Book of the day > Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between. By Andrew Bolton. Published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photography by Nicholas Alan Cope, Inez & Vinoodh, Katerina Jebb, Kazumi Kurigami, Ari Marcopoulos, Craig McDean, Brigitte Niedermair, Paolo Roversi, and Collier Schorr. “’What I’ve only ever been interested in are clothes that one has never seen before, that are completely new, and how in what way they can be expressed. Is that called fashion? I don’t know the answer.’ —Rei Kawakubo

Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is widely recognized as among the most important and influential designers of the past 40 years. Since her Paris debut in 1981, she has blurred the divide between art and fashion and transformed customary notions of beauty, identity, and the body.

This lavishly illustrated publication weaves an illuminating narrative around Kawakubo’s experiments in oppositions and the spaces between boundaries. Brilliant new photographs of more than 120 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear for Comme des Garçons accompanied by Kawakubo’s commentary on her designs and process, reveal her conceptual and challenging aesthetic as never before. A chronology of Kawakubo’s career provides additional context, and an insightful conversation with the author offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of this fashion visionary. Also includes a bonus foldout poster featuring 2 Dimensions, autumn/winter 2012–13 and Invisible Clothes, spring/summer 2017.”

Book of the day > Irving Penn: Centennial. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Irving Penn was among the most esteemed and influential photographers of the twentieth century. This indispensable book features one of the largest selections of Penn's photographs ever compiled—nearly 300 in all—including famous and beloved images as well as works that have never been published. Celebrating the centennial of Penn's birth, this volume spans the entirety of his nearly 70-year career.

Lively essays acquaint readers with Penn's primary subjects and campaigns, including early documentary scenes and imagery; portraits of cultural figures and celebrities; fashion; female nudes; peoples of Peru, Dahomey (Benin), New Guinea, and Morocco; and still lifes. Rounding out the book are discussions of Penn's advertising pictures and his painstaking printing processes, as well as an illustrated chronology. Irving Penn: Centennial is essential for any fan of this artists work or of the history of twentieth-century photography.”
 

Book of the Earth Day > Overview: A New Perspective of Earth by Benjamin Grant. Published by Amphoto Books. "A stunning and unique collection of satellite images of Earth that offer an unexpected look at humanity. Inspired by the 'Overview Effect'--a sensation that astronauts experience when given the opportunity to look down and view the Earth as a whole--the breathtaking, high definition satellite photographs in OVERVIEW offer a new way to look at the landscape that we have shaped. More than 200 images of industry, agriculture, architecture, and nature highlight incredible patterns while also revealing a deeper story about human impact. This extraordinary photographic journey around our planet captures the sense of wonder gained from a new, aerial vantage point and creates a perspective of Earth as it has never been seen before."

Book of the day > François Halard Polaroids. Published by The Name Books. “A fine selection of glamourous photographs from three decades.” 

Book of the day > Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand: New Documents, 1967. Published by MoMA. "In 1967, The Museum of Modern Art presented New Documents, a landmark exhibition organized by John Szarkowski that brought together a selection of works by three photographers whose individual achievements signaled the artistic potential for the medium in the 1960s and beyond: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Though largely unknown at the time, these three photographers are now universally acknowledged as artists of singular talent within the history of photography. The exhibition articulated a profound shift in the landscape of 20th-century photography, and interest in the exhibition has only continued to expand. Yet, until now, there has been no publication that captures its content. Published in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the exhibition, Arbus Friedlander Winogrand features full-page reproductions of the 94 photographs included in the exhibition, along with Szarkowski’s original wall text, press release, installation views and an abundance of archival material. Essays by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister and critic Max Kozloff, who originally reviewed the exhibition for The Nation in 1967, critically situate the exhibition and its reception, and examine its lasting influence on the field of photography."

Book of the day > Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern by Wanda M. Corn. Published by Brooklyn Museum, Delmonico Books | Prestel. “This book explores how Georgia O’Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O’Keeffe’s clothes. The author has attributed some of the most exquisite of these garments to O’Keeffe, a skilled seamstress who understood fabric and design, and who has become an icon in today’s fashion world as much for her personal style as for her art. As one of her friends stated, O’Keeffe “never allowed her life to be one thing and her painting another.” This fresh and carefully researched study brings O’Keeffe’s style to life, illuminating how this beloved American artist purposefully proclaimed her modernity in the way she dressed and posed for photographers, from Alfred Stieglitz to Bruce Weber. This beautiful book accompanies the first museum exhibition to bring together photographs, clothes, and art to explore O’Keeffe’s unified modernist aesthetic.”

Book of the day > Rules For Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky. First Edition, 1971. Published by Random House. “In this book Saul Alinksy, America’s most famous community organizer, tells the Have-Nots how they can organize to achieve real political power for the practice of true democracy. Machiavelli told the Haves how to maintain themselves in power – this books tells the Have-Nots how to take that power away. Alinsky’s hard-headed tactical advice provides an alternative not only to the powerlessness that threatens our democracy, but to the random violence and bitter alienation by which so much radical energy is wasted.” Same as it ever was…

Book of the day > Rick Owens Furniture. Published by Rizzoli. "This book is conceived as an intimate look into the creative, personal, and often secretive lives of Rick Owens and his wife, muse, and collaborator, Michele Lamy. Known for his self-described “grunge meets glamour” style, Owens showed his first furniture collection in Paris in 2007. It was quickly received as a direct extension of his subversive aesthetic, with its bold mix of material, texture, and functionality, proving that his own artistic universe stretches far beyond the reaches of fashion into a lifestyle his acolytes could embrace.  Rick Owens: Furniture captures the place where Owens began designing furniture as a hobby, his iconic home and headquarters at the Palais Bourbon, a space populated with the furniture that Owens has been designing since 2006. Including antler chairs and petrified bark tables as well as workspaces and bedrooms, this volume provides a unique view of the lifestyle and body of interior design work of an artist who is constantly pushing the boundaries with his personal approach to craft.Beautifully illustrated with previously unpublished photographs of materials and process, this book offers readers a distinct look at the home and lifestyle of one of the most acclaimed couples working in fashion today."

Book of the day > Merce Cunningham: Common Time. Published by Walker Art Center @walkerartcenter. "Renowned as both choreographer and dancer, Merce Cunningham also revolutionized dance through his partnerships with the many artists who created costumes, lighting, films and videos, and décor and sound for his choreographic works. Cunningham, together with partner John Cage, invited those artists to help him rethink what dance could mean, both on the stage and in site-responsive contexts. His notion that movement, sound, and visual art could share a “common time” remains one of the most radical aesthetic models of the 20th century and yielded extraordinary works by dozens of artists and composers, including Charles Atlas, John Cage, Morris Graves, Jasper Johns, Rei Kawakubo, Robert Morris, Gordon Mumma, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, David Tudor, Stan Vanderbeek, Andy Warhol, and La Monte Young, among many others. These collaborations bring to the fore Cunningham’s direct impact upon postwar artistic practice.

This 456-page volume, published in conjunction with the Walker Art Center and MCA Chicago’s exhibition Merce Cunningham: Common, reconsiders the choreographer and his collaborators as an extraordinarily generative interdisciplinary network that preceded and predicted dramatic shifts in performance, including the development of site-specific dance, the use of technology as a choreographic tool, and the radical separation of sound and movement in dance. It features ten new essays by curators and historians, as well as interviews with contemporary choreographers—Beth Gill, Maria Hassabi, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener—who address Cunningham’s continued influence. These are supplemented by rarely published archival photographs, reprints of texts by Cunningham, Cage, and other key dancers, artists and scholars, several appendices, and an extensive illustrated chronology placing Cunningham’s activities and those of his collaborators in the context of the 20th century, particularly the expanded arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s."

Book of the day > Cy Twombly. Published by Sieveking Verlag @ sievekingverlag "The American artist Cy Twombly was one of the seminal artists of the second half of the twentieth century, with a complex oeuvre extending over six decades. His work brilliantly fused the legacy of American Abstract Expressionism with the intellectual rigor of classical European and Mediterranean culture, reflecting his extensive reading in history, classical literature, and mythology. This catalogue, edited by curator Jonas Storsve, accompanies a sweeping retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, one of the largest exhibitions on his work to date.

Twombly's artistic development is traced through more than 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs which span his entire career, including three major history painting cycles - Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963), Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), and Coronation of Sesostris (2000). From his early works at the beginning of the 1950s which were characterized by the interweaving of text with his signature scrawled lines, to his final, vibrantly colored, paintings, this survey underscores Twombly's career as a series of cycles in which he invented painting anew.

Polyphonic in conception, Cy Twombly presents a range of views with essays that shed light on the various aspects and phases of his body of work. It includes reflections by contemporary artists (Sally Mann, Edmund de Waal, and Katharina Grosse, among others) as well as recollections by his former assistant, archivist, companion and the president of the Cy Twombly Foundation, Nicola Del Roscio. Together these multiple voices bring Cy Twombly to life, illuminating his creative process and the humanity that underlies his work."