Domenichino ( Domenico Zampieri 1581–1641), was a prominent Italian Baroque era painter of the Bolognese School of painters. He was born in Bologna the son of a shoemaker, and because of his small stature, he was nicknamed Domenichino, “little Domenico.” He left Bologna for Rome in 1602 and became one of the most talented apprentices to emerge from Annibale Carracci’s supervision there. The most classical Bolognese painter of his era, Domenichino sought the ideal form and grandeur known as disegno. By 1614 he had become Rome’s leading painter. In 1621 he began working as architect for Pope Gregory XV

“That he might devote his whole powers to the art, Domenichino shunned all society; or, if he occasionally sought it in the public theaters and walks, this was in order better to observe the play of the passions in the features of the people — those of joy, anger, grief, terror and every affection of the mind — and to commit them vividly to his tablets” -Gian Pietro Bellori

Description: Hard bound catalogue raisonne in 2 volumes (text and plates) A systematic complete study of the artist’s life and work. All known paintings, drawings, lost & rejected works of this master Baroque artist. Previous owners name to front free endpage, otherwise very good. Evelina Borea and Richard Spear have in their well researched catalogue raisonné resurrected the artist from the Victorian graveyard and re-established his place among the most important and influential painters of seventeenth-century Italy. In 1996 the first major exhibition of his work was held at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome.

Bookseller Inventory # 19121

SOLD

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Quoted: Jorge Luis Borges

“Let others be proud of the pages they have written; I am proud of the pages I have read.”
—Jorge Luis Borges

· Category: Literary Quotes ·

We have recently purchased a small collection of signed John Irving titles.

The Cider House Rules
– Signed first edition

The World According to Garp
- Signed U.K. edition

Setting Free the Bears
- First edition

A Prayer For Owen Meany
- Signed first edition

The Water Method Man
- German edition inscribed by Irving with hand signed letter.

The Cider House Rules: Deluxe Edition
- Hard bound limited edition signed by John Irving with glassine dust jacket, in publishers slipcase, as issued

· Category: Recent Acquisitions ·

We offer for sale several Inscribed copies from the collection of the visual artist, printmaker and illustrator; Fumi Komatsu. For many years she lived and worked in Greenwich Village. She is probably best known within the literary world for her book illustration, most notable the U.S. editions of Yukio Mishama’s novels, including The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and A Thousand Cranes.

The Grapes Of Wrath – inscribed to her by John Steinbeck

The Glass Menagerie – inscribed by Tennessee Williams

A Mask of Mercy – inscribed by Robert Frost

The Bridge of San Luis Rey – inscribed by Thorton Wilder

The Adventures of Augie March – Inscribed by Saul bellow
The Victim – inscribed by Saul Bellow

Gentleman’s Agreement – inscribed by Laura Z. Hobson
The Other Father – inscribed by laura Z. Hobson

In Search – inscribed by Meyer Levin

Dark trees to the Wind – inscribed by Carl Carmer
Listen For a Lonesome Drum – inscribed by Carl Carmer

· Category: Recent Acquisitions ·

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS TO THE PRINT ARTIST FUMI KOMATSU.” To Fumi Komatsu best wishes always – Tennessee”. First printing of the motion picture edition, with Lustig designed cover. Original wrap around band present. Some rubbing to dust jacket and a few small chips, otherwise very good. 

Bookseller Inventory # 18354

SOLD

The Glass Menagerie
Williams, Tennessee

Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: 1949
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition:Good
Signed: Inscribed by Author
Edition: First Edition Thus

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY THORTON WILDER TO THE ARTIST FUMI KOMATSU ” For Miss Fumi Komatsu – with the regards and best wishes of Thorton Wider – Harvard University Nov. 3 1950″ Reprinted edition. Some wear and a few small chips to dust jacket edges. Interior clean and binding tight.

Bookseller Inventory # 18357

SOLD 

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Description: Hard bound second printing with dust jacket. INSCRIBED by John O’Hara ” To Kate and Grannie with love from their little friend, John O’Hara – 5 July 1952 East Hampton”. Some wear to corners and edges of boards. Some minor foxing to end pages. Dust jacket shows some wear and minor chipping, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding tight.

Bookseller Inventory # 17035

SOLD

The Farmers Hotel
O’hara, John

Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 1951
Binding: Hard bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: Inscribed by Author
Edition: Second Printing

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Description: Hard bound first printing missing original dust jacket. INSCRIBED TO THE ARTIST FUMI KOMATSU BY ROBERT FROST ” For Fumi Komatsu from Robert Frost . 1958″. Some minor wear to boards, mostly to edges and corners. Slightly cocked, otherwise good.

Bookseller Inventory # 18356

SOLD

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Pulitzer prize-wining author E. B. White was probably the most important contributor to the New Yorker, at a time when it was arguably the most important literary magazine in the country. He primarily wrote essays, and his columns for Harper’s and other magazines were widely read. In the nineteen thirties, at the request of a young relative he began to write fiction. He will probably be best remembered for his enduring children’s classics such as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.

Description: A rare signed presentation copy of White’s book of literary essays, poems and stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker. Hard bound with dust jacket INSCRIBED by E. B. White on the front free endpage ” To Helen. from E B White”. Early printing. Some minor foxing to end pages. Wear to boards and fading to spine edge, otherwise very good. Interior clean and free of marks. Binding tight. Dust acket shows only the most minor edge wear. A RARE inscribed copy!.

Bookseller Inventory # 16246

SOLD

The Second Tree From the Corner
White, E. B.

Publisher: Harper and Brothers, New York
Publication Date: 1954
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: Inscribed by Author

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY JOHN STEINBECK TO THE PRINT ARTIST FUMI KOMATSU! Modern library copy with Thomas Benton cover. Some wear to dust jacket with a few small closed tears and chips, otherwise good. A VERY RARE SIGNED ASSOCIATION COPY!.

Bookseller Inventory # 18355

SOLD

The Grapes Of Wrath
Steinbeck, John

Publisher: Modern Library
Publication Date: 1939
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Signed: Inscribed by Author

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Roy Lichtenstein merged popular imagery and “high art” to establish his own unique style. His paintings were based in part on the motifs and procedures of comic strips and graphic ad’s of the 1960′s. Along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein was one of the central figures of American Pop Art movement. Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way mass media portrays them.

Description: Paperback copy published on the occasion of the October 8, 1993 exhibition held by the Guggenheim. 393 pages profusely illustrated. This work aims to be the definitive monograph on Roy Lichtenstein, a founder of American Pop Art. It covers every phase of his career including: still lifes; landscapes; the “Brushstroke”, “Modern”, “Mirror”, “Entablature” and “Interiors” series; sculptures; murals; and public commissions. Some minor wear to wrappers, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 18492

SOLD

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Early in the 1960s reacting to what he called the ” illusion ” in abstract painting Donald Judd began to create art that used ” real materials existing in real space “. He did not attempt to deliver his own political or social messages, but insisted his goal was to focus on the space occupied and created by his objects – their purity of form. This style of art was called minimalism, and Judd was one of it’s greatest proponents. He became well known for sleek, boxlike constructions made of industrial materials such as plywood, sheet metal, and plexiglass that were painted using commercial techniques. Stacked, aligned, cantilevered, or centered, their strict geometric arrangements eliminated the idea of composition and achieved a singular focus on the object itself. Although his art is resolutely three-dimensional, Judd refused to call them sculpture, a term he associated with the hand-crafted art of an earlier era. Instead, he referred to them as “specific objects“–a phrase meant to suggest their neutral, discrete and unique nature.

“I wanted to create reality
not a picture of it”
- Donald Judd

Description: Paperback exhibition catalogue published in association with W. W. Norton. Catalogue from the exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from October 20 – December 31, 1988 and at the Dallas Museum of Art, from February 12 – April 16, 1989. Profusely illustrated in color and b&w. 160 pages. A nice copy with only the most minor edge wear.

Bookseller Inventory # 18463

SOLD

Donald Judd
Haskell, Barbara

ISBN: 0874270618
Publisher: The Whitney Museum of American Art
Publication Date: 1988
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good

Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist’s artistic consciousness.
Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.”
-Donald Judd

Description: Paperback exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the Sept. 16, 1994 exhibition. 31 pages. A nice copy, bright and clean.

Bookseller Inventory # 18465

SOLD

Donald Judd: Sculpture
Agee, William C.

ISBN: 1878283464
Publisher: Pace Wildenstein, New York
Publication Date: 1994
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good

American sculptor and art writer Donald Judd (1928-1994) was best known as a major practitioner of and spokesman for Minimalism in the 1960s. His works, or “specific objects,” display an overall sense of wholeness and clarity and reiterate the belief that art and idea are inseparable.

Description: Paperback exhibition catalogue of the exhibition at The Pace Gallery, September – October 1991. Essay by Yve-Alain Bois. 11 Color Photographs and 5 b/w Illustrations. A nice copy, bright and clean. Bookseller

Bookseller Inventory # 18464

SOLD

Donald Judd: New Sculpture
Bois, Yve – Alain

Publisher: The Pace Gallery, New York
Publication Date: 1991
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good

· Category: Recently Sold ·

One of the most mysterious members of the Arte Povera movement (literally, “poor art”), an Italian artist known for his adventurous use of new materials. He was the predecessor of the Junk Art movement in the United States and the Arte Povera movement in Italy. perceiving the creative potential of mundane objects, which he sought to combine with the new language of expressive abstractionHis early works were rags splashed in red paint, fashioned to simulate the blood-soaked bandages of wounded Italian soldiers. Milton Gendel, an American critic living in Rome, visited Burri’s studio in 1954 and described the atmosphere: “The studio is thick-walled, whitewashed, neat and ascetic; his work is ‘blood and flesh,’ reddened torn fabric that seems to parallel the staunching of wounds that Burri experienced in wartime.”

He was in fact a formalist in his abstractions, troubled by memories of the war, and his materials were often made to appear destroyed or wounded, slashed—suffering as if living flesh.

Burri was trained as a physician and began to paint only in 1944, while in a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas. He had been a medic in the Italian army, then, after being captured by the British in Tangiers, he was interned in Hereford, Texas, where he first took up painting, using old sacks as his support. This kind of existential relationship with materials, at once personally and collectively symbolic, prefigures the later, fetishistic use of fat and felt by another Axis serviceman, Joseph Beuys, who claimed to have been wrapped in those materials by Tartars when his Luftwaffe plane was shot down over Russia. About 1946 he moved to Rome and began to paint seriously. His early works—rags splashed in red paint to simulate blood-soaked bandages—grew directly out of his experiences as a doctor in the Italian army. He then began to produce works grouped into series according to the material used. The works of the earliest series (c. 1953) were made of coarse cloth stitched together. After 1956 he employed thin pieces of burned wood and layers of polyethylene in which holes were burned, creating a rich spatial network within the layers of plastic. The humble and sometimes crude materials used in these works contrast effectively with their elegant designs, and the easily destroyed materials form a perforated network over an impinging background field. In his series of metal works done after 1959, however, the solid material completely encloses the background field, although the metal is hammered from behind as if the imprisoned field were trying to break out

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Some wear and and a few small closed tears to dust jacket, otherwise very good. Translated by Martha Leeb Hadzi. 236 pages. Text in English.

THE DEFINITIVE WORK ON BURI!

Bookseller Inventory # 18090

$250

Burri
Brandi, Cesare

Publisher: Editalia, Rome
Publication Date: 1963
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

Robert Rauschenberg has cited his visits to Burri’s studio in 1953 as an important catalyst to his own Combine series.

Description: Paperback copy with dust jacket, published on the occasion of the November 29, 2007 exhibition.

Bookseller Inventory # 17487

$22.50 

Alberto Burri

Publisher: Mitchell – Innes & Nash, New York
Publication Date: 2007
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·

Zhang Huan is widely considered to be one of the most vital and influential contemporary artists working today.  He was born in 1965 in a small town called Anyang in Henan Province just prior to the Cultural Revolution.  At one year of age, Zhang Huan went to live with his grandparents in a tiny village in the countryside known as Tangyin County.  At age fourteen, he started his artistic training in the so-called Su-style or Soviet style and traveled by bus each day for his lessons.

Zhang enrolled in undergraduate studies at the Art Department, Henan University, Kaifeng to concentrate on Chinese ink painting, drawing, oil painting and art history in 1984.  Upon completion in 1988, Zhang was an instructor at Zhengzhou College of Education for three years.  He studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing from 1991 to 1993, and it was during this period that he first started experimenting with performance art.  Zhang Huan’s first public performance was called Angel, which he staged on the front steps of the National Art Museum of China as part of a group exhibition for students at the Central Academy.  Angel was openly critical of the Chinese government’s controversial “one child” policy and it resulted in the entire exhibition being closed.

During this same period, a group of young Chinese artists, including Zhang Huan, established the “Beijing East Village.”  It was in this community that Zhang developed his early performance practices and many of the works that would soon bring him international attention.  Conceived as both existential explorations and social commentary, performances like 12 Square Meters, in which the artist sat for an hour, covered in honey and fish oil, in a fly infested public latrine or To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, where nine people lay on top of one another to raise the summit by a meter. These performances and many others came to be known by their photographic documentation, which are now considered the artist’s first iconic works.

Description: Hard bound with grey boards, no dust jacket. 179 pages profusely illustrated. Published on the occasion of the October 10, 2007 London exhibition.

Bookseller Inventory # 18037

$125

Zhang Huan : Ash
Huan, Zhang

Publisher: Haunch of Venison, London
Publication Date: 2007
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good

Description: Hard bound with wood vaneer on carboard, no dust jacket, as issued. Published on the occasion of the May 9, 2008 exhibition. Mnor wear to boards, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 16956

$50

Zhang Huan : Blessings
Huan, Zhang

Publisher: Pace Wildenstein, New York
Publication Date: 2008
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, As Issued
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·

Description: Paperback copy with 321 pages. Profusely illustrated. Sunning to spine edge, otherwise good.

Bookseller Inventory # 17018

$150 

Frank Stella
VV Staff

Publisher: T.F. Editores
Publication Date: 1996
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good

· Category: Art ·

Gypsy Rose Lee was one of the most famous strippers of all time. It was her burlesque act which earned her legendary status. She brought a sharp sense of humor into her act. She became as famous for her onstage wit, as for her striping style. She was spotted by H.K. Minsky, who featured her in his infamous New York club, from there to theatre, 12 films, and eventually her own television show. She wrote two mystery novels, and an autobiography, which was a bestseller. The walls of her Los Angeles home were adorned with pictures by Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all of which were reportedly gifts to her by the artists themselves.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. INSCRIBED by Gypsy Rose Lee. Some edge wear. Dust jacket shows some wear, with chipping to spine edges and corners, otherwise good.

Bookseller Inventory # 17036

SOLD

Mother Finds a Body
Lee, Gypsy Rose

Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: 1942
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Signed: Inscribed by Author
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Description: Hard bound first printing bound in yellow cloth with red lettering. Glassine dust jacket. Text in German. 106 pages, profusely illustrated. #1 in the series – Bauhausbucher. Very progressive architecture for the time, showing the most early ideas of modernism in architecture. Some wear and minor soiling to cloth boards. Corners and spine edges threadbare. iInterior clean and binding tight. RARE hardbound copy!.

Bookseller Inventory # 18266

SOLD

Internationale Architektur
Gropius, Walter & Nagy, Moholy L.

Publisher: Albert Langen Verlag
Publication Date: 1925
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·