Collage & Photomontage: Important Catalogs & Monographs

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  Siglio Robert Seydel: Book of Ruth Robert Seydel's Book of Ruth presents an assemblage of collages, letters, journal entries and other artifacts from the life of Seydel's fictional alter-ego, Ruth Greisman--spinster, Sunday painter and friend to Joseph Cornell. Drawing on the inherent seductiveness and intrigue of archives, the volume is conceived as a gathering of fragmented materials by Greisman unearthed from a storage space in the Smithsonian and a suburban family garage, which are presented as a mosaic portrait of a reclusive artist. The New Yorker described the project thus: "Burrowing into the pop-detritus archive somewhere between Ray Johnson's mail art and Tom Phillips' Humument project, Seydel's serial collage Book of Ruth describes an allusive fantasy about his aunt and alter ego Ruth Greisman, her brother Saul, and their escapades with Joseph Cornell... unfold[ing] in novelistic rhythms." Over the past decade or so, working almost exclusively in notebook form, Seydel has produced hundreds of works in multiple . . . . [see book details]

  Pbk, 6 x 8.5 in. / 152 pgs / 91 color / 35 b&w. Publication Date: 5/31/2011 List Price: US $35.00

  Siglio Keith Waldrop: Several Gravities For nearly four decades, National Book Award winner Keith Waldrop has been creating a lyrical body of visual art that mirrors his extraordinary oeuvre of poetry, fiction, and translation. Like his collage poems, Waldrop's visual works are enveloped in quiet tensions and ghosted impressions, densities of atmosphere and architecture, drift and dream. Rich in textual and visual play, romantic and contradictory in their shapings, his collages use traces of memory to gesture toward the absent and the invisible. Edited and with an essay by Robert Seydel, Several Gravities features a substantial selection of these radiant collages in a full-color hardcover edition, and includes a previously unpublished serial poem as well as an essay by Waldrop that enunciates the relationship between this author's distinctive visual and poetic practices. "This juxtaposition of prose commentary, verse and collage is a fascinating and illuminating work in itself. Several Gravities also serves as a bright window onto . . . . [see book details]

  Edited and with text by Robert Seydel. Hbk, 6.25 x 9.25 in. / 112 pgs / 36 color / 5 b&w. Publication Date: 4/30/2009 List Price: US $39.50

  Michael Kohn Gallery She: Images of Women by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince The use of heterosexual pornography or soft erotica in collage and assemblage is often all too uncritical, but for a few of the California artists who came of age in the early 1950s, its applications were much more nuanced. For example, Wallace Berman's 1957 "Cross" assemblage features a close-up photograph of heterosexual penetration that affirms sex as a "factum fidei" ("true fact," as Berman's inscription went)--its explicitness serving simply as realism. This approach to "girlie magazine" imagery and its polar opposite--the impulse to decommodify sexuality--can both be found in the photographs, paintings and books of Richard Prince, an artist whose fondness for the era of Berman is well known. She traces these overlaps and sympathies with reproductions of previously unseen works by Berman and new images from Prince's Girlfriends and de Kooning series. Also including an interview with Prince, She is edited by Kristine McKenna, whose ongoing work on Wallace Berman . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Kristine McKenna. Hbk, 10.5 x 9.75 in. / 110 pgs / 60 color. Publication Date: 2/16/2009 List Price: US $48.00

  JRP|Ringier Linder: Works 1976-2006 Linder Sterling's work had its first exposure in the punk fanzine The Secret Public and as art for the sleeve of the Buzzcocks' first single, "Orgasm Addict." Soon she had her own band, Ludus, founded with Ian Divine. Her visuals and her performances have remained legendary in the musical world--for example, a costume consisting of raw meat and a black vibrator, worn for a special evening at the Hacienda--but these formative contributions to the aesthetics of punk and its offshoots have only recently received wider recognition. With no clear academic career path, without institutional or curatorial support, Linder has continued to make multidisciplinary work, work that has led observers to call her the missing link between Yoko Ono and Tracey Emin. This first book, a rediscovery and a debut at once, includes contributions from writers and cultural figures including Philip Hoare, Jon Savage, Andrew Renton, Lynne Tillman, Paul Bailey and Morrissey. . . . . [see book details]

  Essays by Philip Hoare, Morrissey, Jon Savage, Andrew Renton and Lynne Tillman. Hardcover, 11 x 10.75 in. / 144 pgs / 60 color and 60 b&w. Publication Date: 8/15/2006 List Price: US $70.00

  The Green Box Hannah Höch: Picture Book A central figure in the Berlin Dada circle, friend to Kurt Schwitters and Piet Mondrian and lover of Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch (1889-1972) is probably the most important female artist from the German modernist period. She is best known for her pioneering works of photomontage, which briskly juxtapose mechanical and organic forms, ancient and contemporary bodies, symbols and text drawn from brands and headlines, also edging feminism, commodity critique and other political concerns into the mix. "It is striking how contemporary to us much of Höch's work feels," Luc Sante wrote recently, "in its sexual politics, its humor, its gleeful appropriation of anything and everything at hand." In 1945, Höch made this fantastical full-color children's book, which chronicles the adventures of the four mythical creatures Runfast, Dumblet, Snifty and Meyer in an enchanted garden, combining photomontage with the hallucinatory plant imagery she had come to favor. It is published here for . . . . [see book details]

  Afterword by Gunda Luyken. Translated by Brian Currid. Hbk, 10.75 x 8.75 in. / 44 pgs / 19 color. Publication Date: 10/31/2010 List Price: US $49.95

  Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Douglas Blau Since the 1980s, Douglas Blau has used words and pictures interchangeably to create a highly regarded and unique body of work. He emerged as a critic and curator in tandem with the Pictures Generation of artists. In 1987, his exhibition Fictions: A Selection of Pictures from the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries was the first in a maverick series to apply curatorial practice to the construction of explicit narratives. Blau creates picture epics and episodes from uniformly framed collages of printed matter: postcards, film stills, images of paintings and photographs, pictures of all kinds are cut and pasted into individual collage elements. These are composed into sequences based on formal and narrative associations that flow from frame to frame. Centuries of picture making appear distilled through Blau’s art into an essential repertoire of characters, plots, periods, styles, locations, and genres. Only the details and degrees of abstraction vary over time and . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Ingrid Schaffner. Pbk, 10 x 8.5 in. / 88 pgs / 50 color. Publication Date: 2/1/2009 List Price: US $30.00

  Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine Alex Katz: Collages Alex Katz: Collages is the catalogue raisonnŞ of Katz's early collages, spanning the period from 1954 to 1960. It presents 85 color plates with complete catalogue entries and an essay by Katz scholar David Cohen, critic for the New York Sun, publisher and editor of artcritical.com and curator at the New York Studio School. Cohen's essay argues that the collages are critical to an understanding of Katz's mature work and occupy a significant place within a history of Modernism. In these seminal works, Katz was already developing his unique artistic voice--a vocabulary of elemental forms, aesthetic efficiency and flat color. . . . . [see book details]

  Essay by David Cohen. Foreword by Sharon Corwin. Hardcover, 9.5 x 8.25 in. / 180 pgs / 85 color. Publication Date: 2/1/2006 List Price: US $45.00

  Walther König, Köln Pia Fries: Merian’s Surinam For the 14 diptychs that comprise the Merian's Surinam series, Swiss painter Pia Fries (born 1955) uses reproductions by the painter and botanical illustrator Maria Sybilla Merian (1647–1717). Merian's images of plants, flowers, animals and insects are elaborated upon with oil paint, from thin to thick impasto, and with varying degrees of obscuration, to establish an open and playful dialogue between the two women. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Camille Morineau. Clth, 7 x 9.75 in. / 100 pgs / 25 color. Publication Date: 3/31/2010 List Price: US $39.95

  Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Wangechi Mutu: This You Call Civilization? The alluring and intricate collages of Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu (born 1972) draw the viewer into narratives of beauty, consumerism, colonialism, race, identity and gender politics. Oriented around imagery of the human body, Mutu's work aims at a visual deconstruction of traditional figuration, reconciling the experience of her Kenyan upbringing with present-day American realities. Published to accompany Mutu's first major survey at the Art Gallery of Ontario, This You Call Civilization? demonstrates the breadth of the artist's oeuvre to date, encompassing numerous works on paper produced since 2001, plus two large-scale installations and two video works. It also includes excerpts from favorite key source books selected by Mutu from her personal library, each of them formative in her quest to raise public awareness about racial and political issues through her art. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by David Moos. Text by Jennifer Gonzalez, Odili Donald Odita, Raphael Rubinstein, et al. Hbk, 8 x 9 in. / 128 pgs / 62 color. Publication Date: 5/31/2010 List Price: US $29.95

  JRP|Ringier Kirstine Roepstorff: The Inner Sound that Kills the Outer The mixed-media collages of Kirstine Roepstorff (born 1972) spill over with messy glee. Over the past decade, Roepstorff has built up a large body of collage work that stages and dismantles the imagery of our times, drawing out themes of disinformation, media theory and feminism. She often coheres her collage narratives through archetypal characters, which come to the fore in her new mechanical theater installation, "Stille Teater" ("Quiet Theater"), documented here alongside essays and an interview with the artist. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Agustin Pérez Rubio. Text by Patricia Ellis, Angela Rosenberg. Pbk, 9.25 x 11.25 in. / 208 pgs / 61 color / 20 b&w. Publication Date: 8/31/2009 List Price: US $55.00

  Hatje Cantz Erwin Blumenfeld: Nothing but a Berliner Dada Montages 1916-1933 Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. In 1941, after being interned in a concentration camp, he left Europe for the United States, where he eventually became a citizen; during the 40s and 50s, he was to make his name here as one of the most sought-after fashion photographers in the world. But most people are unfamiliar with Blumenfeld's early work, the often bitingly satiric Dada photomontages and collages he produced between 1916 and 1933. This book, put together by Helen Adkins, renowned expert on the Berlin Dada movement, is the first to provide a study and a survey of these early works. Blumenfeld did not intend for these works to be shown publicly, as they were primarily personal gifts to his friends and acquaintance, or were enclosed in love letters to his fiancée. Nonetheless, they were conceived in the Dada spirit (Blumenfeld established the Dutch branch . . . . [see book details]

  Preface by Janos Frecot. Text by Helen Adkins. Hbk, 8.5 x 11.25 in. / 224 pgs / 97 color / 130 duotone. Publication Date: 3/1/2009 List Price: US $60.00

  Kerber Michael Buthe: The Angel & His Shadow A glittering personality on the 1970s art scene, Michael Buthe (1944–1994) plundered the world's cultures to make his brightly chaotic drawings, paintings, assemblages and installations (Buthe was among the earliest artists to present room-size installations as works of art). Achieving a balance between delicacy and kitsch, Buthe's work resembles a bizarre amalgam of Jack Smith and Richard Tuttle. This first substantial monograph is a revelation and a delight. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Karsten Müller. Hbk, 8.75 x 10.5 in. / 136 pgs / 101 color / 1 b&w. Publication Date: 6/30/2010 List Price: US $50.00

  Walker Art Center Bruce Conner: 2000 BC Bruce Conner (1933-2008) first came to prominence in the late 1950s as a leader of the assemblage movement in California. Conner had close ties with poets of the San Francisco Renaissance (particularly Michael McClure) as well as with artists such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, Jess and Jay DeFeo. Conner's use of nylon stockings in his assemblages quickly won him notoriety, and saw his work included in Peter Selz's classic 1961 Art of Assemblage show at MoMA. Around this time, Conner also turned to film-making, and produced in swift succession a number of short films that helped to pioneer the rapid edit and the use of pop music among independent film-makers. Conner's innovative editing techniques and decidedly dark vision of American culture laid the foundation for later Hollywood directors such as Dennis Hopper (a friend and collaborator of Conner's, who frequently acknowledged his influence) and David Lynch. A long overdue and . . . . [see book details]

  Photographs by Bruce Conner. Edited by Joan Rothfuss. Contributions by Kathy Halbreich, Bruce Jenkins, Peter Boswell. Hardcover, 10 x 13 in. / 272 pgs / 75 color / 175 b&w. Publication Date: 11/2/1999 List Price: US $59.95

  Four Corners Books Eduardo Paolozzi: The Jet Age Compendium Paolozzi at Ambit 1967-1980 From 1967 up until his recent death, the British sculptor and Pop art innovator Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) used the pages of the innovative British literary magazine Ambit as a space for some of his most experimental creations, collapsing the boundary between text and image with Pop abandon. His Ambit works—collages, visual essays and fragments from novels, pop culture images from newspapers, magazines and advertisements—tackle such subjects as the war in Vietnam, the acceleration of Japanese technology and the mirages of mass advertising. Housed in a funky Day-Glo plastic slip cover with silkscreened title, and printed on a variety of paper stocks, The Jet Age Compendium reprints these works in their entirety for the first time. A 28-page booklet by David Brittain inserted into the slip cover celebrates these works and discusses Paolozzi's relationship to writers associated with Ambit such as J.G. Ballard. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by David Brittain. Pbk, 6.5 x 9.5 in. / 108 pgs / 80 b&w. Publication Date: 3/31/2010 List Price: US $19.95

  Walther König, Köln Hans-Peter Feldmann: Another Book Culling from magazines, books and using his own roving camera, Hans-Peter Feldmann douses the culture, sifting and sorting pictures of shoes, chairs, unmade beds, bicycles, at once neutralizing and relating each to the other. Handsomely designed and composed, Another Book is a scrapbook of the zeitgeist. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited by Helena Tatay. Hbk, 9.25 x 11.75 in. / 264 pgs / 300 color. Publication Date: 8/31/2010 List Price: US $65.00

  Walther König, Köln/D.A.P. Ellsworth Kelly: Thumbing through the Folder A Dialogue on Art and Architecture with Hans Ulrich Obrist In this Dialogue on Art and Architecture, Ellsworth Kelly (born 1923) reminisces with Hans Ulrich Obrist about his early career, his teachers (Max Beckmann, Brancusi, Léger and Vantongerloo) and particularly on the relation of his work to architecture: architects are usually the first people who understand my work,” he tells Obrist here, while describing his many collaborations in this field. Throughout this beautiful publication runs a series of collaged and overpainted postcards by Kelly, dating from 1949 to 1984, which are reproduced here for the first time. These postcards, referred to throughout the dialogue, are unlike any of Kelly's paintings and sculptures, particularly in their use of body imagery; others are closer to familiar Kelly terrain, as projections of torn colored paper forms onto found landscapes and architecture. This artist's book makes a wonderfully unusual record of a warm encounter. . . . . [see book details]

  Hbk, 7.25 x 10 in., 80 pgs / 58 color. Publication Date: 2/28/2010 List Price: US $45.00

  Independent Curators International Jess: To and From the Printed Page Jess: To and From the Printed Page focuses on the artist simply known as "Jess" (1923-2004), and celebrates his lively and lifelong dialogue with poets, poetry and printed matter. Published to accompany the iCI touring exhibition, it features collages made for publication, the books and magazines in which they were reproduced, as well as many previously unreproduced paintings, drawings and assemblages. The book offers a fresh perspective on Jess's work by specifically addressing the interrelation between his art and the California literary culture of which he was a part. It also explores the intimacy of the collaborations and conversations in which he participated over five decades, and points to his effect on younger artists today--through his use of "pop" materials in collage and paint, his early homoerotic themes and his enjoyment of the book format as a compositional vehicle. . . . . [see book details]

  Foreword by Judith Olch Richards. Prologue by John Ashbery. Text by Ingrid Shaffner, Thomas Evans, Lisa Jarnot, Brandon Stosuy. Paperback, 8.5 x 10.5 in. / 112 pgs / 55 color / 35 b&w. Publication Date: 6/1/2007 List Price: US $29.95

  Marquand Books, Inc. Deborah Faye Lawrence: Dee-Dee Does Utopia Oversized and eclectic, Dee-Dee Does Utopia presents a series of meticulously crafted collages, made by the Seattle artist Deborah Lawrence, that explore popular concepts of the sublime. For the project, Lawrence combined images and texts to illuminate the results of a survey she conducted in November of 2004. Prompted by her own dismay at recent political events, the artist sent a mass e-mail posing the question, What does utopia look like to you?” This volume brings elements from the responses together with other historical and literary utopian models. The imagery links many ideas of idealized environments--from the natural to the fabricated--layered in surprising formations and integrated with text that evokes medieval illuminated manuscripts. In Beachtopia,” for example, Lawrence creates an extremely crowded seaside scene with hordes of people frolicking with beach balls near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty” and Hiroshige's Wave.” . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Peter Frank, Frances DeVuono, Susan Platt. Hardback, 10 x 14 in. / 36 pgs / 22 color. Publication Date: 5/1/2008 List Price: US $35.00

  Jandam Press Enia's World: The Art Of Eugenie Alter Propp Eugenie Alter Propp is a self-taught New York artist who has been working in collage and found-object assemblage for the past 25 years, but only recently has her art been seen by the public in shows in the United States and Europe. Born in Moscow in 1922, she and her father emigrated from a privileged life in Vienna to America following the Nazi takeover. She led a happy life in her adopted country and, in 1960 began to create art utilizing an original technique that blended collage and domestic materials--fabric, sequins, beads, ribbon and lace--with a woman's sensibility. Later she expanded her aesthetic with assemblage and environmental installations of found materials--from family heirlooms to Barbie dolls. This first book on the artist features 144 vivid color reproductions, and original essays by American Folk Art Museum curator Lee Kogan, and art critic Lori Waxman. . . . . [see book details]

  Edited and with an Introduction by Sharon Gold. Essays by Lee Kogan and Lori Waxman. Clothbound, 9 x 12 in. / 144 pgs / 144 color. Publication Date: 2/15/2005 List Price: US $35.00

  D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. Arturo Herrera: You Go First Cartoons meets Surrealism by way of Abstract Expressionism in Arturo Herrera's multi-layered body of work, an oeuvre which progresses through specific stages of abstraction. You Go First is devoted to the primary and most essential stage of Herrera's production: collage. In his subversive paper and gouache combinations, Herrera abstracts barely recognizable childhood imagery into sly, formal adventures in vanguard two-dimensionality. Memories of once-familiar illustrations are triggered; recalling them fills in the blanks created by Herrera's cutting and pasting. Other phases of his art-making process push further and further from the original found imagery, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, to create completely abstract-seeming wall works and MDF sculptures. You Go First features nearly 100 collages produced during 2002, sequenced and selected by the artist himself. . . . . [see book details]

  Essay by Friedrich Meschede Hardcover, 9 x 12 in. / 120 pgs / 100 color. Publication Date: 11/2/2004 List Price: US $40.00

  The Ice Plant Pat O'Neill: Another Kind of Record The Merger, The Indictment, and The Girl Pat O'Neill has been deeply involved in Los Angeles culture since the late 1960s. A founding father of the city's avant-garde film scene, an influential professor at CalArts and an optical effects pioneer, he is best known for experimental films like Let's Make a Sandwich (1982), Water and Power (1989), Trouble in the Image (1996) and The Decay of Fiction (2002)--playful but technically rigorous works that fit comfortably alongside those of Stan Brakhage and David Lynch. Whatever the medium, O'Neill's work often hinges on a "perceptual ambiguity" achieved through layers of image, sound and texture. This first artist's book, Another Kind of Record, compiles dozens of superb collage drawings, found texts and digital composite prints O'Neill has gathered and altered over the last several years. Intersecting his own elaborate pencil drawings with graphic and textual fragments of bygone print media (educational illustrations, advertising, reference charts, sheet music), this recent work occupies . . . . [see book details]

  Paperback, 8 x 10 in. / 96 pgs / 17 color / 40 b&w. Publication Date: 6/1/2008 List Price: US $30.00

  Charta Joyce Kozloff: China is Near For almost 40 years, Joyce Kozloff (born 1942) has lived near New York's Chinatown and fantasized traveling the Silk Route. For this project, Kozloff pasted Chinese tissue paper cutouts into a sketchbook, then copied old maps of the Silk Road onto these pages--some in Chinese, some in English. She then painted into these cartographic collages using the bright colors of contemporary Chinese pop culture, and went to Google Maps to search for "China," which appeared all over the globe: China, New York; China, Indiana; China, Tanzania; China, Mexico, so she downloaded and collaged over these too. Finally she photographed the piles of stuff on Mott Street, Manhattan; Main Street, Flushing, Queens; 8th Street, Sunset Park, Brooklyn; Webster Street, Oakland and Grant Avenue, San Francisco, California--all destinations on the twenty-first century global Silk Route. . . . . [see book details]

  Text by Barbara Pollack. Flexi, 6.5 x 9.5 in. / 96 pgs / 92 color. Publication Date: 10/31/2010 List Price: US $37.50