METRO Show- New York - 2014

Bernd and Hilla Becher
Anonyme Skulpturen : A Typology of Technical Constructions, 1970
1694

Düsseldorf ART-PRESS Verlag, in association with Wittenborn and Co., New York. Bechers' FIRST major book containing 194 black and white photogravure plates and measuring approximately 11” x 9”, the book is bound in navy blue cloth-covered boards with title stamped in white on the cover and spine and is covered with a photographically illustrated dust jacket.
The German husband and wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher have spent 40 years documenting the relics of the receding industrial age, classifying these near –obsolete structures according to function: lime kilns, cooling towers, blast furnaces winding towers, water towers, gas holders and silos. In this, their groundbreaking first book, the Bechers established the disciplined approach they would follow throughout their career, objective, centered views made with large-format cameras and finely grained black and white film, working under overcast skies early in the morning during spring and fall only to insure a diffuse light with minimal shadows.

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Bosai
Mountains of the Heart, 1816
2279

10 5/8 x 7 1/2 in. (27 x 19 cm)

One volume, Holloway page 104, Mitchell page 383. Bosai lived from 1754 to 1826, at Edo. Mitchell says he established his own school and became very famous. 'Later in life he ceased studying and teaching and spent the rest of his days composing poetry and drinking sake'. Holloway reproduces several illustrations from the Imaginary Mountains: 9 to 12 in the black and white section. It is a book of subtle, calm, quiet, color woodcut with the most delicate and sometimes barely noticeable background tints. Commonly small figures share the landscape or view it, contemplating or fishing or conversing. Printed on fine, rather soft paper; original pale lilac covers with the remains of the original title label.

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Louise Bourgeois
ODE A LA BIEVRE, 2007
1669

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. In 1919, her family moved to the Parisian suburb of Antony where the Bièvre River "cut across the garden in a straight line". The river was key to their relocation as it was imperative to the family's business of tapestry restoration for the washing of the tapestries. In 2002, Bourgeois would distill her emotions and memories of the river and the garden in an important unique fabric book entitled ODE À LA BIÈVRE. In the book she reminisces through images and text, "With the soil from that river we planted geraniums, masses of peonies, and beds of asparagus ...and honeysuckle that smelled so sweet in the rain." Using her own garments as raw material to make sewn fabric collages, she evoked feelings and memories through lines, shapes and colors. Years later, Bourgeois was to go back to the house with her own family only to find the river to no longer exist, "only the trees that my father had planted along its edge remained as a witness". This 2007 book faithfully reproduces that original fabric work. Each book is signed and numbered on the colophon and includes two signed photographs digitally printed on Verona paper and mounted on 300 gram watercolor paper with the respective titles: "The garden in Antony, 1921" and "The Bièvre River, 1951." Housed in a blind embossed slip case each book is uniquely bound with hand dyed and distressed linen.

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Mario Carrieri
MIlano, Italia, 1959
3785-BK

11 3/8 x 10 1/8 in. (29 x 25.8 cm)

135 black-and-white photographs printed in gravure, design by Giulio Confalonieri, Ilio Negri and Giuseppe Trevisani. . First edition. Carrieri was a leading photojournalist and cinematographer associated with the Italian neorealists. He was influenced by William Klein's 'Life is Good & Good For You in New York' and shared a similarly raw view, though his layout is slightly more restrained. Carrieri spent time photographing in the suburbs as well as in the centre of Milan, focusing his attention mostly on the less glamorous working side of this hard Italian city. 'One of the most important works of the neo-realist tendency of the 1950s' (Parr). In the same year as Milano, Italia, Klein published his own impressions of Italy in Rome: The City and Its People. [Parr, M. and Badger, G., The Photobook: A History Vol.I, p.214].

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Giorgio de Chirico
Mythologie, 1934
4252-BK

12 1/4 x 9 1/4 in. (31 x 23.5 cm)

Paris: Éditions les 4 chemins
Printed calligraphic title, ten leaves of printed calligraphic text and colophon, text by Jean Cocteau; the text is lithographed from the author’s manuscript. 10 lithographs, nine hand-colored by de Chirico. Loose sheets in cream paper portfolio. This copy has a dedication and includes a drawing by Cocteau, dated 1949, on the title page. This author’s copy (H.C.) lacks signatures on the plates; the one uncolored plate is numbered 116.
Copy no. 114 of 130

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Jakuchu
On a Riverboat Journey: A Handscroll by Jakuchu with poems by Daiten, 1989
3147-BK

6 1/4 x 11 1/4 x 1 1/4 in. (15.9 x 28.6 x 3.2 cm)

Tall 8vo., folding album; 25 pages. Published by George Braziller, New York. With a wonderful 18 page introduction explaining The scroll shows a continuous unfolding view of one river bank during a journey from Kyoto to Osaka in the 18th century. The landscape by Jakuchu is combined with poetry by Daiten recording their impressions of the passing scenery and time. Reproduced from the Handscroll at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Poems and illustrations depict the impressions of an eighteenth century Japanese poet and artist as they traveled to Osaka by boat in 1767.

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Le Corbusier
Aircraft, 1935
3484-BK

9 7/8 x 7 5/8 in. (25.2 x 19.4 cm)

92 pages, 16 of text with 124 illustrations, most being photographs and some are reproduced drawings.
Published by The Studio, London.
Aircraft celebrates flight and casts the airplane as the pinnacle of modern technological achievement. The book captures the enthusiasm and ideas surrounding the aerial age. Le Corbusier opens the book by emphasizing the “ecstatic feeling” that flight produces in him. It is “symbol of the New Age”, promising adventure, progress and wild possibility. He idealizes the aesthetics of the machines, too, which possess “clearness of function” (a core principle that underpinned Le Corbusier’s utopian architectural schemes). Le Corbusier’s captions are typically bold and uncompromising. The text that accompanies image 9, for example, reads: “The bird’s eye view … man will make use of it to conceive new aims. Cities will arise out of their ashes.”
Reference: Fotografia Publica 132, p.81; Le Corbusier et le livre, p.122

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Les Levine
House, 1971
4375-BK

Square 4to.; unpaginated; illustrated throughout in b+w; tan wrappers printed in black; included with 24 b+w photographs originally used in production of the book. Each photo is 6 x 9 ½ inches, each individually mounted to thick board; housed in custom cloth box. Fine. First edition. Les Levine’s House is a tongue-in-cheek sendup of Minimalist/Conceptualist art practice in which Levine designates a series of photos of a collapsed house as a “working plan for a sculpture or monument.” Anyone choosing to undertake the project is instructed to work “according to the scale of the space he finds available” and to send photos of the finished work to Levine. Published by Hilversum: Steendrukkerij de Jong & Co., 1971.

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Sol Lewitt
Sunrise & Sunset at Praiano, 1980
819

Small oblong paperback, bound in original white wrappers lettered in black, consisting of a set of 120 beautiful full-color photographs (4 to a page) of sunrises and sunsets by the eminent American artist Sol LeWitt. Slight yellowing to edges of covers. Binding sturdy and tight; interior clean and fresh. Previous bookseller"s price sticker on top right corner of back cover.

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Gordon Matta-Clark
Circus, 1978
1684

Illustrated by Over 25 b/w Illustrations. Survey of the project adjacent to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, including plan and photo-collages by Matta-Clark; essay by Judith Russi Kirshner.

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Gordon Matta-Clark
Splitting, 1974
1683

Staple bound artist book, 32 pages and one fold out page at end, photos of a house on Long Island, split down the center. "Splitting" is remembered primarily through photographs Matta-Clark took of the finished work and reproduced in a small book. In addition, the excised corners of the building have been saved, serving as positive relics of the work's negative space. These images and souvenirs, as Matta-Clark called them, are the constituents of an exhibition called "Splitting" at the Holly Solomon Gallery.

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Gordon Matta-Clark
Walls paper, 1973
1676

160 horizontally split pages with colored reproductions of wall papers found in demolished houses. Illustrated wrappers. This well known book, "inevitably made artist's books, and this, one of his best known, is a 'documentary' work that is a close adjunct to some of his actual sculptures," according to Parr and Badger.

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Sigmar Polke
Bizarre, 1972
1086

Containing 42 offset litho prints of photographs taken by Polke in Cologne and Dusseldorf during the 1972 West German general election.

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Ed Ruscha
Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1967
1477

Second printing of the young artist's first and most influential book, 1 of 400 copies printed in April 1963 by the Cunningham Press, Alhambra, California. 16 pls. [48] pp. White wrappers with red printing and glassine cover.

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Schleiden
Das Meer, 1869
687

7 chromolithos and 216 wood block prints of ocean animals and plants

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Hiroshi Sugimoto
Sea of Buddha, 1997
1720

48 black and white photographs, title pages and impressum folded into a Leporello (accordion style) and attached to 2 polished aluminium cover plates, contained in a silk-covered slipcase. Design by Takaaki Matsumoto.

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JMW Turner
Liber Studiorum, 1810
3054-BK

10 7/8 x 16 1/8 in. (27.6 x 41 cm)

Etchings with mezzotint printed in sepia, circa 1809-1817. This book is exlibris of F. Hurlbutt. Etched by the artist, engraved by C. Turner(Brother), W. Say, R. Dunkarton, G. Clint, T. Lupton and the artist, frontispiece and 70 pages, fine impressions, the majority early states (1 proof, 2 first states, 7 second states, 42 third states, 13 fourth states, 4 fifth states, and 2 sixth states), on laid paper with T. Richard watermarks, with margins,, bound in contemporary calf, richly gilt, for a Duke or person of importance.

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Yun - Fei - Ji
The Three Gorges Dam, 2009
3326-BK

14 x 120 in. (304.8 cm)

Artist Book. A hand scroll, the traditional "book" form of old China. This ten-foot-long horizontal image, hand-printed in China from over 500 hand-carved woodblocks, depicts the flooding and social upheaval caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River in the central part of the country.

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