art

The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini is an English translated book from Italian, first published in 1859. The artist, Cennino Cennini, was an Italian painter born around 1360 and died before 1427. He trained under Agnolo Gaddi, and worked in Padua, at the court of Francesco Novello da Carrara. This book is an English translation of Cennino Cennini’s most notable publication, Il Libro Dell'Arte, with an introduction and commentary by celebrated British artist (and art patron), Christiana J. Herringham.

Birth of the Cool may be the coolest book you will ever see. In this 2008 exhibition catalog of his first retrospective, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) distills black identity into powerful three-quarter and full-length portraits that teem with style and attitude. His sitters are unapologetic in their self-presentation and the result is a phenomenal elevation of African Americans who would have otherwise gone unnoticed in the decades immediately following the civil rights movement.

Africa is rising—fashion, design, wax prints redeux, eco-architecture, floating schools, hammocks in libraries, AK-47s into chairs,  popular culture, récupération, safari lodges, curated dining, LGBT haute couture, Afronauts, sapeurs—where art and design and popular culture collide. Today’s African designers share an unflinching reverence for the past and draw smartly on that heritage in the novelty of their creations. This is not your Africa of yore.

Travel to Paris was a prerequisite for aspiring American painters of the late nineteenth century. Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), an African American painter born in Pittsburgh, was among the throng of artists to journey there. Tanner decided to become a painter at the age of thirteen after seeing an artist painting outdoors in a park in Philadelphia. In 1897, Tanner enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he studied under Thomas Eakins (1844-1916).

In the lead up to 1963’s March on Washington, several of the decade’s most prominent African American artists joined together in a collective called Spiral. Their efforts culminated in a two-day exhibition in June of 1965. This catalogue is the record of that exhibition; it features an illustrated checklist with works from Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and more, as well as a complete list of the collective’s members.

This multiple was created by George Maciunas, ostensible leader of the avant-garde movement Fluxus, in conjunction with Yoko Ono’s 1971 retrospective This is Not Here at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY. Yoko Ono, artist, peace activist, and widow of John Lennon has used smiles as a recurring theme since the 1960s. "It is the simplest thing to make yourself healthy and make others feel good," she says about smiling.

Kunstöffner is a kit designed to encourage a young person’s appreciation of art through objects in the collection at the Kunsthaus Zürich, one of the most significant art collections in Switzerland.

This beautiful coffee table book book is signed by the author, Jonathan Green of South Carolina. It contains 108 color portraits and paintings, with captions describing each work of art. The first thirty pages share a biography of the artist and describe his life’s work. The rest of the book is devoted entirely to nothing but beautiful art. The images depict the artist’s upbringing. He was raised on a farm in Gullah country, the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia, inhabited by the descendants of freed slaves from the area. 

This beautiful book, a wordless novel, tells a story of the African slave trade and one slave trader’s obsession and tragic downfall—all in 128 powerful woodcuts that combine Art Deco and Expressionist styles. Lynd Ward was one of America’s finest wood engravers, and the detailed, complicated plates in this book show him as a master craftsman and illustrator who could also reveal psychological anguish through his art. The plates in this second-edition copy are reproduced photographically; the front and back covers are bound in papers showing a woodcut-style design in black and white.

This little 19th-century gem, The World in Miniature: Africa, was written to satisfy the curiosity of the British public about unknown Africa.  Based on eye-witness accounts written by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who died in West Africa in 1806, the fifty-three chapters cover a wide range of topics: Geography, natural history, ethnicity, types of government, systems of justice, arts and crafts, warfare, food, women, and slavery. The most engaging features in these tiny tomes are the forty-five hand-colored engravings and two maps.

A catalog of the 2013 exhibition Yayoi Kusama: White Infinity Nets at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, in which Kusama exclusively showed her recent white Infinity Net paintings. This book contains full color plates of the paintings; installation shots; details of Kusama’s thick, impasto semi-circles; photographs of the artist at work in her studio; and an essay by Rachel Taylor, curator at the Tate Modern museum in London.

"It seems that pumpkins do not inspire much respect. But I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form." Thus Yayoi Kusama explains her attraction to the humble pumpkin in the preface to the catalog of the 2014 exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Pumpkins at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London. Both the pumpkin form and the repeated, striated spray of dots inspired by the markings on Japanese kabocha pumpkins are recurring motifs in this iconic artist’s work across various media.

This hardcover catalog features work from Yayoi Kusama’s critically acclaimed 2013 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, a celebrated contemporary art gallery in London. The exhibit marked the debut of the artist’s large-scale square-format acrylic on canvas paintings, which demonstrate her supreme talent as a colorist. This book features stunning, full color plates of this series of brightly colored paintings.

Queensland Art Gallery curators Ted Gott and Kathryn Weir created an exhibit featuring monsters and beasts as depicted in art and entertainment history. The exhibit and accompanying book, Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong highlights the many ways beasts feature prominently in imaginations of artists and filmmakers. The animal now known as the gorilla came to the attention of modern Europeans in 1847. From that time, gorillas and similar beasts have been popular subjects in sculptures, paintings, books, and movies.

A book that accompanied the 1946 exhibit "If You Want To Build A House" exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art. The book highlights mid-century modern architects such as Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Richard Neutra as well as Prairie School architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The book describes the concepts of modern architecture from the prospective of a potential home builder.

This beautifully illustrated and colorful book focuses on the work of the designers and architects who apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright at the Taliesin Fellowship in Scottsdale, Arizona from 1937-1950s. There are hundreds of photographs and drawings in this first edition book, many from the apprentices’ own archives and previously unpublished. The author interviewed and traced the careers of many former apprentices, including internationally known architects E.

Book artist and engineer Joe D'Ambrosio wrote, printed, illustrated, signed, and bound just 125 editions of this book. The first twenty-five copies of the printing have a deluxe binding and additions such as extra hand-coloring, metallic inks, and feathers. This edition is one of the rare twenty-five. The text of the tale is letterpress printed in four colors on two different colors of confetti paper.

This volume on Western style encompasses everything from humble denim jeans to the fanciest rhinestone-covered cowboy costumes. Brimming with photos, it presents a history of the American West spanning its early days to the present, told through clothing. You’ll find a buckskin hunting shirt from the 1820s, Angora chaps worn by a Colorado cowboy in the 1920s, and a colorful gauze fiesta dress from the 1950s made by Thunderbird Fashions of Prescott, AZ.

German artist Max Ernst was a pioneer of the Dada and Surrealist movement. After marrying American artist Dorothea Tanning in 1946, the couple moved to Sedona, Arizona, where they lived until 1953. Initially remote and unpopulated, an artists’ colony soon took root amongst the monumental red rocks.

An attractive, slipcased catalog for a collaborative exhibition of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, painter Genichiro Inokuma, and designer Issey Miyake at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), Japan, highlighting the mutual influence of the three friends and their hybrid Japanese and American cultures.

This colorful catalog for an exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum in 1980 presents photography, painting, and sculpture created by artists who traveled through Arizona and were inspired by the state. The 93 artists included in the exhibition and this catalog span nearly 150 years, and include Helen Frankenthaler, Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, and Carleton Watkins. 

British printmaker Rupert Shephard (1902-1992) was inspired by the people and cultures of South Africa to create the eighteen prints in this limited-edition portfolio (200 copies). Ndebele women, known for their beadwork and colorful geometric murals, are portrayed here in a warm, lively setting in this lino-cut print from the portfolio. Shephard taught printmaking at Michaelis Art School in Cape Town, South Africa, from 1948 to 1962.

Shunkyū Higi Zukan [勝川春章肉筆春宮秘戯図巻 (Secret erotic play)] is a set of erotic paintings produced by Katsushika Shunshō (1726-1793), one of the most important ukiyo-e painters of the Edo period (1600-1868).

These stunningly ornamental canoe prows glide through the coastal waterways of the Cameroon, where the Duala people live. German anthropologist Leo Frobenius traveled to this bucolic West African setting and documented his findings in this 1897 book. To make this piece even more special, it is one of only nine copies that exist in the United States.