| RECENT POSTS DATE 1/14/2025 DATE 1/2/2025 DATE 12/31/2024 DATE 12/26/2024 DATE 12/24/2024 DATE 12/18/2024 DATE 12/17/2024 DATE 12/14/2024 DATE 12/12/2024 DATE 12/12/2024 DATE 12/8/2024 DATE 12/8/2024 DATE 12/7/2024
| | | RECENT POSTS CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/14/2025Tuesday, January 14–Monday, January 20, please join Artbook | D.A.P. in the Aesthetic Movement Showroom at the Atlanta Gift Market to view a curated selection of new books on art and culture for Winter and Spring 2025!
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/2/2025 In Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, published to accompany the PST exhibition on view now at Palm Springs Museum of Art, Michael Duncan notes that “art is ultimately not science but something that can use science to create the indefinable, ineffable, and other.” He cites Albert Einstein’s 1930 essay, The World As I See It. “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was this experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity: in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.” Pictured here, a still from John and James Whitney’s 16mm film Five Film Exercise #4 (1943–45).
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/31/2024 At the dawn of the new year, we find ourselves looking back at Robert Delaunay’s luminous 1930 painting Circular Forms, reproduced from Harmony and Dissonance, published by Guggenheim Museum to accompany its current sleeper blockbuster on the Orphist movement in Paris, 1910–1930. Championed by the great French poet Guillaume Apollinaire for its movement away from Cubism towards an abstraction that he perceived as “physically and spiritually unlimited,” Orphism radiates positivity to us even now, through its “transcendent qualities of light and color, and its expression of inner authenticity, dynamism, harmony and simultaneity,” in the words of essayist and Guggenheim curator Tracey Bashkoff.
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/26/2024 Detail is from Jacques-Henri Lartigue: The Proof of Color. A lovely hardcover with tipped-on cover image, this new release from Atelier EXB collects previously unpublished double-view autochromes by the early-twentieth-century French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue—beloved for his sporty portraits of friends and family enjoying moments of leisure at the beach, in the country and on the slopes of the French Alps. Much as we hate to imagine wearing them ourselves, how we love to see women skiing in long skirts! This particular photograph includes Lartigue himself, second from right in his iconic “tango” orange sweater, photographed with his own camera by Victor Folletête in Chamonix, January 21, 1914.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/24/2024Painted Santas as bowling pins. A collaged Santa whose beard turns into a megaphone for Christmas carolers. A little boy holding balloons spelling “JOY.” A lovely red cabin with smoke rising out of its chimney. A Santa whose midsection is shown behind an X-ray machine, cute red heart and all. These are some of the 24 cards in this cute boxed set from Letterform Archive Books. Some painted, some collaged, some printed with die-cuts and folds, these cards were originally made by hand and sent to friends by one Paul Rand, known in graphic design circles as the wizard behind such iconic logos as IBM, UPS and ABC, to name just a few.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/18/2024Wednesday, December 18 at 7 PM, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center will host David Silver, co-curator of 'The Farm at Black Mountain College,' for a gallery walk-and-talk alongside a book launch / signing event. If you're in North Carolina, please join for an in-depth look at the Farm story and a celebration of the exhibition. This event is free and open to all.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/17/2024It would be very hard to convey just how excited we are to announce Inventory Press’s new, first-ever English translation / facsimile edition of Bruno Munari’s beloved 1977 treatise on creativity, Fantasy. “A study on fantasy will seem to many an impossible task,” Munari writes. “For some, fantasy is caprice, oddity, extravagance. For others it is fiction, that which is false, an illusion, an imagining, a superstition. For some peasants a fantasia is a folk dance; for others a hallucination, a fixation, a whim. It can be understood as a reverie, a phantasmagoria, an inspiration, or a form of transport. For the military, it is an occasional exercise to be performed when the usual rigorous rulebook isn’t in force. Fantasy is also irregularity, aimless tinkering. And if that weren’t already enough, isn’t invention also fantasy? And isn’t fantasy also invention?” Featured photograph is from the chapter on stimuli for creativity. Other illustrations represent Surrealist artworks, a ship in a bottle, an exceptional bonsai tree and the imprint of an oak leaf, to name just a few.
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/14/2024 “Western Dream” (1957) is from Helen Frankenthaler: Painting without Rules—published to accompany the critically acclaimed retrospective on view now at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Featuring 150 color reproductions of artworks, ephemera, portraits and documentary photographs, this sweeping overview examines Frankenthaler’s work and life in context of her artistic influences and friendships—including Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Anne Truitt. “Friendship is pivotal to this project,” Douglas Dreishpoon writes. “It is another way to see and contextualize Frankenthaler’s own innovations. The painter chose her inner circle carefully, and those fortunate enough to be included were nurtured, feted, and sustained. As friends they visited one another’s studios, attended openings, celebrated successes, and kept up with life events. When tragedy struck, they came together to commiserate. Before fax machines, computers and email, Frankenthaler and her friends wrote to each other, sharing life’s ups and downs through chatty, at times serious, letters, postcards and notes.” These documents add depth to our understanding of Frankenthaler as an artist and a highly connected human being.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/12/2024Ever since the wild and wooly, experimental art and design program at Black Mountain College shuttered its doors in 1957, its legend has continued to grow. Nearly all of the books and exhibitions about it have focused on its “jaw-dropping band of famous and soon-to-be-famous artists, writers, thinkers and visionaries from the US, Europe and beyond, a veritable who’s who of mid-20th-century Western art and ideas.” In his enlightening new book from Atelier Éditions and Black Mountain College Museum, author David Silver proposes a welcome new take, examining the school through its utopian, self-made, and ultimately not-self-sustaining agriculture program. “The farm was of vital importance to the college,” Silver writes, “not only because it provided necessary food from organic farming, but because it served as a testing ground for self-sufficiency, communal living and collaboration—the most precious and precarious ingredient at the college. In these pages, the spotlight is on the extraordinary contributions of these folk, many of whose stories have seldom, if ever, been explored.” Spreads are from The Farm at Black Mountain.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/12/2024Thursday, December 12, from 6:30–8:30 PM, please join us to celebrate the publication of 'More Than the Eyes: Art, Food and the Senses' by Ellen Mara De Wachter, co-published by Atelier Éditions and D.A.P, at Donlon Books in Hackney, London.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/8/2024Sunday, December 8, from 4–6 PM, please join us at super-special Atlantic Avenue home goods store The Primary Essentials for a book signing with Brooklyn painter JJ Manford, whose new monograph is out now from Derek Eller Gallery / Harper's.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/8/2024Spreads from Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s seminal 1977 conceptual photography book, Evidence—out now from D.A.P. in a new, unjacketed hardcover edition printed from gorgeous new scans, many of which are from the original negatives. Collecting 59 perplexingly deadpan black and white documentary photographs from a variety of government agencies, educational institutions and corporations, the original book was an uncaptioned, effortlessly fascinating cypher. Here, it returns to its most original form. “One major and especially pertinent figure for them, but for Mandel in particular, was Chris Burden,” Sandra S. Phillips writes. “Although probably not obvious, since its intent is poetic rather than specifically political, Evidence has a consistent theme and a kind of narrative. The work in the book is a sort of funny referendum on the new technology, burgeoning close by in the incipient Silicon Valley. Sensitive to the desensitizing implications of a technology gone out of control, Sultan and particularly Mandel found Burden’s work especially relevant. Burden was, for the most part, a performance artist, but his pieces emphasized the realness of the artist, the importance of the gesture of the individual, and the role and value of the creative, humane, and whimsical personality, and they illustrate how slight but heroic the mere body can be.”
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/7/2024 “Texas Desert Interior with Noguchi Lantern” (2023) is from JJ Manford’s eponymous new (and first) monograph—a featured title at our December pop-up at dapper Brooklyn home emporium The Primary Essentials. Essayist Gilles Heno-Coe notes the way that Manford’s enigmatic interior tableaux “vibrate with animate intensity despite the characteristic absence of life, save for an occasional potted plant or loafing tabby cat.” The work inhabits a liminal space, “somewhere between invention and appropriation, painting and drawing, experimentation and design, inside and outside. … These are not paintings about life, per se, but they demonstrate that longing of wanting to give life to something. But that has long been the domain of artists—to bring inanimate matter to life. Manford succeeds in that regard, if only to remind us that sometimes even the most banal parts of life can still be both wonderful and strange.” Please join us for a book signing with Manford Sunday afternoon!
 LACY SOTO | DATE 12/7/2024Saturday, December 7 at 3 PM, Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents a book signing event celebrating 'Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s' with photographer Chloe Sherman in conversation with writer and activist Michelle Tea. Book signing to follow.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/5/2024Thursday, December 5, from 6–8 PM, please join us to celebrate the opening of our December pop-up with Brooklyn home goods store of great intelligence and beauty, The Primary Essentials! Throughout the month, TPE will present a curated selection of more than 50 titles, with a focus on the study. Customers can receive complimentary book plates and in-person calligraphy for extra special holiday gifting. PLUS: on Sunday, December 8, painter JJ Manford will sign his new monograph from Derek Eller / Harper’s.
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/5/2024 How we love The Sleepers, Sophie Calle’s newest artist’s book with Siglio. So beautifully made, and so mysterious. Swiss-bound with a puffy, pillowy cloth cover, bright silver edges and exquisitely printed endpapers and interiors, this is a book that all Calle lovers will want for their libraries forever. Calle’s front cover copy explains the project perfectly: “I asked people to give me eight hours of their sleep. To come and sleep in my bed. For eight days, my room was to be a constantly occupied space. Twenty-seven people agreed. The occupation of the bed began on Sunday, April 1, 1979 at 5 p.m. and ended on Monday, April 9 at 10 a.m. Sleepers came and went. Some crossed paths. Everyone was offered breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Clean bedding was provided. To establish a neutral relationship, I asked a few questions. I took photographs every hour. I watched my guests sleep.” Featured here, a detail from “first and second sleepers, Gloria K. and Anne B.”
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/3/2024 Taken by a roving FSA documentarian, this 1936 photograph captures the daughter of a farmer resettled to Kearney Farmsteads, Nebraska, during the Depression. On Thanksgiving day, the image of this young woman tending her flock simply made us smile, and reminded us to savor the small moments. It's reproduced from Denim: The Fabric That Built America, 1935–1944, the new release from our archive-obsessive friends at Reel Art Press.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/2/2024Featured spreads are from Sergio Leone by Himself, Sir Christopher Frayling’s highly anticipated compilation of writings and interviews from the influential Italian director of “spaghetti Westerns” like A Fistful of Dollars and Once Upon a Time in the West, among many others. “He was all cinema,” Frayling writes. “He once said ‘I was born in a cinema, almost. Both my parents worked there. My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice versa.’ The passionate experience of movie-going, the ideas and sensations it unleashed in him, informed all his work in film. And he had the photographic memory of a deep cinephiliac—not so much for the dialogue, but for the visuals. One critic even suggested that Sergio Leone should write in his passport ‘Nationality: Cinema.’ His films refreshed film language with elements gleaned from various cultures—among them Italian, Spanish, American and Japanese—not recognizing the borderlines of geography and time—and the result entered the global pop culture zeitgeist in unmistakable ways, competing on level terms in that arena with the instantly recognizable work of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. Modern genre cinema—which is to say much of mainstream cinema—and the modern action hero, begin here.”
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/28/2024As Americans begin their annual migration across the country to feast with families, friends and foes, what better inspiration than Neal Slavin’s classic 1976 photobook, When Two or More Are Gathered Together—out now in a new, expanded edition from Damiani. On June 5, 1973, Slavin initated the project with a Memo-to-self. His plan: to document stereotypes and clichés; to understand the relationship of the one to the many; to study peer groups, vanity, frailty and ego. “Possible outcome: When a group presents itself fully to the camera, revealing the totems and markings that make it unique and individual, then that group will simultaneously reveal the innate sensation of belonging. I envision a work that communicates the desire to belong in America in the mid-1970s and the conflicts caused by that wish. In short, I want to photograph groups—they are the American icon.” Featured here, Pugs, New York, New York (1991). See more holiday gift suggestions here!
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/28/2024 This holiday season, we honor the importance and beauty of gathering. At a time when our culture may seem more divided than ever, and more focused on consumption than connection, we take joy in this family photograph from Reel Art Press’s new book on FSA-era denim—the quintessentially American fabric. Pictured here, Feggen Jones and his fourteen children, Zebulon, North Carolina, March 1942.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/24/2024Amy Sherald’s 2017 oil painting, The lesson of falling leaves, is reproduced from new release Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, published to accompany the major survey opening this week at MOCA LA. Spanning from the 1960s to today, and including everyone from Robert Bechtle and Richard Estes to Joan Semmel and Marilyn Minter, this book proves that the genre is not just alive and well, but sometimes challenging, weird and confrontational. In her catalog essay, MOCA curator Anna Katz discusses Sherald. “The dichotomy between painting and photography, drawn along lines of racial exclusion and inclusion, is stark in the work of self-described ‘American Realist’ Amy Sherald, who was catapulted to national fame at the unveiling of her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018. The lesson of falling leaves exemplifies her selection of Black sitters, often strangers, whom she chooses for their ‘quality of existing in the past, present, and future simultaneously.’ … Sherald’s signature is the depiction of the bodies (skin, hair, nails, eyes) of her portrait subjects in grayscale. She uses grayscale to invoke the nineteenth-century daguerreotype, which comprised some of the earliest portraits of African Americans. In the history of European and North American art, Black people rarely figured in painted portraits and enjoyed their first opportunities to be portrait subjects upon the dissemination of the relatively accessible means of photography. The photographic is thus doing heavy lifting here: whereas in [works by artists like Jesse Treviño and Robert Bechtle], the nonhierarchical distribution of details anchors the images to a specific time and place, in Sherald’s painting the photographic locates a historical origin of representation for Black subjects, while also pointing out a history of absence and pointing toward a future inclusion. The photographic is a corruption, an acknowledgment and an abrogation of painting’s racist foundations.”
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/22/2024Check out our hand-picked list of staff favorites for everyone you love to gift—from the hardcore art lover to the photo aficionado, from the sophisticated traveler to the obsessive collector . . . and more!
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/21/2024Thursday, November 21, from 6–7:30 PM, the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library presents photographer Neal Slavin in conversation with editor Kevin Moore for the launch of the new, expanded edition of 'When Two or More: Are Gathered Together,' published by Damiani Books. The event will take place in the Willa Cather Room, on the first floor of the library, and will be followed by a signing.
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/18/2024 There is so much to see in new release Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage. Published to accompany the major retrospective at Fondation Beyeler, on view through January 2025, it features the artist’s work across all movements, from early Fauvist landscapes and interiors to the radical, monochromatic nude cutouts of the 1950s. The book’s design is also notably pleasing and unique, with two heavy gatefolded covers bound in to the one beautifully produced paperback volume. Pictured here: Grand nu couché/Nu rose (1935). Excerpted in the headline: an excerpt from Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poem “Invitation to the Voyage,” which inspired Matisse throughout his life.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/16/2024Science, technology, artistic freedom! Ah, the optimism and unfettered exploration of the Belle Époque. Then: the First World War, followed by the devastation of the 1918 influenza epidemic. In November 2024, the Guggenheim Museum opens Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930, the first in-depth examination of this avant-garde movement whose name, borrowed from the Greek poet-hero Orpheus, was coined in 1912 by French literary giant Guillaume Apollinaire. “‘Orphism’ referred to the kaleidoscopic and dynamic paintings produced by a constellation of transnational artists exploring the boundaries of representation to convey their experiences of modern life,” Guggenheim senior curator Tracey Bashkoff writes. “Artists connected to Orphism engaged with ideas of simultaneity—which they equated with modernity—creating compositions that often capture motion, encompass disks of vibrant color, and evoke multisensory responses. Situated among vanguard movements of the period such as Cubism and Futurism, Orphism pushed further into modes of abstract expression, whereas these other idioms remained invested in figurative content. … To invoke [František] Kupka, Orphism is an amorphous concept. Apollinaire invented the term to describe an abstracted pictorial idiom, but he did so by specifically conjuring the ultimate bard, the mythological Orpheus. In doing so, he productively allied painting, poetry and music with one another—and with modernity itself.” Featured spreads show work by František Kupka, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Gino Severini and Mainie Jellett.
 CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/13/2024Out now from Damiani, the new, expanded edition of Neal Slavin’s classic 1976 photobook, When Two or More Are Gathered Together, collecting more than 100 photos of groups big and small, scientific, artistic, gastronomic, athletic, etc, etc, etc. … from the 1970s to the present. Pictured here, “Yogis, Los Angeles, California” (1974). Kevin Moore writes, “Certainly, over the last fifty years, the nature of groups has changed—how they organize, how they meet, where they meet, and what they meet for. Much of this activity now happens online, on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. But in many cases, the online realm is a parallel space, a portal of introduction and information that interfaces with in-person assembly. No matter how they form, the reasons for groups have not changed much over time. Groups exist to express common identity, to provide companionship, offer support, and a sense of belonging. Groups also form to preserve, share, agitate, entertain, or simply to escape. In the fractured and often divisive times in which we live, exacerbated by politics, technology, and propaganda, groups have come to provide the social sustenance often missing from traditional outlets, such as jobs and families. Groups, with their processes of arguing, consensus building, and voting, are our common experience of working democracy.”
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