Karl Blossfeldt Masterworks /anglais

Bloßfeldt, Karl

D.A.P.

First edition. Seventeen short essays, most previously published and reworked, on subjects relating to design and the book as art object. Four black and white illustrations accompany the text. Signed by the author. 79, 3 pages. stiff paper wrappers. small 8vo..

Bookmaker's Desire, The

Arts & Photography

Buzz Spector

Graphic Design

An artist's book exploring the language of protest A new artist's book by Adam Pendleton (born 1984), As Heavy as Sculpture follows Pendleton's 2021 installation of the same title, exhibited at the New Museum in New York. The book collects, repeats and processes over 80 source collages, incorporating drawings, sketches, writing and marks, often in combination with images. Much of the language in the collages is drawn from the protests against police brutality that swept the US in 2020: Pendleton has transcribed slogans sprayed on walls and windows, combining them with his own improvised language as well as photographs of art objects and artifacts (sculptures, masks and figures). The work points to the poetic pressure that uprisings place on language itself, compressing it in some cases into the barest of forms: simple sequences like "ACAB" or "1312," further reducible to the elements "A, B, C," "1, 2, 3." In parallel with these operations of decomposition and recomposition, the collages in As Heavy as Sculpture have been duplicated, laid out across 30 sheets and folded into book signatures, creating new displacements and cuts. This folding is in effect a chance operation, a procedure of recombination and translation, resulting in arrangements of images not planned out in advance.

Adam Pendleton: As Heavy as Sculpture

History & Criticism

Review\nThese previously unpublished selections of 35mm slides confirm and extend the stubborn singularity of Leiter’s color language. -- Randy Kennedy ― Aperture\nThe photographs and texture of the mundane movements of the city: a couple kissing on a rain-dampened bench, glossy taxis waiting in the street, the flash of a red dress. -- Baya Simons ― Financial Times: How To Spend It\nThere are hardly any notable color photographs from that era – other than Leiter’s. This makes his images of everyday Manhattan such a revelation: a black-and-white world turned into a sidewalk Oz. -- Mark Feeney ― Boston Globe\nThe book takes us into familiar Leiter territory―umbrellas, red dresses, rain-dappled windows―only to prove the man all the more remarkable for never seeing a thing the same way twice. -- Julia Vitale ― Airmail\nLeiter was a keen observer as life unfolded before him, somehow finding a way to reliably pluck a sublime split-second out of a mundane moment. -- Mee-Lai Stone ― Guardian\nAt a time when photos are disposable and Instagram gratification is coin of the realm, Unseen Saul Leiter is a book that will teach you a new way to see. -- Bill Shapiro ― Esquire\nIt is a revelatory and colossal archival project that allows even Leiter’s enthusiasts to discover him all over again. -- Kim Bubello ― TIME\nA thrilling trove of newly discovered color works from the photographer celebrated for his pioneering painterly vision 
Now firmly established as one of the world’s greatest photographers, Saul Leiter (1923–2013) was relatively little known until the 2006 publication of Saul Leiter: Early Color, when he was already in his eighties. Choosing to shoot in color when black and white was the norm, Leiter portrayed midcentury New York’s street life with a gorgeous painterliness that evoked the sensuality of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries Rothko and Newman. His studio in the East Village, where he lived from 1952 until his death in 2013, is now the home of the Saul Leiter Foundation, which has commenced a full-scale survey of his more than 80,000 works. 
This volume contains works discovered through this project―specifically, color photography from slides never before published or seen by the public. It is edited by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation, and is embellished with texts that describe how Leiter assembled his slide archive and how it is being catalogued and restored. 
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923. He pioneered a painterly approach to color photography in the 1940s and produced covers for fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, before largely withdrawing from public attention in the 1980s. The publication of his first collection, Early Color, by Steidl in 2006, inspired an avid “rediscovery” that led to worldwide exhibitions and the release of a documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2014). He died in New York in 2013.

The Unseen Saul Leiter

Photography & Video

The first retrospective on a fascinating protagonist of the 1970s Pattern & Decoration movement, who defied Minimalist orthodoxy with humorous multimedia explorations of domesticity and ornament 
This is the first comprehensive volume on Cynthia Carlson (born 1942), a key artist of the Pattern & Decoration group who responded to Minimalism’s dominance in the 1970s. The work of this group has recently been revisited and reappraised in exhibitions and by art scholarship. A Chicagoan under the influence of the Chicago Imagists, Carlson landed in New York City in 1965 and has exhibited widely (she was included in Lucy Lippard’s seminal 1971 exhibition 26 Contemporary Women Artists at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art). Her interest in the domestic―as a source of shapes and as a realm of familial experiences, chores and memories―intersects with the works of contemporaries ranging from Jennifer Bartlett to Joel Shapiro and Elizabeth Murray. Carlson's utilization of architectural motifs might align at one moment with the vernacular embraced in the buildings of Venturi & Scott Brown and, at another, with the postmodern rehabilitation of Beaux-Arts ornament. Her hand-painted "wallpaper" is considered a significant contribution and influence on contemporary installation art. Carlson’s artistic identity continues to morph: from room-size wallpaper and a life-size gingerbread house to unexpected shaped canvasses, architectural constructions and pet portraits. Whatever she creates, however eccentric, is high-spirited, genial and insightful.

Cynthia Carlson: Sixty Years

Individual Artists

Eugene Richards: Remembrance Garden: A Portrait of Green-Wood Cemetery

A major survey chronicling Thomas' vibrant, rhinestone-adorned paintingsNew York-based artist Mickalene Thomas' critically acclaimed and extensive body of work spans painting, collage, print, photography, video and immersive installations. With influences ranging from 19th-century painting to popular culture, Thomas' art articulates a complex and empowering vision of womanhood while expanding on and subverting common definitions of beauty, sexuality, celebrity and politics. This major survey publication further affirms Thomas' status as a key figure of contemporary art. It features notable works that are arranged in thematic chapters throughout the book. The book also features an interview with the artist by Rachel Thomas, and is followed by essays from Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Darnell L. Moore, Claudia Rankine, Ed Schad, Renée Mussai and Christine Y. Kim, which cover her distinct visual vocabulary, drawing on themes of intergenerational female empowerment, autobiography, memory and tenets of Black feminist theory. In particular, they explore how Thomas subverts art history to reclaim the notions of repose, rest and leisure in works that celebrate self-expression and joy. For the artist, repose is a radical act, pointing to "what is able to happen once you have the agency." Mickalene Thomas (born 1971) is an international, award-winning, multidisciplinary artist whose work has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. She is known for her elaborate portraits of Black women composed of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel: Evidence

Through Blossfeldt's lens, plants and flowers become gorgeous formal gestures
Karl Blossfeldt was a pioneer of botanical photography, though his interest in the plant world was initially educational. Fascinated by the structure of plants, whose seemingly artistic forms resulted from biological necessity, he realized that photography could be a useful teaching tool, allowing his students to see and compare natural forms. Working with a homemade camera, Blossfeldt gathered and photographed his own plant samples, magnifying them by up to 45 times. From around 1898 onward, he shot some 6,000 images, which he used primarily as visual aids in his classes. Eventually published as Art Forms in Nature (1928) and Art Forms in Nature, Second Series (1932), Blossfeldt’s photographs had a lasting impact on the art of his day and were enthusiastically embraced by both the Surrealist and New Objectivity movements. His books brought him overnight fame and are still considered landmarks in the history of art and photography. Karl Blossfeldt: Masterworks presents a remarkable collection of Blossfeldt’s strikingly austere yet poetic portraits of plants, which capture their timeless beauty in intimate detail.

Karl Blossfeldt: Masterworks

Since the 1990s, Thomas Struth has been one of the best-known and internationally successful photographers of the German art scene. Struth studied painting under Gerhard Richter and photography under Bernd and Hilla Becher, a combination that decisively influenced his vision.
This volume is a compilation of representative photographs from each series of works in Struth’s oeuvre: street photographs from the 1970s and ‘80s; empathetic portraits (particularly of families); large-format “museum photographs”; nature studies; jungle photographs (New Pictures from Paradise); and, from the latest series, images from the world of science. As this compendium of his work shows, Struth has succeeded in setting new aesthetic standards thanks to his great precision, chromatic clarity, sound sense of composition and intellectual profundity.
Thomas Struth (born 1954) studied with the Bechers at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. Struth is today a leading figure in German arts and international photography. He lives in Berlin and is represented in the US by Marian Goodman Gallery.

Thomas Struth

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