art portraits

Hardcover. Chicago, Frederick J. Drake and Co., 1902, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial cloth, 164 pages plus publisher's ads. 86 illustrations, frontis portrait of author. Only date is the copyright year 1902. Features detailed explanations and diagrams of numerous feats with coins-most prominent among them the author's world-famous original creation, "The Miser's Dream," a much-imitated act climaxing in the production of a shower of half-dollars. In this complete manual of the art of conjuring with coins, Downs shares his secrets for scores of "fakes" and sleights, including passing a coin through the bottom of a hat, the money-producing cigarette, the mysterious claret glass, the crystal coin ladder, the obedient coins, and many more. He also offers a wealth of suggestions for stage "business" involving handkerchiefs, goblets, hats and other props, as well as helpful tips on presentation, patter and other techniques. Overall fair, fragile condition with some chipping to cloth on front cover.

Hardcover. US, teNeues, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover with dust jacket. 240 pages. Clean, tight copy. Like new in pubisher's shrinkwrap. In an increasingly mobile society, it's common to cross the globe many times in a single month. Journeys that might once have taken weeks, now take hours. All of this travel is a suitable metaphor for Andrew Macpherson's rise to the pinnacle of celebrity photography. He has literally traveled the world to profile the best-known people of our age; Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon, and George Clooney to name a few. As he's done so, he's also embarked on an artistic journey to bring something fresh and inviting to each of his images. In this quest, he employs a multitude of varied techniques, playing with form, context and color. A note of poignancy overshadows this work. Many of the original negatives were lost in a warehouse fire. It is a testament to the strength of Macpherson's work that even scanned from magazine pages - as some of these images are - the results still radiate vitality and power.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 126 pages illustrated in color. In this intimate and profound portrait, the former Metropolitan Museum director elicits extended and revealing dialogue from the artist, revealing the philosophy and spirit of his art.

Hardcover. Florence Italy, Giulio Giannini & Son, 1st, 1910, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Unpaginated, b&w line portraits of famous Italians by Buona Fortuna accompanied by verse. Originally softcover here bound in three-quarter leather and marbled boards, spine with raised bands, gilt lettering. Bound with Casa Guidi Windows by E.B. Browning.(1925, Florence, 96 pages) Front cover hinge cracked but holding.

Hardcover. New York, Aperture, 1st US, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 104 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Published in Italian in 1955, and now available for the first time in the English language, Un Paese captures in photographs and in spoken testimony the essential experience of daily life in Luzzara. It presents a series of intense portraits, graceful landscapes, and images of everyday objects. Paul Strand's photographs are carefully distilled, deeply powerful; they contain the flavors and the rhythms of an entire culture crystallized in a single village. Zavattini successfully synthesizes text and image, aligning with the new cinematic trend of the day, a movement known as Italian neorealism. Their Luzzara is an ordinary village, neither overly picturesque nor greatly unusual, yet it is a town sustained by a grounded humanity and a profound love for the land by its people.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred Knopf, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 175 pages. Introduction by Anne Rice. A collection of 154 black and white and color images from: Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Imogen Cunningham, Steven Meisel, Man Ray, Bettina Rheims, Helmut Newton, Sally Mann, Kurt Markus, Jerome Zerve, Ellen von Unwerth, Andre Kertesz, Arthur Elgort, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Herbert List, Eve Arnold, Brassai and numerous others. Photographs of the nude (or rather semi-nude) male and female in underwear.

Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 464 pages, b&w photographs. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy. This biography offers the most complete and accurate portrait to date of the writer Caroline Gordon (1895-1981). Viewing Gordon's life in the context of female literary tradition, Nancylee Novell Jonza reclaims Gordon's integrity, individuality, and artistic vision from beneath a self-effacing, sometimes detractive, public image carefully fostered by the artist herself. Gordon's nine novels and three short-story collections are a major contribution in their own right to the southern literary renaissance. Despite an enduring readership, however, she still remains in the shadow of her husband, Allen Tate, the Fugitive Poet and Agrarian critic, partially due to her contrived persona of a traditional southern lady turned artist under the tutelage of a gifted, benevolent male writer. Drawing on manuscript drafts, unpublished works, letters, and a significant body of her journalistic writing, Jonza investigates fully the causes and effects of Gordon's self-mythologizing and covers substantially more ground than the thirty years during which she was closest to Tate.

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. Essex, VT, Battenkill River Press, 2nd printing, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 288 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Black and white images throughout. SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY AUTHORS ON TITLE PAGE.

Hardcover. Essex Junction VT, Battenkill River, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 278 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. An intimate look at the life of Norman Rockwell and his Arlington, Vermont neighbors, the Edgertons. Foreword by Dick Clark. Black-and-white photographs throughout. Bright and clean. A tight copy.

Softcover. Montclair NJ, Montclair Art Museum, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 36 pages, stapled exhibition catalog. 16 b&w plates by Sherman, many multiple images. Like new. The Unseen Cindy Sherman, curated by MAM's Chief Curator Gail Stavitsky, offers a little-known selection of works by this leading contemporary artist. Primarily culled from family collections, the exhibition comprises early photographs and photographic assemblages created by Sherman as a college student, when she had begun to use herself as the subject of staged photographs. These early works vividly illustrate Sherman's early explorations of the myriad constructions of self and female identities as a young woman, and her interest in challenging conventions of beauty and behavior.

Softcover. Montclair NJ, Montclair Art Museum, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 36 pages, stapled exhibition catalog. 16 b&w plates by Sherman, many multiple images. Like new. The Unseen Cindy Sherman, curated by MAM's Chief Curator Gail Stavitsky, offers a little-known selection of works by this leading contemporary artist. Primarily culled from family collections, the exhibition comprises early photographs and photographic assemblages created by Sherman as a college student, when she had begun to use herself as the subject of staged photographs. These early works vividly illustrate Sherman's early explorations of the myriad constructions of self and female identities as a young woman, and her interest in challenging conventions of beauty and behavior.

Hardcover. Melbourne, Macmillan Art Publishing, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Explores the elements of the lives, idiosyncrasies & creative processes of 60 Australian artists photographed over a 2 year period. Includes artists such as John Olsen, Jeffrey Smart, Robert Jacks, etc.

Hardcover. University of South Carolina Press, Supreme Council, Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 269 pages. " ...a fascinating journey through the history of Scottish Rite in America. This comprehensive pictorial history provides valuable insights into the critical role masons have played throughout our nation's history." b/w, sepia, & color plates throughout. In Valley of the Craftsmen, the story of "higher degree" Freemasonry is depicted through portraits, official papers, material objects, photographs, buildings, and stagecraft. Featuring many previously unpublished images, Valley of the Craftsmen begins with rare illustrations of the English and French philosophical sources that were projected upon an American landscape vitalized and transformed by the concept of fraternity. The story is framed by American popular culture and the serious private effort of individual men in small towns and expansive cities who were intent on developing a moral life in service to their communities. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Studio, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This lavish, photo-laden tour of Tinsel Town's history is coffee-table condensation of 87 years of Vanity Fair coverage of the Hollywood scene. Visually, it's a thrilling compendium of images that have defined not only the film industry and its workers but how the American public has understood them. Ranging from Edward Steichen's iconographic black-and-white portraits of Louise Brooks, Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg, and Gloria Swanson (which defined the "look" of Hollywood in its first half-century) to the contemporary and often shocking color photographs of Annie Leibovitz (of nearly everyone from Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta to Cate Blanchette and Johnny Depp)Dand peppered with shots by Bruce Weber, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Griege Hurrell and othersDthe book traces how these stars have come to embody pop mythologies of everyday life. The photos are interspersed among 13 (mostly short) essays by writers as diverse as Carl Sandberg, Patricia Bosworth, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker, Peter Biskind and D.H. Lawrence, which range from the humorous to the illuminating. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Clarkson N Potter, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 203 pages. Hardcover with clipped dust jacket. Clean, tight copy with black and white photographs throughout. Collects vivid photographic portraits of a wide variety of authors, artists, movie stars, politicians, dancers, and other celebrities.

Hardcover. New York, Abrams, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 384 pages, 100 color, 200 b&w images by the world's best photographers. Essays by Christopher Hichens, others. In publisher's shrinkwrap. Vanity Fair: The Portraits brings together 300 iconic portraits from Vanity Fair's 95-year history in a remarkable book that captures the image of modern fame--the magical thing that happens when individual talent and beauty (and sometimes genius) is caught in the spotlight of popular curiosity and passion. The photographers--from Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton to Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino--are a glittering and celebrated group themselves. Their portraits have become the iconic likenesses of the best-known figures from the worlds of art, film, music, sports, business, and politics.

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.

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. NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, still sealed in publisher's shrinkwrap. 550 pages. Seventeenth-century Delft has traditionally been viewed as a quaint town whose artists painted scenes of domestic life. This important book revises that image, showing that the small but vibrant Dutch city produced fine examples of all the major arts--including luxury goods and sophisticated paintings for the court at The Hague and for patrician collectors in Delft itself. The book traces the history and culture of Delft from the 1200s through the lifetime of the city's most renowned painter, Johannes Vermeer. The authors discuss at length some ninety major paintings (seventeen by Vermeer), forty drawings, and a choice selection of decorative arts, all of which are reproduced in full color. Among the paintings are state portraits, history pictures, still lifes, views of palaces and church interiors, illusionistic murals, and refined genre pictures by Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch. The rich works on paper encompass exquisite drawings by Delft artists and sketches of the town by visiting artists. Included in the decorative arts are tapestries, bronze statuary, silver, Delftware, and glass. The volume concludes with an essay that takes the reader on a walk through seventeenth-century Delft. It is accompanied by maps of the city's neighborhoods that indicate major monuments and the homes of patrons, art dealers, and painters.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. This lavishly illustrated book establishes the towering influence of the scientist Victor Regnault (1810-1878) in the earliest decades of photography, a period of experimentation ripe with artistic, commercial, and scientific possibility. Regnault has a double significance to the early history of photography, as the first leader of the Societe Francaise de Photographie (S.F.P.) and as the maker of more than two hundred calotype (paper negative) portraits and landscapes. His photographic and scientific careers intersected a third field with his appointment in 1852 as director of the Sevres porcelain works.Readers are treated to Regnault's own beguiling pastoral, garden, and forest scenes; striking portraits of the scientists and artists in his circle of friends; quirky images of acoustic experiments; and an insider's view of the Sevres porcelain works. Regnault's richly varied photographs also encompass perhaps the most extensive group of family portraits in early photography, and his romanticized landscapes reflect a moment when the rural outskirts of Paris were being aggressively suburbanized and industrialized.

Hardcover. Chicago, IL, Center for American Places, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 184 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Includes CD. The product of several visits to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Views from the Reservation is meant to open our eyes, minds, and hearts to the life, culture, and conditions of the Oglala Lakota people. With his insightful and complex images Willis enlists several other voices to offer a more complete story: writer Kent Nerburn, who contributes an original essay; Lakota elders and Pine Ridge High School students, who offer poems; Emil Her Many Horses, the associate curator of the National Museum of the American Indian, Kevin Gover, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs, and Oglala Lakota artist Dwayne Wilcox. Accompanying the book is Heartbeat of the Rez, a compact disc collecting traditional songs compiled by the author, the elders, and KILI, the radio station of the reservation.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st English, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 143 pages, b&w photographs throughout. A very clean, tight copy.

Softcover. SelfMadeHero, 1st US, 2015, Softcover, 142 pages illustrated in color by Stok. Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson. This graphic biography documents the brief and intense period of creativity Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) spent in Arles, Provence, in southern France. Here van Gogh dreams of setting up an artists' studio--a haven where he and his friends can paint together. But attacks of mental illness leave the painter confused and disoriented. When his friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin refuses to reside permanently at the Yellow House, a distraught van Gogh cuts off part of his own ear. Throughout this period of intense emotion and hardship, Vincent's brother, Theo, stands by him, offering constant and unconditional support. Writer and illustrator Barbara Stok breathes riveting new life into a fascinating episode of art history, creating a vivid portrait of one of the world's most beloved and legendary artists. Clean copy.