This volume presents the first comprehensive survey of Paul McCarthy's large-scale inflatable sculptures. McCarthy, born in 1945 in Salt Lake City and based in the Los Angeles area, where he taught at UCLA for many years, first came to public notice in the 1970s with his shockingly scatological and strangely hypnotic performances and videos; he's now a veteran of solo exhibits at Tate Modern and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many other world-class institutions of art. Since the mid-1980s, he has been creating increasingly complex and influential installations and videos, as well as a broad portfolio of sculptures and large-scale, outdoor blow-up figures. This volume--which contains 15 giant posters housed in a shopping bag, 12 notebooks and a text booklet--illustrates every McCarthy inflatable to date, including important pieces such as "Daddies Ketchup Bottle" (2003) and a significant number of newly commissioned works.

Paul McCarthy: Inflatables

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Steidl & Partners

The cover of A Kind of You features a deadpan image of artist Roni Horn holding a black-and-white image of French Feminist theorist H l ne Cixous over her own face. Cixous contributes an essay to this overview of Horn's photo series' from the last seven years--You are the Weather (1995), This is Me, This is You (2000), Cabinet Of (2001), Image (2005) and Weather Reports You (2007). Each series asks fundamental questions about identity, as Cixous' essay explores in her singular way: "Roni Horn turns and returns in every way the question that haunts her: 'Who are you, Face, you who I am, whom I follow, you who look at me without seeing me, you whom I see without knowing whom, you in whom I look at myself, you who would not be without me, you whom I envelope, you who seduce me and into whom I do not enter..."

Roni Horn: A Kind of You

CIXOUS, Hélène

History & Criticism

From his pioneering 1960s Happenings and Pop art assemblages to his Expressionistic works from the 1970s and his current fascination with the story of Pinocchio, Jim Dine manages to maintain relevance in the art world despite, or perhaps because of, the constant changes he has made in his work during the last 40 years. Drawing and printmaking have had a central place in Dine's oeuvre since the 70s, when he began collaborating in earnest with master printers throughout the U.S. and Europe. This pocket-sized, affordable publication is a collection of 47 prints, two illustrated books and a recently published portfolio, all of which feature Dine's signature iconography: hearts, robes, self-portraits, flowers and birds. Of particular interest are the Pinocchio prints, as Dine has spent the last several years engaged in a visual translation of the mythology and archetypal imagery in Carlo Collodi's classic tale. As Dine states: "His poor burned feet, his misguided judgment, his vanity about his large nose, his temporary donkey ears all add up to the real sum of his parts. In the end, it is his great heart that holds me. I have carried him on my back like a landscape since I was six years old."

Jim Dine: Selected Prints 1996-2006

KELDER, Diane

Reference

"I started out as a fashion photographer. One cannot say that I was successful but there was enough work to keep me busy. I collaborated with Harper's Bazaar and other magazines. I was constantly aware that those who hired me would have preferred to work with a star such as Avedon. But it didn't matter. I had work and I made a living. At the same time, I took my own photographs. Strangely enough, I knew exactly what I wanted and what I liked." Since the 1940s, Saul Leiter, an inveterate walker, has trawled the streets of New York, capturing its colors and spirit. His liking for disarray, solitude and elusiveness make him a unique artist, quite unconcerned about joining the throng. "I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learned to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything." This volume contains several previously unpublished color pictures alongside Leiter's early work in black-and-white. Co-published with Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.

Saul Leiter

The photography of F.C. Gundlach defines the look of post-war fashion in Germany. Using strong contrast effects, he was able to create a style that unified model, clothing and backdrop into a single composite, merging, for example, in one famous series, the bold stripes of an Op Art jacket with the pyramids at Giza beyond, or clustering a model in boa feathers within a phalanx of police officers. During the four decades following the end of the Second World War, Gundlach worked for high-circulation magazines in Germany such as Film und Frau, Constanze, Annabelle, Stern and Quick. In 1963 he signed an exclusive contract with the magazine Brigitte, and from this point on he began to embody the image of 60s couture photography in Germany, with his frequent borrowings from Op and Pop art idioms. Born in 1926, Gundlach was also the founder of the photographic supplies company PPS and the PPS Galerie, one of the first photo galleries in Germany, and has done much influential work as a lecturer and exhibition curator. This monograph, the first in English to offer an extensive consideration of Gundlach’s oeuvre, and co-designed by Gundlach himself, establishes his significance as a trailblazer in the industry.

F.C. Gundlach: Photographic Work

Located in Essen, Germany, and one of today's leading international art museums, the Museum Folkwang's renowned photography collection was established in 1979 with nearly 3,000 works by Otto Steinert. Steinert is well known for his enigmatic images, which emphasize light and shadow and are quite prescient in their use of now-common conventions like blurring and multiple exposures. He was the founder of the Fotoform movement of postwar German photographers, who actively reinvigorated the photo techniques of the Bauhaus. The collection has since been expanded with an additional 6,000 images, including work by Helmar Lerski, Germaine Krull and Peter Keetman. A Picture Book presents a survey of the Folkwang collection, organized into eight chapters structured around the ideas of Theme, Period, Method, Medium and Materials. Essayists Reinhard Braun, Wolfgang Brückle, Clément Chéroux, Florian Ebner, Hans-Jürgen Lechtreck, Jürgen Müller, Christopher Phillips and Klaus Pollmeier contextualize the collection and expand upon the ideas raised by the thematic chapters. Additionally, a thorough history of this unique photography collection is explored by Editor and Director of the museum's Department of Photography, Ute Eskildsen.

A Picture Book: The Photography Collection in Museum Folkwang

Brückle, Wolfgang

Chéroux, Clément

Eskildsen, Ute

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Essential for ephemera aficionados, fans of Surrealism and proto-Surrealism and for anyone prone to spending more time in a museum's shop than in its galleries, The Stamp of Fantasy vindicates the postcard as a medium with a history as rich as the mediums it helped to foster, such as photomontage and mail art. In presenting the most fantastical postcard images from the early twentieth century, this book may be the opposite and complement to Martin Parr's famous Boring Postcards series, stuffed as it is with disembodied heads, hybrid humans, erotic imagery and drawn modification. If the great French filmmaker Georges Méliès had produced postcards (instead of films on a postcard scale), they might resemble these miniature works by diverse hands, selected from the esteemed collections of Peter Weiss and Gérard Lévy for the touring exhibition of the same name. The book tracks the overlap between so-called "fantasy" postcards and the avant-garde art of the 1920s and 1930s, principally Dadaism and Surrealism. Paul Eluard, André Breton and Salvador Dalí were enthusiastic collectors of fantasy postcards and Hannah Höch, Herbert Bayer, Man Ray and many others used them as material in their work. Marcel Duchamp's famed 1919 détournement of a "Mona Lisa" postcard, "L.H.O.O.Q," may be one of this book's guiding precedents, at least for drawing attention to the postcard per se--but plenty of anonymous artists contribute equally irreverent and inventive tweakings, as well as more hallucinatory amendments. The Stamp of Fantasy is a wonderful celebration of the small gesture, amateur inventiveness, folk Surrealism and art's most democratic form of reproduction.

The Stamp of Fantasy: The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards

Stahel, Urs

Snare drum backbeat plus electric guitar: the simple formula that launched the rock star, and contemporary teen culture along with it. Today, rock 'n' roll seems to define postwar American culture, especially in its impact abroad. Though its inception is often imagined as sudden and seismic, it was, of course, a gradual and complex transition from boogie-woogie to the stardom of Elvis Presley and Bill Haley. A thorough survey of rock 'n' roll's bloodline would even reach back as far as 1939, a time when the electric guitar's role was mostly played by piano or saxophone. Rock 'n' Roll 39-59 does this, with the assistance of some of the genre's finest photographers. Bruce Davidson, Wayne Miller, Robert W. Kelley, Esther Bubley, Eve Arnold and Ernest C. Withers are all here, amid a wealth of visual props, including priceless period posters, records, rare souvenirs, photographs and film stills, and indices of the movement's key venues, events, artists, producers and people. This book describes a lively mess of genres, from boogie-woogie to blues, gospel, big band jazz, country and, most of all, rhythm and blues--interbreeding against a backdrop of colossal social change, and culminating in the rock 'n' roll explosion of the mid-1950s.

Rock 'n' Roll 39-59

Halberstam, David

Guralnick, Peter

MARCUS, Greil

Gillett, Charlie

Music

In 1950s California, and especially in Los Angeles, there existed few venues for contemporary art. To a whole generation of California artists, this presented a freedom, since the absence of a context for their work meant that they could coin their own, and in uncommonly interesting ways. The careers of Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz all begin with this absence: Ruscha turned to books as a means of dissemination, Berman pioneered mail art through his magazine Semina and in March 1957, Ed Kienholz, in collaboration with curator Walter Hopps, co-founded one of California's greatest historical galleries, Ferus. Within months of opening, Ferus, which is Latin for "wild," gained notoriety when the Hollywood vice squad raided Berman's first--and, in his lifetime, last--solo exhibition, following a complaint about "lewd material." Shows by Kienholz and Jay DeFeo followed, but 1962 was Ferus' annus mirabilis, with solo shows by Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell, and the first solo shows of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol on the west coast. The following year, Ferus also hosted Ed Ruscha's first solo exhibition. After Kienholz and Hopps parted ways--Hopps went on to mount the first American Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Musuem--the reins were handed to Irving Blum, who got Ferus out of the red and ran the gallery until its closure in 1966. A Place to Begin is an illustrated oral history of this heroic enterprise. With 62 new interviews with Ferus artists and more than 300 photographs (most previously unpublished), it retrieves a lost chapter of twentieth-century American art. Edited by Kristine McKenna, noted expert and co-editor of the critically acclaimed Semina Culture.

The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin

McKenna, Kristine

German photographer Otto Steinert did not see the people of Paris, he saw its structures, rhythms and its subtle plays of light and shadow. The building facades lining Steinert's avenues tell the story of Paris during that era, but his blurred figures and vehicles, moving against such stationery backdrops, look strange and fleetingly intangible. In this volume, a series of multiple exposures and luminograms, which were created at landmarks like the Place de la Concorde, reveal Steinert's prescience and his embrace--as the founder of the postwar Fotoform movement--of the tenets of Bauhaus photography. This important volume features numerous previously unpublished photographs taken by Steinert in Paris between 1948 and 1956. Containing an essays by photographer and writer Florian Ebner, it reveals key developments in Steinert's unique and influential language.

Otto Steinert: Parisian Shapes

Ebner, Florian

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