Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 500 pages, b&w illustrations. In this second volume of his definitive biography of Pablo Picasso, John Richardson draws on the same combination of lively writing, critical astuteness, exhaustive research and personal experience that made a bestseller out of the first volume and vividly re-creates the artist's life and work during the crucial decade of 1907-1917--a period during which Picasso and Georges Braque invented cubism. Clean copy in a bright dust jacket.
Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1899, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 96 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. In 1952, at the age of 23, Helen Frankenthaler created her legendary painting Mountains and Sea. She poured thinned-down pigment directly onto unprimed canvas to be absorbed into its fibers. This large painting, the first in which Frankenthaler used her soak-stain technique, synthesized the influences that had informed her work to that point and announces her arrival as a mature artist. Published to accompany a 1998 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this book focuses on Mountains and Sea and other groundbreaking paintings of Frankenthaler's early career. In this period, Frankenthaler drew upon Cubism, the abstractions of Arshile Gorky and, especially, those of Jackson Pollock, whose radical technique inspired her to reject easel painting. Frankenthaler herself became associated with the second generation of the New York School and her unique method and experimental use of materials influenced her contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists.
Hardcover. New Havn CT, Yale University Press, 1st , 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 333 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Illustrated in color, B&W. Clean, tight copy. Few painters lived the intellectual adventures of the early twentieth century as intensely as Albert Gleizes. At the centre of the public scandal over Cubism that broke out in Paris in 1911, he was with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia in New York during the war and was one of the first European avant-garde artists to respond to the scale and vigour of New York life. Gleizes was also one of the few French painters of the 1920s to recognise nonrepresentational painting as the logical development of Cubism. His work as a painter is accompanied by an immense body of theoretical work, addressing the question posed so starkly by Duchamp and Picabia: why should we paint? What is the justification for the work of art? Over his life he touches on many spheres of human activity - religious, political and cultural history, physics and the philosophy of work.This book follows Gleizes' argument as it evolves, drawing on painting, and both published and unpublished writings. It reveals Gleizes, not just as a significant historical personality, but as a man whose work and thinking remains surprisingly fresh and relevant to the needs of our own time.
Softcover. NY, Da Capo Press, 1st pbk., 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 546 pages, b&w illustrations, Apollinaire champions Picasso, Braque, Cezanne, Delaunay, Duchamp, Rousseau ,cubism, surrealism, and much more. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial cloth. Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel is an icon of fashion, and can lay claim to having invented the look of the 20th century. At the height of the Belle Epoque, she stripped women of their corsets and feathers, bobbed their hair, put them in bathing suits and sent them out to get tanned in the sun. She introduced the little black dress; trousers for women; costume jewelry; the exquisitely comfortable suit that became her trademark. Early in the Roaring Twenties, Chanel made the first ever couture perfume - No. 5 - presenting it in the famous little square-cut flagon that, inspired by Picasso and Cubism, became the arch symbol of the Art Deco style. No. 5 remains the most popular scent ever created. This volume, published to accompany a landmark exhibition in Paris, traces the birth and evolution of Chanel's timeless style. Specially commissioned photographs by Julien T. Hamon showcase the clothing, while essays by fashion historians illuminate a period, an event or a theme. Rare archival documents, including portraits of Gabrielle Chanel herself, round out the book. Remainder line on bottom edge otherwise clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Hardcover. New York, Arcade Publishing, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 440 pages, illustrations in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. A pioneer of modern art and founder of Cubism, Georges Braque was a creative genius and tireless innovator, constantly pushing back the boundaries of the possible. In this magisterial work, Alex Danchev taps a wide range of new sources to reveal the heart and mind of one who helped usher in the greatest revolution in the ways of seeing since the Renaissance and changed the face of modern art. Chapters include: "Memories in anticipation:" The Confirmed Painter, "Mon vieux Wilbourg:" The Encounter with Picasso, "If I should Ide Out There:" The Great War, The prong of the rade" : Late Braque. And much more.
Hardcover. New York, Arcade Publishing, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 440 pages, illustrations in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. A pioneer of modern art and founder of Cubism, Georges Braque was a creative genius and tireless innovator, constantly pushing back the boundaries of the possible. In this magisterial work, Alex Danchev taps a wide range of new sources to reveal the heart and mind of one who helped usher in the greatest revolution in the ways of seeing since the Renaissance and changed the face of modern art. Chapters include: "Memories in anticipation:" The Confirmed Painter, "Mon vieux Wilbourg:" The Encounter with Picasso, "If I should Ide Out There:" The Great War, The prong of the rade" : Late Braque. And much more.
Hardcover. Los Angeles, Calif., Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover with a dust jacket. This copy is still shrink-wrapped in plastic. Many b&w and color illustrations throughout. Accompanied an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2001. Examines more than seventy-five paintings and other artworks, representing the Purist movement in twentieth-century modernist art, featuring the works of Le Corbusier, AmTdTe Ozenfant, and Fernand LTger as well as a complete translation of the classic work AprFs le cubisme.
Softcover. Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics Books, Reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 156 pages. Softcover. A very clean, unmarked copy. Black and white illustrations throughout by Mary Fleener. Most everyone has heard the phrase "sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll." But "sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, and comics"? You bet. In a gloriously straightforward manner, Mary Fleener illustrates her oftentimes decadent social experiences in this complete collection of her autobiographical comics work. The tableaux she weaves are a candid take on the party scene of Southern California, but what is most distinctive isn't her storytelling--it's her art. She has developed a unique style that she calls "cubismo": a blend of underground comix and cubism. She uses this style to convey changes in mental states--specifically, changes in the subjective fields of experience--whether from anger, frustration, or drug use.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press/Barnes Foundation, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards with a white cloth spine. This book offers a long-overdue reassessment of the career of the Parisian-born artist Marie Laurencin (1883-1956), who moved seamlessly between the Cubist avant-garde and lesbian literary and artistic circles, as well as the realms fashion, ballet, and decorative arts. Critical essays explore her early experiments with Cubism; her exile in Spain during World War I; her collaborative projects with major figures of her time such as Andre Mare, Serge Diaghilev, Francis Poulenc, and Andre Groult; and her role in the emergence of a "Sapphic modernity" in Paris in the 1920s. Along with more than 60 full-color plates, Laurencin's life and career are documented through an illustrated chronology and exhibition history, as well as an appendix charting her network of female patrons and associates. Laurencin became a fixture of the contemporary art scene in pre-World War I Paris, including as a muse and romantic partner of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. She returned to the city after the war, having developed her signature style of diaphanous female figures in a blue-rose-gray palette. Laurencin's feminine yet sexually fluid aesthetic defined 1920s Paris, and her work as an artist and designer met with high demand, with commissions by Ballets Russes and Coco Chanel, among others. Her romantic relationships with women inspired homoerotic paintings that visualized the modern Sapphism of contemporary lesbian writers like Nathalie Clifford Barney. Indeed, one of Laurencin's final projects was to illustrate the poems of Sappho in 1950.
Hardcover. NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 200 pages. A look at the artistic and technical innovation of British printmaking from World War I to the eve of World War II, as artists from the Grosvenor School and beyond harnessed an emerging modernist style. This richly illustrated volume reintroduces rare print works from the collection of Leslie and Johanna Garfield into the narrative of modernism, demonstrating their relationship to other movements such as Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism. Essays explore how artists turned to printmaking to alleviate trauma, memorialize their wartime experiences, and capture the aspirations and fears of the twenties and thirties. Special attention is given to the linocut technique revolutionized by Claude Flight and his students at London's Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Highlighted as well are the pioneering works of artists such as C. R. W. Nevinson, Sybil Andrews, Cyril E. Power, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Edith Lawrence, Ursula Fookes, and Lill Tschudi. In their quest to promote a more democratic art, these artists created innovative graphics that portrayed in subject, form, material, and technique the dynamic era in which they lived. In publisher's shrinkwrap.
Softcover. London, Phaidon Press, reprint, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Softcover, 255 pages, b&w and color photographs throughout. Light fading to dust jacket spine. Else a very clean, tight copy. "Paul Rand (1914-96) was a pioneering figure in American graphic design. Adopting what he called a 'problem solving' approach to design, he drew on the ideas of European avant-garde art movements, such as Cubism, Constructivism and De Stijl, and synthesized them to produce his own distinctive graphic language."
Hardcover. NY, Taschen, reprint, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Color frontispiece. Black & white illustrations throughout on every page. 11" high X 8" wide, 448 pages. The perfect tribute to the world's favorite dirty old man. It spans the years 1982 to 1989, a period when the artist was comfortably ensconced in rural California, raising his young daughter Sophie, who appears throughout this volume. But Crumb was still Crumb, declaring in one drawing, above a lovingly rendered tree, "As I get older I get more twisted, convoluted, depraved, cynical, embittered, self-centered, jaded, debauched, ruthless, greedy, conceited, set-in-my-ways, long-winded, absent-minded, prejudiced, closed-minded, misanthropic, nervous..." To prove this self-flagellating analysis he fills the pages with his signature perversions (in country settings), scathing social commentary, cruel self-portraits, experimental cubism... and some lovely sylvan landscape. His mastery of the Rapidograph pen is at its zenith here in his 40s, Clean, still in publisher's shrinkwrap.
Hardcover. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. It is little known that interbellum Britain hosted a generation of Modernist artists who absorbed the wealth of Continental avant-garde idioms and adapted them to their own unique ends. Some of this work was done under the rubric of Vorticism, the Neofuturist movement spearheaded by Wyndham Lewis, while other artists were closely associated with London's Grosvenor School of Art (and so came to be known collectively as the Grosvenor School), breaking new ground in the practice of linocut. Rhythms of Modern Life examines the impact of Cubism and Futurism on British printmaking in the years between the First and Second World Wars, focusing in particular on the dynamic imagery of 13 artists, including C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and David Bomberg, all early followers of Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, and on the works of Grosvenor School artists Claude Flight, Sybil Andrews, Cyril Power and Lill Tschudi. All of these artists coined styles that addressed the velocity of modern life, espousing industry, speed and an optimism for the century ahead. This book, the first survey of its kind, features more than 100 lithographs, etchings, woodcuts and linocuts, ranging from geometric abstractions to forceful impressions of the first fully mechanized war, Jazz Age images of sporting events, speed trials and other contemporary diversions. Clifford S. Ackley's introduction takes stock of the art historical moment and is followed by discussions of the prints, an overview of the history and technique of the modern linocut and short biographies of the artists.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 284 pages. In Rustic Cubism, Bruce Adams tells the fascinating story of Moly-Sabata, an art colony founded in the Rhone Valley during the height of French modernism by Cubist pioneer Albert Gleizes. Following his social and spiritual agenda of earthly labor and a Celtic-medievalist view of Christianity, Gleizes' disciples worked to fuse Cubism with a revival of ancient agrarian, artisanal traditions. The most important and committed member of this experimental commune was ceramicist Anne Dangar (1885-1951). Generously illustrated with photographs of the art and social milieu of the period, this captivating and original narrative makes a considerable contribution to our understanding of French modernism and early twentieth-century cultural politics as well as of the life of a most talented and intriguing female artist.
Hardcover. Washington, Prestel, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 288 pages. Softcover. Very clean, like new in publishers shrink-wrap. This book pays tribute to the mature work of Stuart Davis, a distinctly American artist who adapted European modernism to reflect the sights, sounds, and rhythms of popular culture. Beginning in 1921, a series of creative breakthroughs led Davis away from figurative painting and toward a more abstract expression of the world he inhabited. Drawing upon his admiration for Cezanne, Leger, Picasso, and Seurat, Davis developed a style that would evolve over the next four decades to become a dominant force in postwar art. His visionary responses to modern life and culture both high and low remain relevant more than 50 years after his death. Focusing on the images and motifs that became hallmarks of his career, this book features approximately 100 works-from his paintings of tobacco packages of the early 1920s, the abstract Egg Beater series, and the WPA murals of the 1930s, to the majestic works of his last two decades. The authors take a critical approach to the development of Davis's art and theory, paying special attention to the impact his earlier work had upon his later masterpieces. They also discuss Davis's unique ability to assimilate the lessons of Cubism as well as the imagery of popular culture, the aesthetics of advertising, and the sounds and rhythms of jazz-his great musical passion. Informed by previously unpublished primary documents, the detailed chronology is, in effect, the first Davis biography. Together, these elements create a vital portrait of an artist whose works hum with intelligence and energy.