Philip Taaffe

This one-of-a-kind collaboration between acclaimed author Susan Orlean and celebrated artist Philip Taaffe unites the literary and the visual, the nostalgic and the optimistic, and brings greenery to your bookshelf. Taking inspiration from the rapidly dwindling "flower district" of New York City, Orlean and Taaffe offer tandem musings on the conceit of "the floral ghost." Orlean’s essay, one of her first botanically themed writings since she penned the widely lauded The Orchid Thief, reflects on a poignant moment when she first visited the district in its resplendent heyday. Her text is accompanied by Taaffe’s colorful silkscreen monotypes—a bouquet of paper and ink recalling the unique yet universal nature of time passing and petals fading. An evocative rendering of both the memories of youth and the ephemeral nature of the cityscape, The Floral Ghost makes an elegant gift for every aspiring writer, artist and dreamer who moves to a city to make his or her mark or who admires its mutable glory from afar.
Susan Orlean (born 1955) is the bestselling author of eight books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. Her 2011 book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, was a New York Times bestseller. Orlean has been a staff writer for the The New Yorker since 1992. She lives in Los Angeles and upstate New York.
Philip Taaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1955, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. He has exhibited worldwide since his first solo exhibition in New York, in 1982. Taaffe has traveled widely in the Middle East, South America and Morocco, where he collaborated with Mohammed Mrabet on the 1993 book Chocolate Creams and Dollars, translated by Paul Bowles. His work is in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Taaffe lives and works in New York and West Cornwall, Connecticut.

Philip Taaffe (born 1955) emerged in the 1980s alongside a generation of American painters who breathed new life into abstraction, at a time when it had been somewhat languishing in the wake of Pop art and Minimalism. Heavily layered and often grand in scale, Taaffe's paintings renew abstraction through a meticulous juxtaposition of appropriated symbols and emblems from a multitude of customs and epochs, many of which the artist encounters during his travels through South America, India and the Middle East. Taaffe's art is thus both beautiful and erudite, informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of literature and anthropology. Philip Taaffe: Anima Mundifeatures mixed-media and mostly abstract paintings executed over the past ten years. It includes original texts by Colm Tóibín and Enrique Juncosa as well as an interview between Taaffe and David Brody.

New York-based painter Philip Taaffe became internationally known as part of the early-80s Appropriation art movement for his unique approach, which combined abstraction with ornamental art from a variety of cultures. Poet and critic John Yau has written, “In attempting to connect the microcosmic with the macrocosmic, Taaffe constructs a metaphysical vertical axis that connects earth to sky, as well as the ancient to the postmodern.” Taaffe has traveled extensively, building a lexicon of imagery from cultures with a history of ornate decorative art, among them Arabic, Asian, Celtic and Pre-Colombian. Within the confines of his canvases, imagery from these civilizations mingles freely together, and merges with influences from the Western canon, such as Art Nouveau, Op art and Abstract Expressionism. Taaffe also uses non-art sources like early botanical photography. This substantial new monograph provides an overview of Taaffe’s entire oeuvre, with all works beautifully reproduced on full-page color plates. The volume also includes a visual essay by Taaffe and a series of photographs showing him at work in his studio.

Published in an edition of just 2,000 copies, and housed in a splendid French-fold dustjacket designed by Philip Taaffe, Composite Nature gathers 70 full-color reproductions and six tipped-in illustrations of the artist’s most recent work. A conversation between Taaffe and film-maker Stan Brakhage rounds out the volume.