art monograph

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. Guadalajara, Jalisco, Centro Metropolitano, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth covers stamped in gilt with a photographic label on front. A study of the Mexican artist's sculpture. Illustrated in b&w and color, 194 pages plus index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Rizzoli , 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 280 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Valentina was the twentieth century's first American fashion designer celebrity, working and living on equal social footing with the clientele she dressed (Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Katharine Hepburn, Millicent Rogers, and Audrey Hepburn, among others). One of the few designers who proved that America could live without the Parisian haute couture, her career is a much needed missing link in the history of American fashion. Beyond merely turning out show-stopping evening gowns, Valentina's exotic beauty, dramatic personality, and incomparable style earned her a legendary reputation. Kohle Yohannan explores the carefully constructed persona and lore of this designer who helped define American Couture. Published in association with the Museum of the City of New York's exhibition Valentina: New York Couture and the Cult of Celebrity, this book includes photographs, never-before-seen personal ephemera, sketches, and original platinum prints from master photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, and George Hoyningen-Huene.

Hardcover. New York, Alfred van der Marck, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 176 pages. Profusely illustrated with full color reproductions (including one fold-out) of pin-up art and paintings by Alberto Vargas. Foreword by Kurt Vonnegut. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Berlin GR, Benedikt Taschen, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, illustrated wrappers, 80 pages. Black laminated wraps with 'red Queen' 1954 on the front. Introductory text by Astrid Rossana Conte (grand-niece of Vargas) A monograph dedicated to the Peruvian painter and illustrator Alberto Vargas, famous for his pin-ups and portraits inspired by actresses, which examines four decades of his production, from the 1920s to the 1950s. Parallel texts in German, English and French; well illustrated with two photographs of Vargas, black and white examples of his drawings and many full colour examples of his paintings. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Harmony Books, 3rd pr., 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 128 pages. Foreword by Hugh Hefner, illustrated in color and black & white. A monographic study of the art of Alberto Vargas back to his earliest known work. His draughtsmanship and technique in depicting the female nude is unsurpassed. Moreover, he was a cultural force. The work he did for Playboy is confined to a few pages at the end. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Taschen, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 416 pages, color illustrated, large format. This catalog raisonne brings together Velazquez's complete works--jaw-dropingly reproduced in extra-large format with a selection of delicious enlarged details--with insightful commentary on how his paintings give equal attention to all that they contain. To him, an old woman frying eggs or a buffoon was as important as a Pope or a King. For him, form was subservient to light and color; the brushstrokes were markers to help the viewers reconstruct each picture mentally--concepts adopted vehemently by the Impressionists. Velazquez's greatest talent was creating beauty from the grotesque, imbuing each subject with a human liveliness rarely seen on canvas. In its extensive detail and comparisons, Jose Lopez-Rey's book reveals the development of this vision. NOTE: DUE TO SIZE AND WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. London, National Gallery , 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 256 pages, illustrated throughout in color. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket with small scratch on front cover. Clean, tight copy. With over 150 illustrations and an in-depth chronology, this beautifully produced and comprehensive book surveys Velazquez's entire career and explores his universal popularity. Fascinating essays by world-class Velazquez scholars address the artist's life and technique, examining his studies in Seville and Italy to his final great works at the court of Philip IV.

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, Rizzoli, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two volume set. Hardcovers with dust jackets. Both in beautifully illustrated slipcase. Minor fraying to slipcase edges. Hardcovers both clean and unmarked. Color illustrations throughout.

Softcover. New York, Guggenheim Museum, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 147 pages. Softcover. Full color illustrations. Light bump to top right corner. Clean, unmarked copy.

Hardcover. London, Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Nonpaginated. Hardcover. Color illustrations throughout. Clean inside and out. From the back cover: "The images in Vital Signs, Harvey Benge's fourth book of photographs, have been made in Paris, London, Prague, Hong Kong and beyond. They engage both the eye and the mind, inviting viewers to examine their own experience of urban life and what that means to them."

Hardcover. Brooklyn, NY, PowerHouse Books, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 123 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Black and white photographs throughout.

Rome, Franca May, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Black cardboard slip-case is VG with some wear. This is a written essay by the Italian author, Soavi of the art and world of Jean-Michel Folon. There are many full page full-color plates of the artist's paintings and serigraphs. This is also a visual essay (via color photos) of the farm in Burcy, near Paris, where the artist has his home and atelier. In all, twenty-eight of the artist's works are reproduced, most either taking up a full page, and some as two-page spreads.

Hardcover. New York , Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 352 pages. A balanced assessment of this talented and troubled figure. The 350 photographs are richly reproduced and reflect the scope of Smith's work.

Hardcover. GR, Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 272 pages. Illustrated in b&w. Walker Evans (1903-1975) is, without doubt, one of the most influential American photographers ever, and many of his images have become fixed in the collective memory. But while Evans' uncompromising depiction of poverty during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the subject of a series commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, has become a key chapter in the history of photography, his equally innovative images from later decades have generally commanded less attention. Back in print, this bilingual monograph attempts to redress the balance by examining Evans' complete body of work, and features many rarely seen photographs, including his final works, a sequence of Polaroids shot in the early 1970s (a sequence made possible by an unlimited supply of film from its manufacturer). Evans' re-ascendancy in the 1970s and his relationship with legendary Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski are also closely examined, in this essential and definitive volume on a great photographer who certainly achieved his aim to produce pictures that were "literate, authoritative, transcendent."

Hardcover. New York , Pantheon, 1st US, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 111 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Light edgewear and rubbing to dust jacket. Faint foxing to top edge, otherwise a clean, tight copy. In April 1933 an editor at Lippincott asked Evans to take photographs for a polemical book by Carlton Beals, a leftist writer who was very critical of the then Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado and anxious to show how American support of Machado had created an economic catastrophe in Cuba. Evans agreed after acceptance of his conditions that he have complete freedom to choose the photographs for publication and that they be collected at the end of the book so that they appeared to be an independent entity and not simply illustration of the text. Indeed, according to legend, Evans had not read Beals's text when he went to Havana in May 1933. He was in Cuba for three weeks. When his personal funds ran out, his way was paid for by Ernest Hemingway; the two had never met before, but Hemingway was eager for the company of someone equally qualified in literary conversation and in drinking. In the end, Evans contributed thirty-one photographs to the published "The Crime of Cuba". This book, WALKER EVANS: HAVANA 1933, contains seventy of the photographs Evans took in Cuba, including most of the photographs he selected for "The Crime of Cuba". The volume is introduced by an excellent essay by Gilles Mora that gives the historical background and discusses the place of Evans's Cuban photographs in his overall body of work. The photographs were selected by Mora and by John T. Hill, who also was responsible for the sequencing of their presentation. (One of Mora's points is that Evans attached a great deal of significance to the sequencing of his photographs, any collection of which he viewed as a composite artistic/documentary statement and, as such, more important than any single photograph.)

Softcover. New York, Abrams, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 368 pages, b&w plates. A reduced format softcover edition of the monumental 1993 edition by the same publisher. 300 duotone photographs that survey every significant aspect of his life and work, from his self-education and early specialization of street-life observations to his three-year involvement with the Farm Security Administration and his breakthrough exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Hardcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages, 106 illustrations. Light edgewear and rubbing to dust jacket. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art, 3rd pr., 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 192 pages, 106 illustrations. Clean, tight copy. A reprint of the classic 1971 monograph. Introduction by John Szarkowski.

Softcover. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Softcover, 318 pages. B+W and color photographs throughout. Clean and tight copy. Large exhibition catalog. Although his work has received many awards, been enshrined in the best museums, and been exhibited on several continents, Evans's total corpus is only now being fully examined. This important book revises our appreciation of Evans by presenting previously unknown material in an accessible context. Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Doug Eklund, and Mia Fineman offer novel insights into the sources and legacy of Evans's work. The result is a superb exploration of what was achieved by one of our finest, mostly deeply American artists.

Hardcover. New York, Museum of Modern Art , 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages, illustrated with 106 b&w photos by Evans. Dust jacket with light edgewear and soil, price-clipped.

Hardcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art, 2nd pr., 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and price-clipped dust jacket. Stated second printing. 189 pages, profusely illustrated in bw. With an introduction by John Szarkowski. Catalog of a photography exhibition held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Skira, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 224 pages. A splendid monograph on an unconventional photographer who developed a unique and deeply personal vision of the world surrounding him. Walter Chappell (1925-2000) is considered one of the foremost figures in twentieth-century American photography. His thinking and vision of the world were closely connected with the intimistic, spiritual explorations undertaken between the 1950s and the 1970s by artists like Minor White and Paul Caponigro. While Chappell photographed various subjects, his inner eye was stimulated in particular by the form of the human body and landscapes as well as the combination of both, through which he endeavored to perceive the creative flow, the energy that runs through and connects all things. Produced to accompany the first major European retrospective of Walter Chappell's work, this catalog presents over 130 photographs, all originals, as well as the unfinished and previously unpublished album World of Flesh, which the photographer intended as the primary publication on his work. Clean copy.