softcover. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 315 pages. Color illustrations. For nearly four decades in the sixteenth century, the careers of Venice's three greatest painters-, Titan, Tintoretto and Veronese, overlapped, producing mutual influences and bitter rivalries that changed art history. Venice was then among Europe's richest cities, and its plentiful commissions fostered an exceptionally fertile and innovative climate. In it, the three artists, brilliant, ambitious and fiercely competitive, vied with one another for primacy, employing such new media as oil on canvas, with its unique expressive possibilities, and such new approaches as a personal and identifiable signature style. They also pioneered the use of easel painting, a newly portable format that led to unprecedented fame in their lifetimes. With more than 150 stunning examples by the three masters and their contemporaries, this volume elucidates the technical and aesthetic innovations that helped define the uniquely rich "Venetian style," as well as the social, political and economic context in which it flourished. Essays range from examinations of seminal new techniques to such crucial institutions as state commissions and the patronage system. Most of all, by concentrating on the lives and careers of Venice's three greatest painters, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese paints a vibrant human portrait--one brimming with savage rivalry, one-upmanship, humor and passion. Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. New York, Prestel Publishing, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 452 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Color pictures throughout. Black covers with gilt lettering on spine. Previous owner's signature and bookplate on front flyleaf. Light wear and rubbing to dust jacket. This excellent catalog of the 1990-1991 exhibition in Venice and Washington is a work of permanent value. Featuring essays by 16 authorities, primarily Italian and American, on every aspect of the art of Titian (Tiziano Vecelli, c. 1490-1576), the quintessential Venetian artist of the high Renaissance, the work transcends the limits of spatial and temporal exhibition to summarize and extend current scholarship. At the same time, the text is accessible, well translated, and aimed at a broad audience. Many of the works in the exhibit were conserved or cleaned, so the book features fresh illustrations and a hefty amount of technical discussion of specialist interest.

Hardcover. London, Phaidon Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 240 pages. Hardcover no dust jacket. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Titian (Tlziano Vecellio, c. 1488/90-1576) was an outstanding painter of the Renaissance. An Ideal introduction to Titian's life and work for the general reader and scholar alike. Places Titian's career and work into the social and historical context of sixteenth-century Italy and explores his approach to a number of themes.

Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. In 1972, underground cartoonists Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli produced Tits & Clits - a funny, rowdy, raucous underground comix series about female sexuality that one reviewer described as "the ultimate in vaginal politics" - and became the first American women ever credited with writing, drawing, and publishing their own comic books. A feminist answer to Zap, Tits & Clits quickly became an anthology showcase for other women cartoonists, featuring the work of Mary Fleener, Roberta Gregory, Krystine Kryttre, Lee Marrs, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Trina Robbins, Dori Seda, among others. Like other underground comix, Tits & Clits leaned into being lewd in order to satirize women's experiences with so-called sexual liberation. Featuring stories about birth control, abortion, menstruation, masturbation, and more, Tits & Clits featured intimate politics which occasionally clashed with contemporaneous feminist concepts about sex and sexuality. As Chevli put it: their work had something to offend everyone. (In 1973, conservative legal authorities in Orange County deemed their work pornographic and even threatened the two editors with arrest on obscenity charges.)Now, for the first time in half a century, a new generation of readers will be shocked, entertained, enlightened, and scandalized by the bold satirical cartoonists that comprised the band of sisters in Tits & Clits. In addition to reprinting the seven-issue run of the Tits & Clits series, this collection also includes in their entirety two classic solo comics from 1972 written and drawn by Farmer and Chevli - Abortion Eve and Pandora's Box. Also included is an introductory essay providing context to Tits & Clits' place in the history of women's cartooning by the book's editor, Samantha Meie

Softcover. Hanover NH, Hood Museum of Art, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 32 pages, b&w plates. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st pbk., 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 273 pages, b&w illustrations. The first in-depth analysis of the rich spiritual and artistic traditions of the Carib-speaking Yekuana Indians of Venezuela, who live in the dense rain forest of the upper Orinoco. Within their homeland of Ihuruna, the Yekuana have succeeded in maintaining the integrity and unity of their culture, resisting the devastating effects of acculturation that have befallen so many neighboring groups. Yet their success must be attributed to more than natural barriers of rapids and waterfalls, to more than lack of "contact" with our "modern" world. The ethnographic history recounted here includes not only the Spanish discovery of the Yekuana but detailed indigenous accounts of the entire history of Yekuana contact with Western culture, revealing an adaptive technique of mythopoesis by which the symbols of a new and hostile European ideology have been consistently defused through their incorporation into traditional indigenous structures. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abbeville Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 222 pages in color and b&w. Tony Sarg (1880-1942), an American artist born in Guatemala to a diplomatic family, first achieved professional success as an illustrator in London and New York. But in the 1920s, he gained even greater renown for his touring puppet shows based on classic tales like Alice in Wonderland and Robinson Crusoe. Fusing the time-honored craft of traditional marionette shows with a playful modern sensibility, Sarg's productions were foundational to American puppetry: Jim Henson can be considered a direct artistic descendant. Yet this was only one facet of Sarg's varied accomplishments: he was also a pioneer in animated films and children's books, and, as a longtime designer for Macy's, he invented the gigantic balloons used in the firm's Thanksgiving Day Parade. (He also employed one of his parade balloons in the famous Nantucket Sea Serpent hoax of 1937.) This abundantly illustrated volume, published to coincide with a major exhibition organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, is the first to survey Tony Sarg's protean career. It brings together imagery and artifacts from numerous public and private collections, and includes special sections on Sarg's long association with the island of Nantucket and his influence on American puppetry. Tony Sarg: Genius at Play will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of popular culture. Claen copy.

Softcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, oblong format. Replete with photographs and reproductions of Tony Smith's work. 200 pages including 237 illustrations (108 in color), Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Exhibition History. Tony Smith (1912-1980) was an American sculptor, architect, and painter best-known for his abstract, large-scale sculptures. As an architect, he worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and founded his own architectural firm during the 1940s. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, large format pictorial boards, 200 pages. In 1949, the ambitious Charles Biro - who had previously co-created the realistically brutal comic Crime Does Not Pay - edited and wrote an oversized comic aimed at adults, called Tops. Like several other radical adult comics projects that would follow, it proved to be a commercial failure and lasted only two Life magazine-sized issues. The original comics have since become a legendary holy grail among comics fans and historians, fetching as much as $6,000 on the collector's market: written about but rarely seen and never reprinted. Until now.Fantagraphics' Tops collects both issues of these oversized experimental comics in their entirety. Some of the best craftsmen working in comics at that time drew these pulpy, sexy, and melodramatic stories: Dan Barry, George Tuska, and others. It includes two stunning pre-EC crime tales illustrated by Reed Crandall, reminiscent of his Crime SuspenStories work. Actor Melvyn Douglas (believe it or not) takes the reader on a tour of utopia, entitled "How Would You Live Under A World Government?" - a positive spin on global Socialism! A treasure trove of fascinating and revelatory comics history for scholars and fans, this compilation includes an introduction by the editor, the historian and cartoonist Michael T. Gilbert, as well as several other essays providing background on the creation of the series and the publisher, editors, and cartoonists who realized it. It includes a chronicle in essay form of experimental, adult comics endeavors throughout the first half of the 20th century. Tops is a landmark work of historical importance and a mind-boggling reading experience from a bygone era meticulously restored and reproduced in a deluxe hardcover in its originally published dimensions. Full-color illustrations throughout.

Softcover. NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 244 pages. The story of westering Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been told most notably through photographs of American Indians. Unlike this vast archive, produced primarily by male photographers, which depicted American Indians as either vanishing or domesticated, the lesser-known images by the women featured in Trading Gazes provide new ways of seeing the intersecting histories of colonial expansion and indigenous resistance. Four unconventional women-Jane Gay, who documented land allotment to the Nez Perces; Kate Cory, an artist who lived for years in a Hopi community; Grace Nicholson, who purchased cultural items from the Karuk and other northern California tribes; and Mary Schaffer, who traveled among the Stoney and Metis of Alberta, Canada-used cameras to document their cross-cultural encounters. Trading Gazes reconstructs the rich biographical and historical contexts explaining these women's presence in different Native communities of the North American West. Their photographs not only record the unprecedented opportunities available for Euro-American women eager to shed gender restrictions, but also reveal how women's newfound mobility depended on the increasing restrictions placed on Native Americans in this era.

Softcover. Salt Lake City, Gibbs Smith, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wrappers, 160 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. Trailer Travel showcases the rich visual history of America's enduring fascination with life on the road. Beautifully reproduced color and black-and-white images culled from public archives and the private collections of passionate trailerites vividly document the travel trailer?s storied past. This engaging volume offers a look at motor-camping trips in the early 1900s, the unparalleled innovations in trailer design during the thirties, rare and unique trailer models and interiors, and an extensive array of bold and graphic promotional material, literature, and postcards that illustrate the undeniable attraction of living on wheels.

Softcover. DeKalb IL, Northern Illinois University Press, 1st pbk, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 232 pages. From the time of the first written sacred texts in the West, taboo has proscribed the act and art of translation. So argues the author of this book, exploring the age-old prohibition of translation of sacred texts. Clean copy.

Softcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wraps, 195 pages. Exhibition Catalog, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. This stunning catalogue includes color photographs of more than 230 objects, excavated in the 1930s by renowned British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley, from the third-millennium-B.C. Sumerian city of Ur. Learn the fascinating story of the excavation and preservation of these magnificent artifacts.Many of the objects are published in color and fully described for the first time--jewelry of gold and semiprecious stones, engraved seal stones, spectacular gold and lapis lazuli statuettes and musical instruments; and vessels of gold, silver, and alabaster. Curator Richard Zettler sets the stage with a history of Ur in the third millennium and the details of the actual excavations. Art historians Donald Hansen and Holly Pittman discuss the historical importance and significance of the many motifs on the most spectacular finds from the tombs. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Da Capo Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 245 pages, b&w photos. Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was one of the most brilliant exponents of New Orleans jazz. A prodigy on the clarinet, he soloed with Bunk Johnson's orchestra at age eleven, was improvising cornet-clarinet duos with Buddy Petit at age fifteen. Leaving New Orleans in the 1920s, Bechet took his Creole sound and spirit to New York, where he adopted the soprano saxophone and soon developed the unique style that marked his special artistry.

Hardcover. Troy NY, William H. Young, 1st, 1891, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 453 pages. Hardcover, dark green covers stamped in black. Previous owners name on preliminary page. Black & white illustrations. One fold-out city view. Title in gilt on spine. Cloth covers with areas of light surface rubbing. Clean, unmarked text.

Hardcover. Harrisonburg VA , Vision On, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Now, for the first time, photographs from Jim's extensive color archive are published in book form, offering a fresh insight into the work of this renowned photographer and a new look at some of the great figures in music history. His unique style and fearless approach gained him unlimited access to everyone from Miles Davis to Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones and The Who right up to recent sessions with Velvet Revolver.

Hardcover. Baton Rouge LA, Louisiana State University, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 294 pages. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 214 pages. A follow up of Truitt's journal "Daybook." The author continues the exploration of her life as an artist, a woman, and a mother, focusing on the constant interplay between daily activities and choices and the broader context of history and ideas. Clean copy.

Softcover. New York , Ira Spanierman Gallery, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Exhibition catalog. 88 pages, illustrated throughout with numerous plates in b&w and 19 plates in full color. French folded pictorial wrappers. Lovely copy. like new.

Softcover. Rome, Libreria dello Stato, 1st, 1992-01-01, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 429 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Folio. Light edgewear and rubbing to wrappers, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Disney Editions, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages. One Joe was in his ninety-seventh year when he died in 2005; the other Joe died the same year at age forty-five. Both died before their time. This book explores the interplay between personal creativity and the craft of animation storytelling, as seen through the lives and art of two of its greatest practitioners: Joe Grant and Joe Ranft.Grant and Ranft were unique influences on storytelling at two major studios during important periods in the history of animation. Joe Grant, in fact, straddled two eras. A gifted newspaper caricaturist, he contributed ideas for Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony shorts as well as classic masterworks like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; Pinocchio; Fantasia; and Dumbo. As Walt Disney's confidant, Grant played a leading role in defining Disney's pioneering animation legacy. He returned to the studio at eighty-one after a fortyyear hiatus, his creative spirit and abilities undiminished, and made significant contributions to Beauty and the Beast; Aladdin; Mulan; and The Lion King, among others.Joe Ranft built on the traditions of the past forged by Grant and others to become the top animation storyboard artist of his generation, working on Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas; The Brave Little Toaster; Who Framed Roger Rabbit; James and the Giant Peach; The Little Mermaid; and Beauty and the Beast, among other films. As one of Pixar's creative founders and a close friend of John Lasseter's, Ranft had a major influence on the studio's signature originality, warmth, and irreverent humor, through his contributions to Toy Story; Toy Story 2; A Bug's Life; Monsters, Inc.; and Cars.

Hardcover. New York, Gallery Books, 1st US, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 390 pages, illustrated throughout in color. INSCRIBED BY YOSHIDA on half title page. Large, very heavy book. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket. Clean, tight copy.