CLAES OLDENBURG'S STORE DAYS
Something Else Press, 1967. Fascinating documentation of Oldenburg's influential perfomance/installation works, seminal events in New York City's art scene of the early 1960's: The Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962). Includes facsimiles of original texts, plus many color reproductions. Claes Oldenburg was a pioneer of "happenings" and funky avant garde performance. In 1961, he rented a storefront on East Second Street and filled it with art; the offerings included a large selection of his (now-famous) plaster replicas of food. The store was an exhibit space, retail store, and performance space. Real sales were made, but it also served as a venue for original plays and other Pop Art gatherings.
CONDITION: The interior is clean with crisp white pages and tight binding. The biege cloth cover has a few thin red smudges along the top edge of the front cover. Dust jacket is NOT price-clipped (has $12.95 sticker over earlier price of $10). It has some tears, chips, and a triangular piece missing in lower right corner (see photo). Also, the red from the title on the spine has rubbed off on the inside of the dustjacket. Glassine envelope is intact on front endpaper but card is missing. $30 SOLD!

NOTES IN HAND by CLAES OLDENBURG (First US Edition)
E.P.Dutton in Association with Petersburg Press, 1971. Card cover (no hardcover for the US edition). 5 3 D4" by 4". Photographs by Hannah Wilki. A selection of fifty pages from the private notebooks of Claes Oldenburg. This cute little book fits right in the palm of your hand and is an important document of Pop Art. It explores Oldenburg's mind at work on any number of topics. It is playful and even sort of goofy. French fries, bras, eggs--anything and everything in daily life was an potential subject for Oldenburg's art. In this tiny tome you can see his ideas for sculptures in their embryonic stage. You'll never look at a pat of butter the same way again.
CONDITION: You can detect some slight vertical creasing on the spine. Slight wear along edges. Interior very clean. A couple of very light smudges on first few pages--I think this was transfer from the ink opposite. I remember when I bought this in the 70s and it has hardly been touched. $25

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF BERTHE MORISOT (Second small Format Edition)
E.Weyhe, 1959. "The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot with Her Family and Friends: Manet, Puvis De Chavannes, Degas, Monet, Renoir and Mallarme." Compiled and edited by Denis Rouart, translated by Betty W. Hubbard, 187 pages, plus index. Correspondence of the French Impressionist to her friends. Berthe Morisot's names is not as familiar as that of Renoir, Monet, or Degas, but she was one of the original band of French Impressionist painters. This is an informal collection of letters to and from Morisot. Morisot studied with Corot and modeled for Édouard Manet--she also married his younger brother, Eugene. She was a great painter in her own right: her light touch and loose brushwork was perfectly suited to depicting the intimate domestic scenes and landscapes that she is best known for. She and Mary Cassatt are two of the most famous women artists of the 1800's. These days she is finally getting her due, with her paintings bringing million at auction and a recent exhibit on the subject of her life and art at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
CONDITION: Interior is beautiful with crisp, white, pages and no marks of any kind. Light gold cloth jacket is also in great shape. Dustjacket is price-clipped. The jacket has a small, light brown spot on the front under the word "Berthe". The back cover and spine are somewhat dirty. On the back, there is a small spot where the top layer of the paper has lifted up due to earlier removal of a sticker. $40

LA PEINTURE NAIVE by ANATOLE JAKOVSKY (PARIS 1949)
TEXT IN FRENCH. Stiff pictoral wrappers. 101 pages with 65 tipped-in small plates, most are black and white, several are in color. Jacques Damase, editor. A scarce book about Naive Painters, Outsider Artists, L'Art Brut Practitioners, or whatever you wish to call the unique creators that Dubuffet was crazy about. Includes artists such as Henri Rousseau, Fernand Weil, and Louis Vivan. Emphasis on French artists, bien sûr. This is an early work surveying the field, penned by Anatole Jakovsky, who donated his art collection to the city Nice in 1982; you can visit it today at the International Museum of Naive Art. I wish I could go right now!
CONDITION: Wear to edges of cover. Some brown water stains along the top right corner and edges of front and back covers. Wear along top and bottom of spine. Upper right corner of cover and first ten pages or so are bent. A few plates came loose at one side, but all are intact. For a rare book, not bad at all. $30

MY LIFE by MARC CHAGALL (Second Printing)
The Orion Press 1960. 174 pages. Translated from French by Elisabeth Abbott. This was written in Moscow in 1921-1922, when Chagall was 35 years old. Twenty original works by Chagall illustrate his autobiography. The Jewish surrealist shares recollections of his poverty-stricken childhood in the small Russian town of Witebsk in the 1890's, his early adventures and first meeting with Bella, later to become his wife, and his struggle to become an artist in the face of poverty and opposition. Of course, he eventually became world famous and went on to have reproductions of his work hanging over a majority of couches in Jewish households on Long Island in the 1980's. I know, I was there.
CONDITION: Inscription in pen on endpaper. Also a price in pencil. Otherwise clean, crisp paper with tight binding. Light green cloth cover in great shape. Price-clipped dust jacket has a few tears top and bottom on the back and chips and small tears top and bottom of spine. Some rubbing to type on back cover. $12