| | PUBLISHER Ugly Duckling PresseBOOK FORMAT Boxed, special edition, 8.5 x 11.5 in. / 60 pgs / 2 color / 40 bw / 2 posters. PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 11/21/2017 Out of stock indefinitely DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 65 PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781937027889 SDNR40 List Price: $70.00 CAD $92.50 GBP £62.00 AVAILABILITY Not available | TERRITORY WORLD | | THE FALL 2024 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG | Preview our FALL 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
|
|   |   | UGLY DUCKLING PRESSEThe Blind ManNew York Dada, 1917Edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri Pierre-Roché, Beatrice Wood. Introduction by Sophie Seita. Translations by Elizabeth Zuba.
The Blind Man was a key magazine of the early 20th century, the product of a rich network of proto-Dada, modernist and other avant-garde New York salons and publications that introduced audiences to Dada in the US.Produced by Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood and Henri-Pierre Roché, only two issues of the Blind Man ever appeared, but these included a who’s who of the New York and Paris avant-gardes: Mina Loy, Walter Conrad Arensberg, Francis Picabia, Gabrielle Buffet, Allen Norton, Clara Tice, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Charles Duncan, Erik Satie, Carl Van Vechten and Louise Norton all appeared in its pages. Allegedly, the fate of the Blind Man was decided in a chess game between Roché and Picabia (who was about to put out his own Dada publication, 391). And the magazine went out with a bang—its final issue has gone down in art history for featuring Stieglitz’s iconic photograph of Duchamp’s “Fountain” and a defense of that work, seen now as perhaps the most important artwork of the 20th century. The Blind Man: New York Dada, 1917 brings back the magazine in a facsimile reprint, along with reproductions of the Ridgefield Gazook and the poster for the Blind Man’s Ball designed by Beatrice Wood, all packaged together in a handsome boxed set.
Featured image is reproduced from 'The Blind Man.'PRAISE AND REVIEWSThe New York Times Jason Farago …an absolute must for fellow Duchamp geeks Hyperallergic Joseph Neshvatal A Trove of Dadaist Fun Is Reissued. Hyperallergic Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle Opulently inked on top-shelf stock, as an object it is the veritable Grail of art-cult fetishists. Gazette, galoot, gadzooks! It’s a thing of beauty. (Un)covering art from nude to Bride, behold the hand of glory. |
| | STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely. | |
| | FROM THE BOOKExcerpt from ‘The Blind Man Sees the Fountain: An Introduction’
by Sophie Seita
History, Editorial Practice, Networks
In April 1917, the short-lived little magazine The Blind Man opened its first issue with a statement of defiance—“The Blind Man celebrates to-day the birth of the Independence of Art in America”—and a catalogue of promises:
XI.
The Blind Man’s procedure shall be that of referendum.
He will publish the questions and answers sent to him.
He will print what the artists and the public have to say.
He is very keen to receive suggestions and criticisms.
So, don’t spare him.
These promises drew their inspiration from the conviction that “Russia needed a political revolution. America needs an artistic one.” With such avant-garde fanfare, the editors Beatrice Wood (an actress, artist, writer, and later ceramicist), Marcel Duchamp, and Henri-Pierre Roché (a journalist, writer, art collector and dealer from Paris) launched The Blind Man initially to support the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, established by Katherine Dreier, Duchamp, Man Ray, Walter Arensberg, Joseph Stella, and others in New York in 1916. Seeking greater curatorial democracy than the 1913 Armory Show, the new society sponsored art under the tag line “No Jury, No Prizes.” Inspired by the upcoming exhibition and its motto, Duchamp, Roché, and Wood adopted a similarly jury-free, democratic editorial policy (modeled on a “referendum”) for their magazine.
Like many little magazines, The Blind Man was the product of a friendship and a small, local community. Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915, Roché arrived in November 1916 and shortly thereafter met Duchamp who subsequently brought him along to the Arensberg’s salon. Wood met Duchamp through the composer Edgar Varèse in September 1916 and was introduced to Roché by her friend, the bohemian journalist, Alissa Frank. The wider Blind Man circle included artists and writers now-associated with Modernism, Dada, Cubism, Simultaneism, and the Photo Secession, and the magazine’s two issues published the editors, Mina Loy, Walter Conrad Arensberg, Francis Picabia, Gabrielle Buffet, Allen Norton, Clara Tice, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Charles Duncan, Alfred Frueh, Robert Carlton Brown, Louise Norton, Frank Crowninshield, and Frances Simpson Stevens. But crucially, the magazine emerged from a network of other little magazines published in the 1910s and early 1920s, all of which had overlapping contributors, in particular those with a proto-Dada bent: 291 (1915-1916), The Little Review (1914-1929), TNT (March 1919), The Ridgefield Gazook (March 31, 1915), New York Dada (April 1921), 391 (1917-1924), and several others. To place The Blind Man within its publishing networks acknowledges that texts and artworks are not isolated objects but always appear within a social and material context. Magazines, which are generically serial and heterogeneous forms with multiple contributors of usually multiple affiliations and changing practices, allow us to recover and celebrate the dialogues taking place between contributions, between publications, and beyond the page.
In its opening editorial statement, the personified “Blind Man” fashioned itself as precisely such a dialogic format, as “the link between the pictures and the public—and even between the painters themselves,” since it “realize[d] the need of the public and the artists educating each other.” Insisting on the magazine’s communal and collaborative endeavor, this educative and social “link” necessitated speaking the same language. For that, the public had to learn to appreciate new art “like learning a new language,” a new conceptual vocabulary and a cultural openness to otherness. But the public had “spectacles on wholesome eyes,” as Mina Loy lamented in ‘In . . . Formation’, one of her two polemical pieces in The Blind Man. Drawn to “information” rather than new art and writing which were still in the process of ‘formation’, the public, for Loy, saw only ‘something that has been seen before’, instead of ‘seeing IT for the first time’, as artists do. If the public did not practice “pure uneducated seeing”—free from traditional frameworks that were “blind” to new art—artist and public would never meet, Loy concluded caustically. Indeed, the public’s blindness was further satirized in Alfred Frueh’s cover which portrays a guide dog leading a blind man past a painted and framed nude who is thumbing her nose at the blissfully unaware man.
| FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/3/2018Friday, January 12, from 6-8 PM, Printed Matter hosts the launch event for UDP’s facsimile edition of The Blind Man, edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roche, and Beatrice Wood in 1917. Scholar and poet Sophie Seita, editor of the facsimile, will be joined by Kim Rosenfeld and Marjorie Welish for a night of performances and readings from and inspired by New York Dada, followed by a conversation moderated by co-editor Harris Bauer. Copies of The Blind Man facsimile edition, named one of the Best Art Books of 2017 by the New York Times, will be available for purchase at the event. continue to blog | | | Marsilio ArteISBN: 9791254631386 USD $35.00 | CAD $50 UK £ 30Pub Date: 6/4/2024 Active | Out of stock
|
| | Walther König, KölnISBN: 9783753303284 USD $95.00 | CAD $137Pub Date: 3/25/2025 Forthcoming
|
| | Hatje CantzISBN: 9783775747295 USD $35.00 | CAD $49Pub Date: 12/15/2020 Active | Out of stock
|
| | Verlag für moderne KunstISBN: 9783903320246 USD $25.00 | CAD $35Pub Date: 9/15/2020 Active | In stock
|
| | Hauser & Wirth PublishersISBN: 9783906915517 USD $125.00 | CAD $172Pub Date: 12/14/2021 Active | In stock
|
| | Hatje CantzISBN: 9783775743723 USD $29.95 | CAD $39.95Pub Date: 2/27/2018 Active | Out of stock
|
| | Galerie Thaddaeus RopacISBN: 9782910055745 USD $45.00 | CAD $60Pub Date: 8/22/2017 Active | Out of stock
|
| | Walther König, KölnISBN: 9783863355180 USD $240.00 | CAD $335Pub Date: 3/22/2016 Active | Out of stock
|
| | Moderne Kunst NürnbergISBN: 9783869845005 USD $25.00 | CAD $34.5Pub Date: 11/30/2014 Active | In stock
|
| | Moderne Kunst NürnbergISBN: 9783869844657 USD $25.00 | CAD $34.5Pub Date: 4/30/2014 Active | Out of stock
|
| | Walther König, KölnISBN: 9783863353322 USD $29.95 | CAD $39.95Pub Date: 2/28/2014 Active | In stock
|
| | Badlands UnlimitedISBN: 9781936440399 USD $16.00 | CAD $23Pub Date: 2/28/2013 Active | In stock
|
| | Hatje CantzISBN: 9783775734141 USD $40.00 | CAD $54Pub Date: 4/30/2013 Active | Out of stock
|
| | Moderne Kunst NürnbergISBN: 9783869843285 USD $25.00 | CAD $34.5Pub Date: 4/30/2013 Active | Out of stock
|
| | JRP|RingierISBN: 9783037641569 USD $39.95 | CAD $53.95 UK £ 24Pub Date: 1/31/2011 Active | In stock
|
| | Walther König, KölnISBN: 9783865606051 USD $49.95 | CAD $67.5Pub Date: 2/28/2010 Active | Out of stock
|
|
|
| |