Jessica Tan Gudnason studied photography at the International Center of Photography. Her abstract photographs in platinum-palladium and color have been featured in solo and group exhibitions. She lives in New York.

Description: A collection of beautiful close-up portraits of performers in the opera house during rarefied, private moments. SIGNED BY JESSICA TAN GUDNASON on the limitation page. Hard bound in red Japanese linen with gilt titles. Gilt to all page edges. Special hand numbered edition in publishers red linen clam shell box. #353 in a limited edition of 500 printed copies. Essay by Charles A. Riley II.

Bookseller Inventory # 21123

$350

Jessica Tan Gunderson: Opera Portraits
Riley II, Charles A.

Bibliographic Details

Publisher:  North 8 Editions
Publication Date:  2008
Binding:  Hard Bound
Book Condition:  As New
Dust Jacket Condition:  No Jacket, As Issued
Signed:  Signed by Photographer

· Category: Featured Items, Photography ·

Aldo Sessa is undoubtedly the most recognized photographer in Argentina. Born in Buenos Aires in 1939, he started his long career of creative work drawing and painting at the “De Ridder” Atelier at the age of 10. He later specialized in graphic arts, design, and photography. His works are included in private collections and in museums in Argentina and around the world. He has performed more than 250 exhibitions and published 40 art books.

Description: Hard bound in dust jacket. SIGNED IN BLACK PEN BY ALDO SESSA on the titlepage. 47 beautifully haunting and surreal full page photographs. A scarce signed copy!

Bookseller Inventory # 19217

$200 

· Category: Featured Items, Photography ·

French artist Richard Texier works as a painter, sculptor, and graphic artist, often creating pieces monumental in both size and impact. In his largely abstract two dimensional works, he often combines recognizable signs and symbols with bold swatches of color that seem to tear into the canvas. His work reflects the influence of the writings of the French Surrealist artist Jean Dubuffet

The Atlantic territory of its childhood marks its work deeply. Texier spent his childhood in the marshlands of the Poitou region and on the Atlantic coast of France where he enjoyed exploring the wild marshes, whose mysterious landscape left a deep impression on him. During his secondary studies, he devoted his time to painting and showed an interest in Surrealism. The work of Richard TEXIER speaks about a dreamed universe, widened, difficulty of each one among us of locating itself in the complexity of the world; it perpetuates research more poetic than scientific first astronomers. There diagrams of eclipses and celestial mechanics, Richard Texier concentrated a big part of his usual iconographic sources of inspiration. Texier has had a lifelong passion for the ocean and the universe

His creativity is not limited by medium – he fascinates viewers with surreal shapes formed in ink & colour on old maps, oil on canvas, print, tapestry and sculpture; always with a refined, serene, poetic style and sometimes mythical and mysterious. The ocean remains one of the pivotal themes of Texier’s artworks. Texier liked to gather driftwood left by nature, pieces of corroded zinc, and scraps of rusty iron, which helped to inspire and sustain his work. In the 1990s, he created artwork based on early astronomical charts of the Renaissance, as well as old nautical charts

Description: Hard bound, issued without dust jacket in publishers slipcase. Text in French. 351 pages. A nice copy, bright and clean.

Bookseller Inventory # 16510

$200

Richard Texier
Grainville, Patrick

Publisher: Editions De La Difference, Paris
Publication Date: 1995
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, As Issued
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·

Ukiyoe Kuzushi (The folating world in disorder) is a series of photographs take by one of Japan’s leading photographers in an attempt to reproduce the atmosphere of the lost culture of the Japenese Courtasen, and the Yoshiwara red light district of Edo era Japan. Saburuko, (ones who serve), were the result of an increasing social displacement towards the end of the seventh century. Many women found themselves having to become wanderers, who, in order to survive, had to resort to trading their sexual favours. There were among them women who were quite educated and talented. These particular Saburuko who were talented dancers and singers often found themselves invited to entertain at aristocratic gatherings. The high cultural atmosphere of these quarters was quite often layered with classical references to the long gone Heian era. Courtesans and artists alike made many references to Murasaki Shikibu’s famous novel, “The Tale of Genji”. It was this atmosphere and culture within the pleasure quarters that spawned the highly popular ukiyo-e, “pictures which showed us the various inhabitants of the “floating world”. It was, indeed, a place where men could live out their dreams and fantasies. The lure of Yoshiwara, Shimabara, and the pleasure quarters to follow in later years was largely the romance, elegance and excitement that allowed men an escape from the highly-regimented society of those times.

Bookseller Inventory # 16074

$500

Ukiyoe Kuzushi
Hoshino, Komaro and Fujimoto, Giichi

ISBN: 4890110143
Publisher: Nippon Geijutsu Shuppansha
Publication Date: 1981
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Photography, Signed & Inscribed ·

Yasuhiro Wakabayashi, professionally known as Hiro, is a “photographer’s photographer”. He was born in Shanghai in 1930 to Japanese parents. In 1956 he began working for Richard Avedon. Around the same time, Hiro encountered Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar, and worked as his assistant for a time. Hiro has shown a very distinctive vision, and his work in fashion and still life from the mid 1960s onward has spawned many imitators and remains a lasting influence.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. INSCRIBED and dated by HIRO on the front free endpage. Very minor edge wear, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 16599

$150

Publisher: Abrams
Publication Date: 1990
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: inscribed by Artist
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Photography, Signed & Inscribed ·

Spain’s greatest living painter Antoni Tàpies gained worldwide fame in the 1950s for his “matter” paintings: relief-like works composed of dry pigments, sand and marble dust, and paint, which he scrapes, incises, and pierces. Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau-al-Set which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. The main leader and founder of Dau-al-Set was the poet Joan Brossa.

Tàpies started as a surrealist painter, his early works were influenced by Paul Klee and Joan Miró; but soon become an abstract expressionist, working in a style known as “Arte Povera”, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into the paintings.  One of the first to create serious art in this way, he added clay and marble dust to his paint and used waste paper, string, and rags.

Description: Hard bound art exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the Jan. 27, 1999 exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum. Presents the essence of Tàpies’ monumental achievement--an original and extraordinary use of texture and materials coupled with an expression of strongly felt intellectual, political, and artistic beliefs. This volume also includes an overview of the artist’s life by art historian Dore Ashton, as well as translations of four of the artist’s principal writings on art.

Bookseller Inventory # 16509

$250 

Tapies
Gimenez, Carmen

Publisher: Abrams, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Publication Date: 1995
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·

German born photographer Ilse Bing was known as the “Queen of the Leica” for her early and exclusive use of that camera. Bing moved to Paris in 1930 was inspired by Surrealism which was flourishing in Paris at the time. Bing was one of several leading women photographers in the inter-war period, and was know for an inventive use of oblique angles and patterns. She lived to be 99 years old.

Motto:
the invisible has to be pictured
the unspeakable has to be said
the unthinkable has to be dreamed
the intangible has to be held tight
but do not touch it with your finger
-Ilse Bing

Description: Inscribed by Ilse Bing to Jessica (Rose) the wife of the photographer Aaron Rose ” To Jessica – Thank you SO much! fondly Ilse Bing June 1992″. Paperback published on the occasion of the 1988 exhibition. Text in French. Minor wear to wraps, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 13051

$150

Publisher: Musee Carnavalet
Publication Date: 1987
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Good
Signed: inscribed by Photographer

· Category: Featured Items, Photography, Signed & Inscribed ·

Avery was often thought of as an American Matisse especially because of his colorful and innovative landscape paintings. Early in his career his work was considered too abstract; when Abstract Expressionism became dominant his work was overlooked, as being too representational. Although his work is clearly representational, it focuses on color relations and is not concerned with creating the illusion of depth as most conventional. His poetic, bold and creative use of drawing and color set him apart from more conventional painting of his era.

Description:
Hard bound with dust jacket. 263 pages with 158 plates. Intro by Hilton Kramer. Minor wear to dust jacket, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 20358

$325

Milton Avery
Grad, Bonnie Lee

Publisher: Hudson Hills Press
Publication Date: 1990
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·

Stephen Antonakos is known internationally for his spatial redefinitions of neon and for his equally extensive investigations of formalism in his drawings. Antonakos’ interest has always centered on—in his own words—“real things in real space.” His spare, colored geometric forms—particularly his “incomplete” squares and circles in neon—have been experienced throughout the United States, Europe and Japan in hundreds of exhibitions and in almost fifty permanent public art installations.

Description: Signed by Antonakos on the half titlepage. Protected in Brodart cover. A very nice copy in near fine condition!.

Bookseller Inventory # 11357

$125

Antonakos
Sandler, Irving

ISBN: 1555951643
Publisher: Hudson Hills Press, Manchester, Vermont, U.S.A.
Publication Date: 1999
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
Signed: Signed by Artist
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Art, Featured Items, Signed & Inscribed ·

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are a married couple who create environmental installation art. Their works include the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, the 24-mile-long curtain called Running Fence in Marin and Sonoma counties in California, and most recently The Gates in New York City’s Central Park.

Although their work is visually impressive and often controversial as a result of its scale, the artists have repeatedly denied that their projects contain any deeper meaning than their immediate aesthetic. The purpose of their art, they contend, is simply to make the world a “more beautiful place” or to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes. Art critic David Bourdon has described Christo’s wrappings as a “revelation through concealment.” To his critics Christo replies, “I am an artist, and I have to have courage … Do you know that I don’t have any artworks that exist? They all go away when they’re finished. Only the sketches are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain.”

The temporary large-scale environmental works (both urban and rural environments) have elements of painting, sculpture, architecture and urban planning. Once the work of art has been read for what it really is, then the process preceeding the completion is easily understood. Nobody discusses a painting before it has been painted. Our projects are discussed and argued about, pro and con, before they are realized. To understand our work one must realize what is inherent to each project However there is an important diffrence between our works of art and the usual architecture and urban planning, we are our own sponsors and we pay for our works of art with our own money, never accepting any grants nor sponsors.

Description: SIGNED “Christo and Jeanne-Claude” on the half titlepage. Paperback copy with text in German and English. The Umbrellas, Wrapped Reichstag, and the Wall all reproduced in photographs and sketches. 160 pages. Minor wear to wrappers, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 15401

$200

Christo and Jeanne-Claude Gasometer, Oberhausen 1999
Christo & Jean-Claude

Publisher: Taschen
Publication Date: 1999
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good
Signed: Signed by Artist

· Category: Art, Featured Items, Signed & Inscribed ·

Description: SIGNED BY LINCOLN KIRSTEIN. Hard bound in blue cloth with dust jacket. 107 pages. Limited printing 1/3000 printed copies. Color photographs by Jerry Thompson throughout. 9 1/4 x 12 1/4″. Lush photographs of the Kirstein family’s collection of art, sculpture, and more.

Bookseller Inventory # 19160

$125

Publisher: Twelvetrees Press
Publication Date: 1986
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: Signed by Author
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Featured Items ·

Beautiful Inside My Head Forever was a unprecedented two day major auction of works by Damien Hirst held by Sotheby’s, London. It was unusual in the fact that Hirst bypassed the standard gallery exhibition route, instead selling directly to the public. The sale realized £111 million ($198 million) for 218 lots. The auction exceeded expectations, setting a new record for a single-artist auction. The auction included monumental formaldehyde sculptures; paintings which expand on the artist’s classic themes such as butterflies, cancer cells and pills; exquisite new cabinets and preparatory drawings.

Description: 5 paperback volumes in publishers pictoral slipcase, as issued; including separate cataloges for “the kingdom” & “the golden calf. Published on the occasion of the September 15th and 16th, 2008 exhibition “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, an unprecedented two day major auction of works by Damien Hirst held by Sotheby’s, London.Over 500 lots each with full color illustrations. Sticker sheets laid in, as issued. 9 x 12.5 slipcase is near fine with all catalogs fine to as new. Introduction by Michael Bracewell and interview with the artist; hundreds of full color illustrations, many of which are gate folding. A nearly fine copy with only the most minor edge wear.

Bookseller Inventory # 19124

$250

Publisher: Sotheby’s, London
Publication Date: 2008
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·

Description: The story of China’s history and civilization through a collection of excellent photographs and textual descriptions of thousands of precious relics and remains drawn largely from the collection of the National Museum of Chinese History, Beijing. Arranged chronologically in four volumes, the book vividly portrays the rise of the Chinese civilization, following its trails from remote antiquity in the Palaeolithic Age through the end of the Qing dynasty. Along the way it explores the achievements in science, economy, social life, literature and arts of the Chinese people. Rare artifacts, portraits, books, and historical documents never before published were exclusively photographed for these four volumes. Together with other experts, archaeologist and curator of the National Museum of Chinese History, Yu Weichao, provides authoritative texts for each section and entry. This publication is perfect for the scholars and teachers who search for excellent teaching materials; for the librarians who wish to provide the general reader reliable sources of Chinese civilization; and for the art connoisseurs who look for unique artifacts of inspiration. Volume 1: Palaeolithic Age – Spring and Autumn Period Volume 2: Warring States – Northern & Southern Dynasties Volume 3: Sui Dynasty – Northern & Southern Song Dynasties Volume 4: Yuan Dynasty – Qing. Complete in four volumes, all first printings. Vol.#1 Paleolithic Age – Spring and Autumn Period; 271pp. Vol#2 Warring States Period – Northern and Southern Dynasties; 303pp. Volume#3 Sui Dynasty – Northern and Southern Song Dynasties; 323pp. Volume#4 Yuan Dynasty – Qing Dynasty 302 pp. Published in association with the National Museum of Chinese History, Beijing. 4 very nice hard bound copies in like dust jackets. Interiors clean and bindings tight.

Bookseller Inventory #18735

$200

A Journey Into China’s Antiquity (4 Vol.)
Weichao, Yu

Publisher: Morning Glory Publishers
Publication Date: 1997
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition:Very Good

· Category: Featured Items ·

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 ·

Celine’s second masterpiece was written as a prequel to Journey to the End of the Night. A work constructed with an immediate prose style, shocking for the time. Celine aspired to present humanity as is, without the stylistic trappings, and pretense he saw in his contemporaries. Offensive, vulgar, raw, and cynical; he was directly influenced by the tension felt in Europe between the wars. In this existential masterpiece, Celine explores the darker side of the psyche. His influence is far reaching, inspiring such authors as John Fante, Charles Bukowski, and Henry Miller.

Description: Hard bound first U. S. printing with unclipped dust jacket. 593 pages. Corners and edges of dust jacket worn. Minor chipping to edges, and one large chip to lower rear corner of dust jacket. Some sunning to red title on spine edge, otherwise good. Interior clean and binding strong.

Bookseller Inventory # 17150

$300

Death on the Installment Plan
Celine, louis Ferdinand

Publisher: Little Brown & Co
Publication Date: 1938
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: 1st Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Literary First Editions ·

Robert Rauschenberg was a painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked. Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged, during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

Description: Paperback art exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the Jan. 11 opening of the 2008 exhibition held by the PaceWildenstein gallery, New York.

Bookseller Inventory # 17373

$32.50 

Runts
Rauchenberg, Robert

Publisher: PaceWildenstein
Publication Date: 2008
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good

Description: Paperback art exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the October 27 opening of the 2006 exhibition held by the PaceWildenstein gallery, New York.

Bookseller Inventory # 17520

$35 

Robert Rauschenberg : Scenarios and the Ancient Incident
Rauchenberg, Robert

Publisher: PaceWildenstein
Publication Date: 2006
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·