Favorite Art Books

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

I just posted a list of 20 on my blog. Most of it contemporary art, second half 20th century.

https://schicksalgemeinschaft.wordpress ... art-books/


How about your favorite art books?

[Dan Warburton]

Great selection! When my father (formerly Chairman and Vice-President of the Turner Society) died nearly five years ago, he left me with, as he promised "not much money to speak of, but a great collection of art books", no fewer than 1400 monographs and nearly as many exhibition catalogues, most of which I had to sell - alas. Of the hundred or so I brought back to France, favourites would include (and I'm not sure biographies of artists count as art books according to your definition, but be that as it may)















Plus I have and dip into one of about twenty_odd old Thames & Hudson World of Art books from time to time.

Just read on your blog that you're now a father - congratulations and welcome to the other side

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

Nearly 3000 books - a lifetime of collecting!

Not familiar with Darger & Nicolas de Staël, will have to check those out. That Wiener Werkstaette looks great.


The other side is great, thanks! Things are quite manageable up unto now. Keeping fingers crossed!

[Wombatz]

here are five:



christopher wool: cats in bag bags in river

no text, just wool pulling images of his work through a shady color photocopier, sequenced to perfection.



wols: aufzeichnungen

with texts by sartre and roché and removable plates in white or black frames, this is sort of the gold standard for what you can do with what's essentially just a catalog of a few watercolors. (i think there's also an english edition.)



julian schnabel: cvy. nicknames of maitre d's and other excerpts from life

whatever you think of the paintings, schnabel's own account of his early life and work is totally infectious. as good and funny as your favorite jazz musician's autobio.



sonderborg: tuer un rat

every sonderborg book is great because the page just loves his work. this has the added bonus of a workshop/artist's book feel, done together with andré s. labarthe, whom dan will know for his cinema connections.



damien hirst: i want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now

he has a knack for titles, this is what every book would want. total extravaganza, with pull out stuff and other childish fun, but also a wealth of texts. you can pore over this for days, except it might fall apart.

[Steve Minkin]

Not my thing, but I did see one extraordinary creation in the San Diego Mingei Folk Art Museum that I liked so much I bought the book. A PALACE FOR WEDNESDAY is the creation of a middle-aged woman who left her suburban life to live as a hermit on a beach and make sculptures of whatever debris she finds around her. Brief video on the Palace:
https://vimeo.com/50569418

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

I have that Hirst book too. totally over-the-top. I loved it when I was 25, not sure what to think of Hirst today, being over a decade older. I guess he was important, and indeed, his titles (and hence his work) often has a poetic quality to it.

Have you seen pictures of his new work, Treasure? He's going a bit Koons-y. I guess artists with that kind of budgent & exposure become a bit harder to judge. Hirst has become "bourgouisie" art, but then again, it is so over the top, that it is kinda interesting for a few seconds.

[Wombatz]

hey i thought the rules were favorite books not favorite artists but generally i still think he's good. certainly only classics in that book (btw working on art books in different capacities is my job, and there are so damn few of them that really try for something). i even liked when he started painting awkward still lifes a few years back, not for the paintings themselves, but for this story of the artist tycoon with two factory halls full of a couple of hundred of assistants, suddenly locking himself in his garret to paint those damn still lifes he knew nobody wanted to see ... despite/because there's nothing they could possibly prove anyway. Not too taken with the pics or concept of 'treasure', maybe in the flesh it's properly overwhelming ... and it is a neat way to package the usual flood of art-historical references characterizing many artists' late work.

[walto]

I know almost literally nothing, but I added a smidge to my very meager stash with this book, which our kids also enjoyed:

[walto]

As Lutz knows, I also like these:

[Wombatz]

I know almost literally nothing, but I added a smidge to my very meager stash with this book, which our kids also enjoyed:

art primers are great for browsing and staring at stuff you otherwise wouldn't stare at, but that looks very short on text? i've worked on this, and i think it's the only book i was involved with that my kids showed any interest in:



how about george moore's reminiscences of the impressionist painters (does that have the passage about being painted by manet? stupidly i can't find my copy ... i can find my copy of modern painting, but unfortunately that isn't very good) ...

[walto]

Reminiscences is available here on-line:

https://archive.org/details/reminiscencesofi00mooruoft

and Impressions and Opinions (which also has a lot of stuff on painting) is here:

https://archive.org/details/impressionsandop00mooruoft

There's a lot of talk about Manet in both of them.

[caiverzi]

Artists' books, I wish there was more attention given to them and not merely treated more or less as a novelty. I don't know many digitized collections of such books (State Library of Queensland comes up on search, then there's Johanna Drucker's Artists' Books Online) or publishing houses which gives them away (onestar press is the only major exception I'm aware of), am I missing something?

[Wombatz]

oh i wouldn't think they're treated as novelties, for many artists (e.g. ed ruscha, dieter roth, gerhard richter) they're seen as central to the work. of course today every halfway ambitious catalog gets labeled as an artist's book. anyway, this reminds me that

the collected hairy who publications 1966-69



is a very nice book indeed, which unusually reprints the complete original zines.

[Steve Minkin]

My friend/dancer Ren has the best art gallery in the county, mostly contemporary Japanese work.
Here's one of the more striking bound offerings: https://www.renbrown.com/store/watanabe ... fragrance/

[Antoine]

https://archive.org/details/guggenheimmuseum

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

art primers are great for browsing and staring at stuff you otherwise wouldn't stare at

Phaidon's 'Cream' collections were important to me, they focussed solely on really contemporary stuff.


https://www.amazon.com/Fresh-Cream-Edit ... 0714839248

as for a general overview post-1945, with more text, this was also very important, in Dutch:

http://www.addevisser.nl/boek/de-tweede ... st-na-1945

De Tweede Helft by Ad Visser.

[Wombatz]

speaking of primers, this is a really great book, though it's really a meta-primer. the weakness of this october crew is that they rarely stare at art ... Funnily, it becomes a strength in this overview in which they're more or less forced to stick to the story. it is ridiculously theory-loaded and i disagree with judgments a lot of the time ... but there's something i never would have thought of in practically every entry.

[walto]

Does something like this count?--

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

That looks great! Will look into it.

I have these:





Recommended, both for the photography as the very detailed texts.

[faster]