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Archive for November, 2008

A true visionary who defies classification. This collection of  short work was first printed in magazines such as Esquire, Playboy, The Atlantic Monthly. Vonnegut can be both humorous and satirical, his speculative fiction has the ability show the fantastic in the commonplace, and absurdity within the seemingly normal.

Description: Hard bound first printing with dust jacket. Yellow spine and black paper boards. Minor wear to boards. Dust jacket with some minor spotting, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding tight.

Bookseller Inventory # 13912

Welcome to the Monkey House
Vonnegut, Kurt

SOLD

This beautiful book is illustrated with full color plates of Chihuly’s hand blow glass pieces inspired by the sea.

My work, to this day, revolves around a simple set of circumstances: fire, molten glass, human breath, spontaneity, centrifugal force and gravity.”
-Dale Chihuly

Description: Hard bound in pink cloth, no dust jacket. SIGNED by Chihuly in blue, yellow and green paint on front board! Some minor sunning to boards, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 17131

SOLD

Chihuly Seaforms
Chihuly, Dale

Helen Frankenthaler’s woodcuts combine abstract expressionism with the quality and texture of paintings on wood.

“The process is totally different from painting or lithography or etching or anything else,” Frankenthaler says. “As with any other medium, I had to learn from what it offered, what it resisted and what I could bring to it.” Judith Goldman, who is the exhibit’s guest curator and the former print curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, says Frankenthaler’s woodcuts are “a landmark in her evolution as an artist and in the evolution of the woodcut medium.”

The woodcut, a notoriously difficult and rigid medium, could not be further from the artistic realm of a gestural, spontaneous painter. As a painter, Frankenthaler’s creative process is driven by the development of a dialogue with the work itself, ‘a fighting, loving dialogue with this piece of material. You force something on it and it gives you an answer back … until you know that this is right.’8 To a certain extent, the work directs her and it evolves out of itself. Therefore, when creating a woodcut, a medium which requires careful planning and numerous technical adjustments, either the style of the artist or the rules governing the medium must shift. Frankenthaler saw the woodcut as a challenge and has been determined not only to learn its language, but to master it.

Frankenthaler has worked with Tyler Graphics in a collaboration that has dramatically shifted the parameters of the woodcut. Frankenthaler’s experimental nature drove her to use paper pulp as a support for her woodcut Freefall, 1993and hand-dyed paper for Radius, 1993. The artist experimented with the combination of woodcut and other print techniques such as lithography in All about blue, 1994 and etching and aquatint in Ariel, 1996. By casting the rules aside, Frankenthaler has succeeded in coercing the woodcut into yielding printed works bearing the hallmarks of her unique lyrical style. The woodcut is no longer solely the medium of the graphic artist working alone in the studio; it is now also a medium to explore the abstract, a medium of collaboration, the medium of an entire print workshop working in sync with an artist.

In The Tales of Genji Helen Frankenthaler has created a series of six exquisite woodcuts. Working closely with Yasuyuki Shibata (a master of ukiyo-e printmaking), she has forged a new process that brings her unmistakable style to the ancient medium of woodblock printing.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Published on the occasion of the 2002 exhibition in association with George Braziller. A very nice copy, bright and clean. Scarce hardbound!.

Bookseller Inventory # 16590

SOLD

Frankenthaler: The Woodcuts
Goldman, Judith;Frankenthaler, Helen

ISBN: 0807615099
Publisher: Naples Museum of Art, Florida
Publication Date: 2002
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
Edition: First Edition

Description: Oblong paperback with 92 pages profusely illustrated in duo-tone. Photography exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the October 21 opening in association with the University of Maryland at College Park. Photo-montage of Herbert Bayer, Harry Callahan, Herbert Matter, Frederick Sommer, Val Telberg and others. 111 works listed with detailed descriptions, with photographers’ biographies & bibliography.

Bookseller Inventory #

SOLD

Dreams, Lies, and Exaggerations: Photomontage in America
Wayne, Cynthia

Publisher: University of Maryland
Publication Date: 1991
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: As New

Ed van der Elsken first realized that he wanted to be a photographer when, in 1947, he saw a book of pictures by the American photographer Weegee, Naked City. Weegee and his vision of urban life became a crucial influence on Ed van der Elsken’s work. Like Robert Frank and William Klein, he felt strongly drawn toward the darker side of human existence.

In 1959, armed with commissions from two magazines and from Netherlands TV, Ed van der Elsken and his wife Gerda van der Veen set off on a round-the-world trip that was to last almost a year. He worked in a number of countries in Africa, Asia, and America; his photographs regularly appeared in magazines, and he contributed short films to television programs. Six years after his return, he published a selection of photographs from the trip under the title Sweet Life.

Much of his work subjectively documented his own energetic and eccentric life experience, presaging the work of Larry Clark, Nan Goldin or Wolfgang Tillmans. Ed van der Elsken abolishes the frontiers between the professional and private spheres, and also between photography and real life.

Description: FIRST EDITION – FIRST PRINTING. Hard bound with dust jacket. boards show some foxing near edges and corners. Minor chipping to edges of jacket, andone lage chip to spine edge. Previous owners gift inscription, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 10000

SOLD

Sweet Life
Van Der Elsken, Ed

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