Diana Vreeland was the beginning and the end in all things chic. Her persona and dictums were not to be overlooked or ignored. Diana Vreeland was the twentieth century’s greatest arbiter of style and elegance. As fashion editor at Harpers Bazaar for twenty-five years, Editor in Chief of Vogue and as creator of fantastic exhibits for the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Costume Institute, Diana, with her passion for living, her legendary wit and charm energized the world of style and fashion for over fifty years. Vreeland set about reinventing the job of fashion editor. Richard Avedon credits Vreeland with starting “a totally new profession”. She had the unique ability to always think outside the box. Even the decor of her Park Avenue apartment was an original. Billy Baldwin, the famous New York decorator who actually worked with her on the project, Diana said that she wanted her apartment to look like a garden in Hell. Diana Vreeland will always be remembered as a visionary and a pioneer in the world of style, elegance and fashion.

Description:
Hard bound first edition with dust jacket. SIGNED BY DIANA VREELAND on the half title page with her full name in green ink.  Wear and sunning to red cloth boards. Some edge wear to dust jacket, otherwise good.  A SCARCE SIGNED COPY!

Bookseller Inventory # 26915

SOLD

D. V.
Vreeland, Diana

Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: 1984
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: Signed by Author
Edition: First Edition

· 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

SOLD

Burri
Brandi, Cesare

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

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Alice Walker is an award wining novelist, essayist, poet, teacher, & activist. A self-described “daughter of the rural peasantry”, Walker grew up in a loving household in the years following the end of the Great Depression. Though poor, the family was rich in kindness and perspective. Through her writing Walker has helped define the African American experience in the years that led up to the Civil Rights Era and beyond.  She is best-known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She is a prolific writer, her novels establishing her as a canonical figure in American letters, as well as a major figure in what scholars term the renaissance in African American women’s writings of the 1970s.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Stated First edition. Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Award in 1983. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1985. It was directed by Steven Spielberg and stars Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah Winfrey. Original first issue dust jacket with $11.95 printed on front flap. Some minor foxing to end pages and edges of dust jacket, otherwise fine. No marks, with interior clean and binding tight. A deserving classic now rare and sought after.

Bookseller Inventory# 26823

SOLD

The Color Purple
Walker, Alice

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Publication Date: 1982
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very good
Edition: 1st Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Milton Avery was seen as an American Matisse, in part 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 too representational. Although clearly representational it focuses on color relation, and not concerned with creating the illusion of depth. His poetic, bold and creative use of drawing and color set him apart from more conventional painting of his era. A modern master.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. 263 pages profusely illustrated with 158 plates. Intro by Hilton Kramer. Minor wear to dust jacket, otherwise very good. A rare and sought after monograph on the artist.

Bookseller Inventory # 20358

SOLD

Milton Avery
Hobbs, Robert

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

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English author, feminist, publisher, and is regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society, and probably the best known member of the Bloomsbury Group. In 1917 along with Leonard Woolf she founded the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia’s novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, and others. Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic nervous breakdowns and associated illnesses. Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks until her suicide on 28 March 1941.  After the final attack of mental illness Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse near her home where she drowned. Woolf’s suicide, like Sylvia Plath’s, have much colored the interpretation of both her work and her life.

Description:
Hard Bound In Black Cloth With Silver Titles. Missing original dust jacket. Wear To Boards With Spine Edges Chipped. Corners Bumped. Previous Owners Bookplate Affixed To Front Fixed End Page. A Comic Novel Of Manners Concerning Five Young People Struggling With Issues Of Love And Work, Engagement And Marriage, In London In The Early Years Of The Twentieth Century. It Is The Most Linear And ‘Plotted’ Of Woolf’s Novels. A Good Working Copy of Woolfe’s second novel. Scarce!

Bookseller Inventory # 24604

SOLD

Night And Day
Woolf, Virginia

Publisher: Duckworth, U.K.
Publication Date: 1919
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Edition: 1st Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Cy Twombly will probably be best remembered for blurring the line between drawing and painting. His paintings have achieved auction prices well into the millions. He was one of the first American artists to interest himself in graffiti. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard, filled with scrawled gestures, as if Twombly was covering them with hundreds of years of graffiti. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge–each mark with its own history. He studied with other pioneers of the postwar American avant-garde at Black Mountain College, including Rauschenberg, Johns, Cage, Cunningham, Shaun, Chamberlain and others. Twombly’s work is at the same time both representive of the classical, and the post modern. He is intimately interested in the classical gesture, the Roman period, the painterly. He is, at times, as much a ‘painter’ as David or Renoir, but at the same time he is fascinated with the minimal, the excluded and most importantly: the scrawled. Many of his paintings and works on paper moved into “romantic symbolism”, and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as many classical myths and allegories in his works. In the late nineteen fifties Twombly moved to Rome and has lived and worked somewhat quietly there until his death on July 5, 2011.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Published on the occasion of the September 25, 1994 exhibition. 180 pages with 187 illustrations. A nice copy, bright and clean.

Bookseller Inventory # 20125

SOLD

Cy Twombly: A Retrospective
Varnedoe, Kirk

ISBN: 0870706209
Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Publication Date: 1994
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Jawaharial Nehru was was the first Prime Minister of India, serving from 1947 until 1964. Nehru was a charismatic and radical leader, who advocated complete independence from the British Empire. In the long struggle for Indian independence, Nehru was eventually recognized as Gandhi’s political heir.

Description: SIGNED BY NEHRU on the first white page “Jawaharial Nehru – Oct. 1949″. Hard bound with dust jacket. Charming illustrations by Shakuntala Masani throughout. First written for the children of India, this edition adapted for American children. The story of Nehru from the time he was a small boy until he became the first Prime Minister of India. Contents include chapters – Jawaharial Sees the World – Kamala and Kashmir – First Taste of Jail – President of the Congress – At the foot of the Himalayas – and others. Green cloth boards show some minor wear to corners and edges. Minor age toning to pages, otherwise fine with interior clean and binding tight. Dust jacket shows some wear and toning, with two small closed tears, otherwise very good. A increasingly scarce title and Quite rare signed by Jawaharial Nehru.

Bookseller Inventory # 26101

SOLD

Nehru’s Story
Masani, Shakuntala & Nehru, Jawaharial

Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 1949
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: Signed by Author
Edition: 1st Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Willem de Kooning is probably the most important member of the Abstract expressionists, a group that included Pollock, Rothko, Hofmann, and Motherwell among others. The hallmark of de Kooning’s style was an emphasis on complex figure ground ambiguity. Background figures would overlap other figures causing them to appear in the foreground, which in turn might be overlapped by dripping lines of paint thus positioning the area into the background. He will probably best be remembered for his abstract paintings of the female nude, his Woman paintings. There is no doubt that his legacy will carry on as one of the most original and provocative artists of the post World War era.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket, in publishers green cloth slipcase, as issued. Text in Italian. 37 pages of text including a biography, bibliography and index of the plates. 178 numbered plates, with about half in color. One of the titles in the Le Grandi monografie Pittori d’oggi series. This monograph has become a sort of standard in the Literature on de Kooning, often referenced by Sotheby’s and Christie’s. In the late 1950s Willem de Kooning visited Rome, where he was well received by high society there. Art critic Gabriella Drudi, a close friend of Thomas Hess and Gregory Corso, was there at the time. “All the young artists, even the amateurs, asked him to come to see their shows. And if it was a painter, he felt he had to go. He had this feeling that if somebody wanted to be an artist, you had to respect him”. Scarce and sought after!

Bookseller Inventory # 26151

SOLD

Willem de Kooning
Drudi, Gabriella; de Kooning, Willem

Publisher: Fratelli Fabbri
Publication Date: 1972
Binding: Hardcover in publishers slipcase
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition:  1st Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, poet, social activist and is widely recognized as the most important 20th century Catholic mystic. In 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and given the name Father Louis. He wrote more than 70 books, mostly on spirituality, social justice and a quiet pacifism. The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) was also featured in National Review’s list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century.  Merton pioneered an interfaith dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, D.T. Suzuki, and Thich Nhat Hanh. On December 10, 1968, while attending an interfaith conference in Bangkok, he steped out of his bath to adjust an electric fan and apparently touched an exposed wire and was electrocuted.  He died 27 years to the day after his entrance into the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1941.

Description: Hard bound first printing with dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY THOMAS MERTON ON THE FRONT FREE END PAGE “For Brother Eliot, with congratulations & blessings Father Louis Merton”. (Louis being his ordained name) INSCRIBED BY DAN WALSH on page 96. (Merton’s teacher at Columbia University and life long friend, Walsh was instrumental in the realization of Merton’s Vocation) “To Brother Eliot with hearty congratulations on your Silver anniversary, and prayerful wishes in anticipation of the Golden coming up! in Christ Jesus, Dan Walsh”. Edited by Thomas P. McDonnell. 553 pages. Gray cloth boards with red spine edge. Some wear to corners and edges, with interior clean and binding tight. News print portrait of Merton affixed to front fixed end page. The dust jacket shows some wear and chipping to edges, otherwise very good.  A RARE COPY, INSCRIBED TWO TIMES!

Bookseller Inventory # 23452

SOLD

A Thomas Merton Reader
Merton, Thomas & McDonnell, Thomas P.

Publisher: Harcourt Brace and World
Publication Date: 1962
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Signed: Inscribed by Author
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Joshua Slocum was the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. On April 24, 1895, at the age of 51, he departed Boston in his tiny sloop “Spray” and sailed around the world alone, a passage of 46,000 miles, returning to Newport on June 27, 1898. This historic achievement made him the patron saint of small-boat voyagers, navigators and adventurers all over the world. In November 1909, Slocum set sail for the West Indies on one of his usual winter voyages. He was never heard from again. In July 1910, his wife informed the newspapers that she believed he was lost at sea.

Description: Hard bound, no dust jacket. First printing of the first edition. Original decorative blue cloth binding with silver imprinting and green seahorses entwining anchor show some wear and molting. Gilt top-stain. Illustrated with line drawings by Thomas Fogarty and George Varian. Binding tight. Interior shows some minor foxing, otherwise very good. A good working copy of a now sought after true adventure classic!

Bookseller Inventory# 26612

SOLD

Sailing Alone Around The World
by Joshua Slocum

Publisher: The Century Co., New York
Publication Date: 1900
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Edition: 1st Edition, 1st Printing

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. 415 pages. Profusely illustrated throughout with color plates, drawings, renderings, plans, sketches, and models. Text in Spanish and English. A very nice overview of the Herzog & de Meuron Architekten, a Swiss architecture firm founded in 1978 and headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. Minor shelf wear to dust jacket, otherwise fine.

Bookseller Inventory # 23905

SOLD

1981-2000, Herzog and de Meuron
de Meuron

Publisher: El Croquis, Madrid, Spain
Publication Date: 2000
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Doris Stevens (1892 –1963) was an American Teacher, social worker and political suffragist. She organized and spoke for  suffrage campaigns and acted as an executive committee member of the N.W.P (National Women’s Party). Arrested for picketing she was sentenced to 60 days in Occoquan workhouse, and later pardoned by President Woodrow Wilson. This led to the quintessential insider account of the imprisonment of N.W.P activists in Jailed for Freedom. Through descriptions of struggles and setbacks, Stevens tells the epic tale of the Women who fought to win the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Description:
INSCRIBED BY DORIS STEVENS  “To Lesley – who is a living witness to the independent woman’s cross. With Love and admiration, Doris”. Hard bound, with dust jacket. Purple cloth with gilt title to spine edge. frontispiece photograph of Alice Paul. Illustrated with b&w palates. “New edition” circa early 1930′s. Wear, chipping and some minor damp staining to dust jacket. Purple boards show some minor wear, otherwise very good. A very scarce copy, inscribed in jacket.

Book Seller Inventory # 25264

SOLD

Jailed For Freedom
Stevens, Doris

Publisher: Liverlight
Publication Date: Circa early 1930′s (copyright 1920)
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Signed: Inscribed by Author
Edition: First printing of the (2nd) New Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Before her suicide in 1971 Diane Arbus was pioneering a new documentary approach to photography. Her subject was to come from the fringes of society; transvestites, giants, midgets, nudists, and others who have been marginalized by the larger society as a whole. Her portraits have the power to both provoke and disturb. The viewer is drawn in and soon realizes that no matter how freakish her subjects might seem, they are in fact uniquely perfect in their own way.

Description: True first edition. Hard bound in dust jacket.  Meets the point of issue – ” 2 girls with identical raincoats “. Published in 1972 one year after the photographers death, in conjunction with a major retrospective exhibition held by the MoMA in New York. The only edition with the complete photographs,  lacking in later editions. One of the Seminal photography books of the 20th century. White boards show some faint foxing near edges and corners. Minor damp staining to lower edge of rear board, otherwise fine. An important monograph on a photographer who is still gaining in popularity. Rare first printing of the true first edition!

Inventory # 25442

SOLD

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph

Publisher: Aperture
Publication Date: 1972
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) photographer & teacher, achieved international recognition for his almost 6,000 micro photographs of plants taken around 1890. His teacher, Moritz Meurer, assigned him to make a collection of natural forms as inspiration. He wanted to show that all forms in art have their beginning in the natural forms of nature. He considered his work as a teaching tool, not as independent work of art. Each photograph was taken with the same clinical manner to provide a clear and objective documentation of structure. The objectivity and lack of sentimentality in his work readily connect him to such New Objectivity photographers as August Sander, Albert Renger Patzsch, The Bechers, Andreas Gursky and others.

Description: Urformen Der Kunst is one of the most influential photography books to have ever been published. Hard bound in green cloth with title stamped in gilt on front cover and spine and missing original dust jacket. The first edition published 1928 was in a smaller format, this 2nd edition is considered the most attractive. Photographs by Karl Blossfeldt. Introduction by Karl Nierendorf. Text in German. 148 pages, with 120 black and white plates printed in rich photogravure. Limited edition of 6000 hard bound copies. Blossfeldt’s photobook masterpiece (Archetypes of Art). Some wear and minor soiling to cloth boards. Foxing to endpages. Sunning to spine edge, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding still strong.

Bookseller Inventory# 25149

SOLD

Urformen Der Kunst
Blossfeldt, Karl

Publisher: Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin
Publication Date: 1929
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Dust Jacket
Edition: First Printing of the sought after Second Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Everything is bigger and better in Texas. This statement has never been more convincing than when applied to the color enhanced black-and-white photographs enlarged to heroic proportion, and the exceedingly large outdoor sculptures created by internationally known artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade. Based in Austin, Wade helped define the Texas Cosmic Cowboy counterculture of the 1970s.

Description: HAND SIGNED & NUMBERED BY BOB WADE on the copyright page. LIMITED EDITION #20 of 50 hand made copies. HAND SIGNED LETTER and invoice for the original purchase of the book laid in. 150 individually captioned color xeroxes. Photographs of the artist’s installations & photographs of Texas. Rivet bound in branded leather cowhide with the title and Texas motifs (lone stars, horseshoes, broncos, roses) and a stamped rope border. The final plate is the book in production at a Xerox machine. “This Book is a chronological presentation of my projects about Texas, defined in this context as ideas and attitudes about scale, culture, myths symbols, artifacts, history, customs, food, animals, experiences, kitsch, machismo, cross fertilization, sign systems, tourism, country western music, the picturesque, cowboys, boundries, life and death.” – from the artist’s statement. Some wear to corners of leather. Some minor foxing to page edges and end pages, otherwise very good. Overall a nice copy of a very scarce book by a quintessentially American artist.

Bookseller Inventory # 25900

$3000

Bob Wade’s Texas
Wade, Bob

Publisher: Daddy-O Productions
Publication Date: 1976
Binding: Bound in Leather
Book Condition: Very Good
Signed: Signed by Author
Edition: First Edition, Limited

· Category: Art, Signed & Inscribed ·

Ed Ruscha has become know for his deadpan irreverence, and his Pop inspired art work. He holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and gives order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confronts us daily. Born in Omaha in 1937, He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950′s where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute. By the early sixties he had made a name for himself for his collage, painting and printmaking, and for his association with the Ferrus Gallery group. Later he achieved recognition for his painting incorporating words and phrases and for his many photographic books.

Description: SIGNED BY ED RUSCHA on the front free end page. paperback copy with original glassine dust wrapper as issued. Stated second edition, limited 1/3000. 8vo. Unpaginated. Some age toning and chipping  to glassine jacket, otherwise fine.   Magnificently illustrated with 16 reproductions of photographs, 15 in duotone and 1 in b/w.

Bookseller Inventory# 26143

SOLD

Various Small Fires And Milk
Ruscha, Ed

Publisher: Anderson Ritchie & Simon, Los Angeles
Publication Date: 1970
Binding: Soft cover
Signed: Signed by Ed Rucha
Edition: Second edition, 1/3000

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Dalí-Joies is now a permanent exhibition at the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain. In 1941 the first 22 pieces were acquired by the U.S. millionaire Cummins Catherwood. Designed by Salvador Dalí and crafted by a team of Argentinean-born silversmiths, under the close supervision of Carlos Alemany and the artist himself. In 1958 they were acquired by The Owen Cheatham Foundation,  and finally deposited it at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. In 1981 the collection was acquired by a Saudi multimillionaire, and later by three Japanese entities, the last of which agreed to sell it to the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. 210 pages. Beautiful full page plates. Dali: Jewels presents the jewels from the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation. It features essays on Dali and his work, as well as concept sketches  A nice copy, bright and clean. SCARCE!.

Bookseller Inventory # 19154

SOLD

Dali Jewels: The Collection of the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation
Dali, Salvador

Publisher: Umberto Allemandi, Italy
Publication Date: 2005
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition.

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Description: SIGNED BY NEIL SIMON on the front free endpage “Best- Neil Simon”. Hard bound with price clipped dust jacket. Second printing. Illustrated with several b&w plates. Neil Simon¿s smash hit and his best-known play. It opened in New York on March 10, 1965 with Walter Matthau as Oscar (for which he won a Tony for Best Actor) and Art Carney as Felix. Directed by Mike Nichols (Tony winner for Best Director). Some wear to dust jacket and one small closed tear to lower spine edge, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding tight.

Bookseller Inventory # 26103

$140

The Odd Couple
Simon, Neil

Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 1966
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: 1st Edition

· Category: Recent Acquisitions, Signed & Inscribed ·

Conrad Marca-Relli was a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. He is most celebrated for his large-scale collages, composed of pieces of canvas or natural linen overpainted with gestural brushstrokes. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Marca-Relli was actively involved in the avant-garde art world in Greenwich Village. He helped to found the “Eighth Street Club,” an artists’ group whose members included Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Marca-Relli taught at Yale University from 1954 to 1955. He lived and worked in many countries around the world. In his final years, he lived in Parma, Italy with his wife, Anita Gibson, whom he married in 1951.

Description: First Italian Edition. Hard bound in die cut dust jacket, as issued. Text by H. H. Arnason. Collection edited by Ezio Gribaudo. 134 plates. Includes exhibition checklist, chronolgy and brief biography. Tan cloth boards with brown titles show some wear, with lower spine edge bumped. Front hinge weak, but holding. Wear and some soiling to dust jacket, otherwise very good. SCARCE!

Bookseller Inventory # 22954

SOLD

Marca-Relli
Arnason, H. H.

Publisher: Edizioni D’arte Fratelli Pozzo
Publication Date: 1971
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: First Italian Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

All the great scents since the launch of Guerlain’s Jicky in 1889 to Mugler’s Angel in 1992, this book tells the story of some of the world’s most famous fragrances. Edwards’s passion for the subject makes this more a great read than just a reference book. Information value: Outstanding. Everyone will find the story of the creation, name and design of one of their favourite scents, including Chanel No 5, Tabu, Joy, Nuit de Nol and Opium. A invaluable reference tool for anybody in the fashion or beauty industry. An exhaustive work, starting with the birth of modern perfumery in the late 1880′s, and extending into the late 1990′s.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Black cloth boards with fuchsia titles. Published by Michael Edwards in association with HM Editions, France. 295 pages. Foreword by Edmond Roudnitska.  The dust jacket shows only the most minor wear to corners and edges, otherwise fine. A scarce and sought after work on the subject.

Bookseller Inventory # 23439
SOLD

Perfume Legends: French Feminine Fragrances
Edwards, Michael

Publisher: HM Editions
Publication Date: 1996
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Peter Matthiessen is a two-time National Book Award winning American novelist, as well as an environmental activist, and Zen Buddhist. Along with George Plimpton and Harold L. Humes, Matthiessen founded the literary magazine The Paris Review in 1953. In 2008 Matthiessen reissued a revised edition of  his trilogy of novels — Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone, for which he received his second National Book Award.  In Men’s Lives he champions yet another cause, this time the baymen of Long Island’s East End.  Matthiessen himself worked as a commercial fisherman in the early 1950s on the South Fork of Long Island. As both knowledgeable insider and keen observer of a passing culture, he writes of the independent, tough, skilled members of a few large families who have fished those coastal waters for generations, but who no longer can make a living in the face of regulations, political restrictions, economic pressures.  A meditation on a traditional culture  marginalized by the forces of the modern culture, but also a masterful celebration of pride in one’s work, and the sense of community it brings.

Description: INSCRIBED, SIGNED & DATED BY PETER MATTHIESSEN on then half title page. TRUE FIRST EDITION. Two volumes, hardbound in olive green linen with pasted down illustrations affixed to front boards. No dust jackets, as issued. In original publishers olive green linen slipcase. Matthiessen’s tribute to the fishermen of eastern Long Island and their way of life that slowly seemed to dying away. Matthiessen has spent much of his life on the eastern end of Long Island, where he maintains a house in Sagaponack. Photographs by Danny Lyon, Gilles Peress, Lynn Johnson, Dan Budnick and others. 238 and 170 pages; as new condition. ; clean and crisp books and slipcase. A RARE INSCRIBED COPY!

Bookseller Inventory # 25017

$1200

Men’s Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork
Matthiessen, Peter

Publisher: Rock Foundation
Publication Date: 1986
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, As Issued
Signed: Inscribed by Author
Edition: 1st Edition, Limited

· Category: Featured Items, Photography ·

Ellsworth Kelly studied at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, from 1941 to 1943. After military service from 1943 to 1945, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1946 to 1947. The following year, Kelly went to France and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the G.I. Bill. In France, he discovered Romanesque art and architecture and Byzantine art. He was also introduced to Surrealism which led him to experiment with automatic drawing and geometric abstraction.

Kelly abstracts the forms in his paintings from observations of the real world, such as shadows cast by trees or the spaces between architectural elements. In 1950, Kelly met Jean Arp and that same year began to make shaped-wood reliefs and collages in which elements were arranged according to the laws of chance. He soon began to make paintings in separate panels that can be recombined to produce alternate compositions, as well as multipanel paintings in which each canvas is painted a single color. During the 1950s, he traveled throughout France, where he met Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Alberto Magnelli, Francis Picabia, and Georges Vantongerloo, among other artists. His first solo show took place at the Galerie Arnaud, Paris, in 1951.

Kelly returned to the United States in 1954, living first in a studio apartment on Broad Street, and then at Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, where his neighbors would through the years include Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, Fred Mitchell, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. Kelly continued to develop and expand the vocabulary of painting, exploring issues of form and ground with his flatly painted canvases. His first solo show in New York was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956, and three years later he was included in Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1958, he also began to make freestanding sculptures. He moved out of Manhattan in 1970, set up a studio in Chatham, and a home in nearby Spencertown, New York. Kelly’s first retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1973.

Description: Paperback catalogue raisonne 1949 – 1985. Published on the occasion of the 1987 touring exhibition. 201 pages, profusely illustrated. Includes lithographs, leaves, curve series, concord, plant, flower litho images, paper images with an appendix on printmaking. Chronology, glossary, bibliography, and index. Scarce!

Bookseller Inventory # 17354

$125

The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1949-1985
Axsom, Richard H.

Publisher: Hudson Hills Press, Manchester, Vermont, U.S.A.
Publication Date: 1987
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·

Gerhard Richter began working with artists such as Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz. Their work, and Richter’s in particular, began to have an impact in Germany, and eventually international art circles. Richter’s beliefs are credited with refreshing art and rejuvenating painting as a medium during a period when many artists chose performance and ready-made media. Together with Polke and Fischer-Lueg, Richter formed a group called the Capitalist Realists. The Capitalist Realists were satirical, often deriving subject matter from print media. Richter began to see art as something that had to be separated from art history; he believed that paintings should focus on the image rather than the reference, the visual rather than the statement.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Published on the occasion of the April 22, 1991 exhibition. 91 pages. Mirror Paintings, Sculpture,  Glass panels, and Abstract paintings. Catalog, exhibition checklist, and bibliography 1965 – 1991.  A very nice copy of a scarce Richter title.

Bookseller Inventory # 17021

$400

Gerhard Richter: Mirrors