Artists' Books and Book Arts

Ellsworth Kelly first conceived Line Form Color in 1951 as a series of studies, both drawings and collages. Later that year he applied to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a grant to produce a book, "an alphabet of plastic pictorial elements," but the application was not successful. With this volume, Kelly has brought Line Form Color to completion. Its forty plates correspond to the original collages.

Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha, one of the seminal American artists of the past 30 years, is known for taking elements from the visual language of advertising and commercial art: he has made hundreds of 'word' prints, drawings and paintings that exhibit an interplay between bold letters and softly shaded, atmospheric backgrounds. This book reproduces close to 600 'word' artworks by Ruscha, all of which characterize his artistic scope and identity. Assembled together in the form of a thick block, making the book and art 'object' in itself, these images become a sort of novel without an obvious plot: a series of words with no narrative but, rather, with a life of their own. Some of the works consist of only one word - great, mud, trust - and others of short combinations or phrases, such as Indeed I do, She Sure Knew Her Devotionals, Your Polyester People, That Housing Tract is Only Texture, and, of course, They Called Her Styrene. In these works Ruscha's words transcend their apparent randomness to become visual icons of universal emotions and places known and imagined, exposing a dimension of multi-layered irony and threads of subtle and inventive social commentary. This volume embodies an aesthetically appealing compilation presented, in the manner of its content, with bold flair and bright colours: a book that simply cannot be left alone.

World-famous conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner and equally famed photographer Eve Sonneman jointly produce this marriage of text and pictures. Weiner's signature rubber stamp art work here 'stamps' Sonneman's seemingly straightforward snapshots, which serve as the perfect foil for Weiner's glib definitions of first-glance image content.