Around the year 1910, a patient at State Lunatic Asylum No. 3 in Nevada, Missouri, who referred to himself as The Electric Pencil, executed 280 drawings in ink, pencil, crayon and colored pencil. These beautiful drawings of animals, people and buildings were executed on both sides of 140 ledger pages, each bearing the name of the hospital in official type across the top, thus dramatizing the interface of the institutional and the creative. The Electric Pencil's drawings were sewn into a handmade album of fabric and leather, which shortly afterwards was lost--for a century. Now that album is presented publicly for the first time since its making, displaying for contemporary audiences the strange and poignant beauty of the drawings. His many portraits--head-and-shoulders or just heads--feature formal, sometimes dazed-looking men and women with elaborate hats or razor-parted hair who stare out of the page with wide, piercing eyes that suggest both a possible chilling regime of "mental health" treatment and the unblinking, unsettling gaze of those who haunt the margins of sanity and society. The handsomely designed hardbound format of The Drawings of the Electric Pencil features an art folio book block within that opens flat. An essay by Lyle Rexer places the work in the broader context of outsider art, in which The Electric Pencil emerges as an artist of singular brilliance.

The Drawings of the Electric Pencil

Arts & Photography

Rexer, Lyle

History & Criticism

Electric Pencil Press

The remarkable story of Jonathan Lerman, a young artist with autism, seized the attention of the art world at the 2002 Outsider Art Fair. Coverage by The New York Times, The Today Show, 48 Hours, and other international media has brought him into millions of homes across the country. This selection of fifty drawings, with a text by critic Lyle Rexer, presents the full range and astonishing growth of Jonathan's extraordinary talent. Diagnosed with autism and at first scarcely able to communicate, Jonathan began drawing at age ten. By age twelve, his drawings were exhibited in a solo exhibition at K. S. Art in New York. Working with the assurance of a Matisse, the speed of a Picasso, and the humor of a born cartoonist, Jonathan has created an unforgettable body of work. His drawings include portraits of actual figures as well as figures from his own imagination, all rendered with great acuity. These drawings overturn the stereotype of the so-called savant artist as an unchanging talent sprung to life fully formed. Instead, they detail the restless experimentation and rapid growth of an artistic sensibility. Jonathan Lerman: The Drawings of a Boy with Autism is a book not just for art lovers but for everyone who values the rich diversity of the creative imagination. In addition to an illuminating essay on Jonathan's work, the book also contains an afterword by Caren Lerman, Jonathan's mother, describing the sudden appearance of his talent and the challenges and satisfactions of raising a gifted child with autism. 50 b/w illustrations.

Jonathan Lerman: The Drawings of a Boy with Autism

Lerman, Jonathan

George Braziller, Inc.

A visual introduction to the culture and evaluation process of outsider art showcases numerous works, including several previously unpublished pieces by such artists as Henry Darger, William Hawkins, and Adolf Wölfi, in a volume complemented by discussions on the rising influence of outsider art and the role of mental illness in its creation. Original. 12,500 first printing.

How to Look at Outsider Art

Harry N. Abrams

First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Fine cloth, with dust jacket. Edited by James Christen Steward. Essays by Lyle Rexer, James Christen Steward and Serge Tisseron. Includes a biography, exhibition history and bibliography. 204 pp. with 168 duotone plates and 36 four-color plates. 11 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches.

In Human Touch

Tisseron, Serge

Photography & Video

Nazraeli Pr

From the beginning, abstraction has been intrinsic to photography, and its persistent popularity reveals much about the medium. The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography is the first book in English to document this phenomenon and to put it into historical context, while also examining the diverse approaches thriving within contemporary photography. Author Lyle Rexer examines abstraction at pivotal moments, starting with the inception of photography, when many of the pioneers believed the camera might reveal other aspects of reality. The Edge of Vision traces subsequent explorations--from the Photo Secessionists, who emphasized process and emotional expression over observed reality, to Modernist and Surrealist experiments. In the decades to follow, in particular from the 1940s through the 1980s, a multitude of photographers--Edward Weston, Aaron Siskind and Barbara Kasten among them--took up abstraction from a variety of positions. Finally, Rexer explores

The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography

Aperture

The Critical Eye provides a comprehensive approach to the critical understanding of photography through an in-depth discussion of fifteen photographs and their contexts—historical, generic, biographical, and aesthetic. Lyle Rexer argues that by concentrating on just a few carefully chosen works it is possible to understand the history, development, and contemporary situation of photography. Looking at images by photographers such as Roland Fischer, Myoung Ho Lee, Zanele Muholi, and Ernest Cole, The Critical Eye addresses a wide range of issues involved in photography, from authorial self-consciousness to the role of the audience, and with every chapter it seeks to link the history of photography to current practice.

The Critical Eye: Fifteen Pictures to Understand Photography

Intellect Ltd

My photographs are composites of multiple-image fragments that I digitally manipulate and combine, including both images that I have photographed myself and found images. By combining different elements, my objective is to create artificial scenarios that appear vaguely familiar and produce numerous associations. I want to evoke a sense of familiarity that will seduce the viewer into allowing his or her own experience, imagination, and understanding of existing popular imagery to become tools for interpreting my work. Simen Johan The power and pathos of Johan's images springs from his intuitions about the texture of childhood experience and from his method. He works in collage, the technique at the heart of Surrealism. Collage frees him to walk the world with his camera and receive its impossible permissions. Something ordinary will strike him -- a driveway, an abandoned house by the side of the road, a woman's cheek - and he will shoot it, or sample it digitally if it comes from another source, and file it in his electronic unconscious (the computer). Children, dolls, and the peculiar constructions at the heart of his photographs (Dolls stuffed with meat and bird corpses, among others) Johan usually photographs in his studio. How he assembles these elements into digital tableaus is the mystery, and the process of adding, subtracting and recombining can be lengthy. I don't finish quickly. he has remarked. Discards are strewn along his digital highway. Lyle Rexer

Room to Play

Johan, Simen

Individual Artists

Twin Palms Pub

The Book Of Crow

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

The fifth volume in the Helsinki School series, this publication looks back at the development of this group of photographers over the past 20 years. In a collection of essays, international curators, critics and museum directors describe their encounters with the Helsinki School, from the first exhibitions in the late 1990s to the work of the youngest generation. A discussion between Timothy Persons and Alistair Hicks concludes these contributions. The texts are accompanied by installation shots of exhibitions, archival material and recent work by the artists. Not only a history, the book also looks toward the future of the Helsinki School. This volume includes work by Elina Brotherus, Ilkka Halso, Tiina Itkonen, Sandra Kantanen, Timo Kelaranta, Ola Kolehmainen, Tanja Koljonen, Milja Laurila, Anni Leppälä, Janne Lehtinen, Niko Luoma, Susanna Majuri, Nelli Palomäki and Jorma Puranen.

The Helsinki School: From the Past to the Future

Hicks, Alistair

Persons, Timothy

Tannert, Christoph

Hatje Cantz

If you were to stand in one spot at an iconic location for 30 hours and simply observe, never closing your eyes, you still wouldn’t be able to take in all the detail and emotion found in a Stephen Wilkes panoramic photograph. Not only does Wilkes shoot over 1,500 exposures from a fixed angle, he also distills this visual information afterward in his studio, painstakingly composing selected frames into a single image.Day to Night presents 60 epic panoramas created between 2009 and 2018, shot everywhere from Africa’s Serengeti to the Champs-Élysées in Paris, from the Grand Canyon to Coney Island, from Trafalgar Square to Red Square. Each composition is a labor of love as well as patience. Wilkes waited more than two years to gain permission to photograph Pope Francis celebrating Easter mass in the Vatican, ultimately producing a vivid tableau in which the pontiff appears 10 times.
The book also features extraordinary details―works of art in their own right that highlight the stories contained within each image. A bride makes her way through Central Park; in Tanzania, zebras gather around a near-invisible watering hole during a drought; in Rio de Janeiro, surfers come and go while a man holds a sign reading “No more than two questions per customer.” “It is exactly these small stories, these details, that draw people into the photographs,” says Wilkes. Once discovered, these mini narratives lend each composition a personal, candid feel.
This collection takes us on a seamless trip from dawn to dark across the world’s most iconic locations, unveiling the unique ebb and flow of man-made and natural landmarks like never before.Also available in two Art Editions of 100 copies respectively, each with a print numbered and signed by the photographer.

Stephen Wilkes: Day to Night

Taschen America, LLC

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Books by Rexer, Lyle