art modern

Softcover. Paris FR, Paris-Musees, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Flexible cloth covers, profusely illustrated, 463 pages, FRENCH TEXT. "This well-illustrated catalogue provides a fine review of the early years of the German Expressionist movement through a presentation of some 400 paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures by members of the Brucke in Dresden (Heckel, Kirchner, Mueller, Pechstein, Schmidt-Rottluff and Nolde) , the Blaue Reiter artists in Munich (Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee, Macke, Marc, Munter and Werefkin) and Berlin painter Ludwig Meidner. Sixteen wide-ranging essays are supplemented by detailed entries for most of the exhibited works, a selection of texts and letters by the featured artists, and a chronology of important cultural and political events in Dresden, Munich and Berlin from 1905 to 1914." Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper Design, 1st, 2023, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 223 pages illustrated in color. From longtime fashion director, consultant, media personality, and author, Hal Rubenstein, comes a lush, full color, illustrated guide to the most influential fashion on television from the 1950s to today, revealing the surprising ways our favorite shows have significantly reflected and often shaped the way we dress. From Mary Tyler Moore's capri pants on The Dick van Dyke Show and Emma Peel's dominatrix jumpsuit on The Avengers to Olivia Pope's trademark white trench on Scandal and Don Drapers' grey sharkskin suits on Mad Men Dressing the Part is a rich history of popular American fashion and culture in the modern age. In this gorgeous compendium, the longtime fashion director and expert identifies the most stylish television shows of the past 70 years, highlighting the ways they have affected and often inspired ordinary Americans' wardrobes. Combining his decades of fashion expertise and insider knowledge with lush photographs, archival sketches, fascinating interviews with over two dozen of television's best costume designers, commentary from showrunners and co-stars, and little-known backstories, Rubenstein reveals with insight and wit how television has shaped everyday fashion, guiding and often elevating how we dress. Clean copy.

Softcover. London, Tate Publishing, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 248 pages, color and b&w illustrations. This book examines the work of Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia, three pioneering figures in the history of modernism. It explores the points of convergence and the parallels in their development throughout their careers. Central to this is their response to photography and film, and to the challenges posed to fine art by the development of mass production. Duchamp's paintings of 1911-12 were influenced by the representation of movement in photography, while Picabia's were shaped in part by the belief that the advent of the camera spelled the end of traditional painting. Man Ray used photography first to record his own art works and those of others, but soon saw in it a means of creating images of a status and inventiveness traditionally restricted to fine art. And, as this fully illustrated book shows, humor and eroticism were themes common to the work of all three artists.

San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 246 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Beautiful copy in a dust jacket, Like new. "Mucking up the pages of the New Yorker , the New York Times , Rolling Stone , Forbes , the Atlantic Monthly , Blab , and more, Gary Baseman has populated the finest publications with his inimitable brand of illustration. Now Dumb Luck , presents the first complete collection of his work, spanning more than ten years. According to Baseman himself, his art inhabits "that muddy spot where the line between genius and stupidity has been smudged beyond recognition."

Hardcover. New York , Arts, Inc., 1st, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 164 pages, 128 illustrations, 57 in color, including many tipped-in. Bright dust jacket with price-clipped flap. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf otherwise clean, very good.

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. Oxford UK, Museum of Modern Art , 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 88 pages, b/w illustrations, very good paperback (exhibition catalogue). The essay is: Soviet photography between the wars. The photographers are: Max Alpert; Dimitr Dyebabov; Semyon Fridlyand; Boris Ignatovich; Yelizaveta Ignatovich; Georgi Lipskerov; Moisei Nappelbaum; Georgi Petrusov; Alexander Rodchenko; Galina Sanyko; Arkadi Shaikhet; Shaikhet/Alpert/Tules; Abram Shterenberg; Georgi Zelma.

Hardcover. NY, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a slipcase, 192 pages. Transforming words into icons and images into wide-screen epics, Ed Ruscha has wholly reconceived the terms of painting for our era. Tagged variously as a Conceptualist, Pop artist or latter-day Surrealist, Ruscha flouts category, or rather incorporates all categories, always surprising and experimenting with both subject and method. His paintings are steeped in our times: cinema, advertising, logos, late capitalism and the twists and turns of postwar art have all informed his iconography since the early 1960s, arriving on the cool surfaces of his canvases with magnetic detachment. Ruscha eschews process and focuses exclusively on the final product: "the means to the end has always been secondary in my art," he has said. Ruscha has also reinvented the use of words in art, finding disquieting ways to invest language with a weird, throbbing, ambient static, never aspiring to what he calls "word gestures," since "each word is an excursion unto itself." Fifty Years of Painting focuses on Ruscha's majestic oeuvre of paintings. A magnificent publication, it comes housed in a slipcase that sports the artist's classic painting "Standard Station" (1966), and, alongside fantastic reproductions, it contains a preface by novelist James Ellroy, essays by Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz and Ulrich Wilmes, a text by novelist Bruce Wagner, an interview with the artist by Kristine McKenna, an illustrated chronology and an exhibition history.

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Harcover, 128 pages. Since his first road trip in 1956, driving from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, Ed Ruscha has continued to muse on America as seen from the road: "I like being in the car, and seeing things from that vantage point," he has said. "Sometimes I give myself assignments to go out on the road and explore different ideas. My books are an example of that." Consisting of around 75 works spanning the artist's entire career, Ed Ruscha: Road Tested includes many of the famous aforementioned artist's books, including Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, Real Estate Opportunities, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Thirty-Four Parking Lots and the groundbreaking artist's book Every Building on the Sunset Strip; some of Ruscha's most iconic paintings, such as the "Standard Stations" and the "Hollywood Signs," as well as paintings inspired by street names and road signs; and his exploration of the topography of greater Los Angeles in paintings that depict aerial grids of the city, as well as various southern California horizons and sunsets. Also examined here is the rarely seen Ruscha film Miracle (1975), which tells the story of a mechanic whose obsessive repair of the carburetor on a 1965 Mustang dooms his date with a beautiful woman. The first-ever treatment of a primary theme in the artist's career, Road Tested at last gives Ed Ruscha his own road show.

Hardcover. New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 256 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor dust jacket wear. Very light yellow fading to textblock edges. Otherwise a tight copy. 250 illustrations, 207 in color, 43 black & white.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Clio Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, maroon boards with gilt lettering along spine. Binding and hinges tight and square. 1996 publication, in like-new condition with no wear or distress. 202 pages including extensive bibliography; has black & white illustrations. A collection of writings by and about American photographer Steichen (1879-1973) who set new standards for advertising photography, helped pioneer aerial reconnaissance during the First World War and photography as a tool of propaganda during the Second, and served as the first Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Hardcover. NY, Merrell, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. Over the course of his fifty-year career, American photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) blazed a path into Photo-Modernism rendering portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and nudes. In 1902, a sixteen-year-old Weston took up photography in Highland Park, Illinois, where he worked as an amateur for five years. In 1907, at the age of twenty-one, Weston moved to Tropico, California, now the city of Glendale in Los Angeles County, where he constructed his first studio and set about with great purpose to become a photographic artist. Examining Weston's earliest sharp- and soft-focus photographs reveals that the young artist had already formed a perfect sense of composition that was to be the hallmark of his later work. Presenting Weston's earliest work from a recently discovered family album, Edward Weston: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist compares the artist's naive first artistic efforts with his latest masterworks to show the persistence and evolution of his singular vision to find essential form in the vernacular with an ever-increasing intensity. As a young man deeply intuitive and original in his creative expression, Edward Weston demonstrates that his teenage work, beginning with his amateur snapshots, embrace the same significant form as the later work for which he is now considered a master.

Hardcover. Munich/NY, Prestel, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 296 pages, color illustrations and portraits throughout. Issued in conjunction with a 2014-2015 exhibition of portraiture rendered by Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918). "Despite a career that lasted less than a decade, Schiele is considered one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. A protege of Gustav Klimt, Schiele is celebrated for his singular style of draftsmanship, unusual use of color, and physically raw, often sexually provocative depictions of his sitters. Schiele's expressive style and controversial subject matter played an important role in the advancement of modernism in Europe. ... Both the catalogue and the exhibition are divided into six groupings of the artist's work: Family and Academy; Fellow Artists; Sitters and Patrons; Eros; Lovers; and Self-Portraits and Allegorical Self-Portraits. In addition, there is a section highlighting a traumatic and pivotal period in Schiele's life: his arrest and imprisonment during the spring of 1912. The color plates document the evolution of the artist's style, both pre- and post-imprisonment. Schiele's untimely death at the age of 28 adds a mythic quality to his abbreviated career." (dj) With five thematic and illustrated essays, and many illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Thames and Hudson , 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, pictorial boards with a red cloth spine. Sergei Eisenstein is regarded as one of cinema's greatest revolutionaries; his use of montage, symbolic images and skilful editing transformed the possibilities of filmmaking and dramatically modernized the artform. Yet he was also a prolific graphic artist who sketched continuously throughout his life. This book chronicles his life and career. Num Pages: 320 pages, 500 color illustrations. Clean copy.

Softcover. Milwaukie OR, Dark Horse, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 346 pages, trade paperback with french flaps. It would be hard to imagine any creators who have more greatly affected their chosen medium than Will Eisner and Frank Miller have influenced the world of comics and graphic novels. Often misunderstood, but enduringly enjoyed by people from all walks of life, the comic book has in recent years been recognized as a "legitimate" art form by cultural institutions ranging from Harvard University to the Smithsonian, from The New Yorker to the Art Institute of Chicago. Now, culture-curious readers and life-long fans of the comics medium are invited to read along as two of the medium's greatest contributors-legendary innovator and godfather of sequential art Will Eisner, and the modern master of cinematic comics storytelling, Frank Miller-discuss one on one in an intimate interview format, the ins-and-outs of this compelling and often controversial art form. Eisner/Miller is profusely illustrated and features rare, behind-the-scenes photos of Eisner, Miller, and other notable creators.

Hardcover. New York, Abrams/Whitney Museum, 1st, March 1, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 239 pages. 245 plates and figures, 95 bw and 150 color. Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, April 3 to July 20, 2003. This book is the most comprehensive publication to date on the work of Elie Nadelman (1882-1946), an important sculptor and a key member of the New York art scene in the first half of the 20th century.

Hardcover. New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 236 pages, color illustrations. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Elizabeth Murray has radically altered the structure of Modernist painting. Her shaped and constructed canvases, often topologically modeled in three dimensions or fitted together out of multiple jigsaw-like parts, treat figure and ground in unprecedented ways, giving the elastic shapes of classic Surrealism a space in their own image. The alternatively comfortable and cataclysmic world that her images depict would crack irrevocably if it followed Euclidean logic; instead; it constantly metamorphoses under stress. With a chaptered essay by Robert Storr, plate section, and in-depth interview, the book explores Murray's relation to artists such as Joan Miro, Stuart Davis, Claes Oldenburg and Frank Stella, as well as to the mainstream and opened up options for rising generations. This book accompanies the most detailed examination of Murray's art yet mounted, showing its development from Pop-oriented reliefs in the 1960s to the extraordinary volumetric of her recent work.

Hardcover. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, color illustrations; 7.2 X 0.9 X 10.3 inches; 272 pages. Tang dynasty (618-907) China hummed with cosmopolitan trends. Its capital at Chang'an was the most populous city in the world and was connected via the Silk Road with the critical markets and thriving cultures of Central Asia and the Middle East. In Empire of Style, BuYun Chen reveals a vibrant fashion system that emerged through the efforts of Tang artisans, wearers, and critics of clothing. Across the empire, elite men and women subverted regulations on dress to acquire majestic silks and au courant designs, as shifts in economic and social structures gave rise to what we now recognize as precursors of a modern fashion system: a new consciousness of time, a game of imitation and emulation, and a shift in modes of production. This first book on fashion in premodern China is informed by archaeological sources-paintings, figurines, and silk artifacts-and textual records such as dynastic annals, poetry, tax documents, economic treatises, and sumptuary laws. Tang fashion is shown to have flourished in response to a confluence of social, economic, and political changes that brought innovative weavers and chic court elites to the forefront of history. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Softcover. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 215 pages. Many illustrations, 78 in full color. Published on the occasion of the exhibition from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC September 22, 1996-January 26, 1997 and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia PA March 2-May 11, 1997. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. New York, Art in America/ Stewart Tabori and Chang, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 270 pages, illustrated throughout with 134 plates in full color. Essay by Peter Schjeldahl. Edited by David Whitney. Illustrated with reproductions of 77 of Fischl's oil paintings from 1980-1987, 35 of his works on paper, and 12 seminal glassines. Includes a selected bibliography. Minor edgewear to white pictorial dust jacket . Else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Hamlyn Publishing Group, Ltd., 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Illustrated guide to historical and modern Eskimo art. 96 pages, illustrated with more than 100 photographs, both color and black/white (many full-page). Book and dust jacket are in very good condition, dust jacket shows some light edge wear.

Hardcover. Indianapolis, Indiana, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 160 pages. Hardcover no dust jacket. Color pictures throughout. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to boards. Decoding Robert Indiana's work for a new generation, this revelatory book explores previously unknown autobiographical elements in the work of the Pop artist and printmaker. Famously proclaiming himself to be "an American painter of signs," Robert Indiana has created an enormous body of work, much of it boldly colored abstractions. In this incisive new examination of the artist, based on ongoing conversations with Indiana, art historian Martin Krause sifts through autobiographical clues within the artist's work and finds a wealth of affecting and affectionate references to Indiana's childhood, literary heroes, and the cultural icons of his generation. In addition, a penetrating essay by Pop art scholar John Wilmerding deconstructs Indiana's use of geometric shapes, making unexpected connections that enhance Krause's thesis. Accompanied by reproductions of more than 50 prints from the period 1960-2010--and focusing specifically on series such as Decade: Autoportraits, Vinalhaven Suite, and The Hartley Elegies as well as the "Love" and "Hope" images and studies of Marilyn Monroe, Picasso, and the Brooklyn Bridge--Krause's decryption of Indiana's visual language provides telling insight into the work of this quintessentially American artist.

Hardcover. Knoxville TN, University of Tennessee Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 235 pages. Evelyn Scott was a significant literary figure in American letters of the 1920s and 1930s, an important contributor in the experimental forms and techniques of the modernist movement. She wrote and published in many genres -- the novel, short fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism, and drama. Since that time, Scott's work has been forgotten by most readers and critics, and her reputation as an important writer of her day has been obscured. This collection, which features an introduction and thirteen critical essays, is the first volume to focus on Scott's work rather than her intriguing yet troubled life and initiates a long-needed examination of Scott's innovations in fiction, memoir, and other genres. The various essays take diverse critical approaches to Scott's canon, including her best-known works -- Escapade and The Wave -- and explore her views on topics such as women, politics, religion, art, and the South. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Hudson NY, Princeton Architectural Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 143 pages. We are all critics now. From social media "likes" to reviews on Yelp and Rotten Tomatoes, we're constantly asked to give our opinion and offer feedback. Everyone's a Critic is a curated collection of the best and brightest New Yorker cartoonists celebrating the art of the drawn critique, whether about restaurants, art, sports, dates, friends, or modern life. Featuring the work of thirty-six masters of the cartoon, including Roz Chast, Sam Gross, Nick Downes, Liza Donnelly, Bob Mankoff, Michael Maslin, and Mick Stevens, over half the cartoons in this book appear in print for the first time. No dust jacket issued. Clean copy.