Art Avant-Garde

Softcover. Boston MA, Little, Brown and Company, reprint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 319 pages, paperback. Man Ray's extraordinary autobiography, which reveals the entertaining life and times of the remarkable artist. Color and black-and-white illustrations throughout. Mild rubbing and edgewear to wraps. Lower fore edge corner slightly creased. Light pen mark to front flyleaf. A bright and tight copy.

Softcover. Surrey UK, FAB Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 352 pages, b/w illustrations. The essential subterranean tract of 2005, Midnight Mavericks is a rollicking tour through the hearts and minds of today's most uncompromising artists from the lower depths of entertainment culture. Profiled are controversial underground icons, angry stand-up comedians, exploitation filmmakers, hardcore crime novelists and controversial cartoonists, including Abel Ferrara, John Waters, Andrew WK, Chris D, Mike Diana, Lydia Lunch and Jim Goad. Includes Sounds from the Underground, a bonus 70minute CD of interview excerpts and songs from the musicians featured in the book.

Softcover. London, Tate, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 208 pages. Softcover. Color and black and white pictures throughout. Light edgewear to wrappers.

Hardcover. New York , Thames and Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 112 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Louis Stettner is one of the last living members of the avant-garde New York School of photography of the 1950s, which challenged many of the long-accepted foundations of art form. His Penn Station series of the late 1950s represents some of his most important work, gathered here in a single form for the first time. The series is less a portrait of the building than a study of people at once in transit and in suspension. 

Hardcover. London, Tate, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages, color and b&w illustrations. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Provocative and entertaining, Pop Life examines how artists since the 1980s have cultivated their public persona as a product, and conjured a dazzling mix of media, commerce, and glamour to build their own "brands." Beginning with the grandfather of Pop, Andy Warhol, who manufactured mass-produced wares in The Factory in the 1960s, the book explores Jeff Koons' infamous Made in Heaven series-showcasing his marriage and sexual relations with Italian porn-star and latter-day politician Illona Staller (aka La Cicciolina)-and his stainless steel Rabbit sculpture; an iconic array of golden spot and butterfly paintings from Damien Hirst's recordbreaking 2008 auction; and a reconstruction of Keith Haring's Pop Shop in New York. Takashi Murakami's designs for Louis Vuitton are also included, along with works by Richard Prince, Martin Kippenberger, Tracey Emin, and many more.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 238 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Covering the period from the Revolution to the beginning of World War II, this book considers Soviet avant-garde photography and film in the context of political history and culture. Three essays trace this generation of artists, their experiments with new media, and their pursuit of a new political order. A wealth of stunning photographs, film stills, and film posters, as well as magazine and book designs, demonstrate that their output encompassed a spectacular range of style, content, and perspective, and an extraordinary sense of the power of the photograph to change the world.

Hardcover. Roma, Paolo Buggiani, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Non-paginated. Full color handpainted covers, with cutout window exposing image of Paolo Buggiani. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Brief text in English. Light wear to covers. Clean, unmarked copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. The poet John Ashbery wrote of Rudy Burckhardt in 1980: "Before there was an underground, there was Rudy Burckhardt. The genial, Swiss-born jack-of-all-trades and master of several has remained unsung for so long that he is practically a subterranean monument." Since that time Burckhardt's reputation has steadily grown - as photographer, filmmaker, and painter - beyond Manhattan's downtown community of artists in which he lived and worked. For six decades Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was a discreet, but enduring, and ultimately important figure in New York's avant-garde art world. Author Phillip Lopate, a long-time friend of the photographer, provides an insightful and thought-provoking homage to the quiet brilliance of a national treasure. And the poet and curator, Vincent Katz, has contributed an essay further elaborating on Burckhardt's photographic achievement. Illustrated with almost three hundred photographs, Rudy Burckhardt presents the remarkable depth and range of the artist's work. The book will fascinate anyone interested in the New York art world and offers a revelation for all those interested in photography.

Hardcover. Russia, Aurora Art Publishers, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 199 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Some foxing to textblock edges. Otherwise a very clean, unmarked copy with some minor dust jacket wear. Black & white and color illustrations throughout. A tight copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 169 color plates. An introduction to the postmodern photographs of Allan Chasanoff, whose work interrogates and subverts the notion of photography as a truthful record of the real. From the 1960s onward, Allan Chasanoff (1936-2020) maintained a daily photographic practice, producing tens of thousands of images that pushed the limits of the medium and questioned its reliability as a document of reality. Preferring to experiment away from the art world, Chasanoff rarely exhibited his photographs, his art remaining unknown to all but a select circle of friends and collaborators. This catalogue is the first to survey his beguiling work. Monika Sziladi, Chasanoff's archivist, contributes an outline of the artists life and practice, tracing the development of his art from his early experiments with light, shadow, and color in his lens-shot photographs to his late-career foray into 3D printing, which he viewed as the latest frontier of photography. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Study of American artists influenced by Dada and their relationship with American avant-garde. 283 pages, 94 black/white illustrations. Cloth bound book in near fine condition, only sign of wear is slight discoloration to the top edges of pages (light spotting), not visible when reading the book.

Hardcover. Middletown Conn. , Wesleyan University Press, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 283 pages, 94 black/white illustrations. Study of American artists influenced by Dada and their relationship with American avant-garde. Orange cloth, gilt lettering to spine. Pictorial dust jacket shows light wear and rubbing along edges and faded spine, else a very nice, tight, clean copy.

Hardcover. Middletown Conn. , Wesleyan University Press, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 283 pages, 94 black/white illustrations. Study of American artists influenced by Dada and their relationship with American avant-garde. Orange cloth, gilt lettering to spine. A very nice, tight, clean copy.

Softcover. New York , Museum of Modern Art , 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 96 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. Softcover exhibition catalog. The Stenberg brothers, like their contemporaries Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, were artists of immensely varied interests and eclectic skills. They were sculptors, architects, and stage and costume designers, and were enamored of the film and montage theories developed in the suddenly burgeoning Soviet film industry. As seen in this book's superb color plates, they brought to film poster design an extraordinary compositional dynamism, originality, and contrast of scale, employing many of the artistic conventions of the Constructivist movement to great effect.

Hardcover. US, Glitterati, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. The only truly personal biography of one of the greatest artists of our time.Eighty interviews with illustrious artists, designers, and others, each of whom was influenced by Andy Warhol

Softcover. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 288 pages. B&w illustrations, facsimiles, portraits. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Groundbreaking exhibition of Russian and Soviet art, with a special focus on Suprematism and Constructivism. Full of great information, excellent biographical entries. Essential art history.

Hardcover. Boston, G. K. Hall & Co., reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket, 413 pages. This incomparable collection of essays, manifestos, and illustrations was prepared by Robert Motherwell with the collaboration of some of the major Dada figures: Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, and Max Ernst among others. Here in their own words and art, the principals of the movement create a composite picture of Dada - its convictions, antics, and spirit. First published in 1951, this treasure trove remains, as Jack Flam states in his foreword to the second edition, "the most comprehensive and important anthology of Dada writings in any language, and a fascinating and very readable book." It contains every major text on the Dada movement, including retrospective studies, personal memoirs, and prime examples. The illustrations range from photos of participants, in characteristic Dadaist attitudes, to facsimiles of their productions. Embossed name stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Boston, Bulfinch, 1st, December 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 236 pages, b&w and color illustrations throughout. A very clean, tight copy. Resulting from a groundbreaking, four-venue exhibition, Theme & Improvisation features exquisite color reproductions of works from Kandinsky's abstract oeuvre as well as of works by thirty-eight remarkable American artists - some world-renowned, others less well known. Based on important new research into the art of the American avant-garde, and illustrated with many beautiful, often revelatory works of art, this book points the way to a new interpretation of the art of the first half of the twentieth century.

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 253 pages, color illustrations. Bibliography and index. Thomas Chimes is one of the most important artists to emerge in Philadelphia since World War II. Tracing the stylistic evolution of Chimes's idiosyncratic art, this book presents a long-overdue survey of his five-decade career: canvases combining landscape imagery with symbols such as crucifixes (late 1950s-mid-1960s); mixed-media constructions set within finely crafted metal boxes (late 1960s-early 1970s); his best-known works, a series of forty-eight intimate sepia-toned panel portraits of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and artists that are placed within oversized wood frames (1973-78); and the enigmatic 'white paintings' of the past two decades.