Book of the Day Posted Sep 21, 2021

Book of the Day > Frida Kahlo. The Complete Paintings

Purchase ● The complete paintings of Frida Kahlo in an XXL edition
 
Among the few women artists who have transcended art history, none had a meteoric rise quite like Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). Her unmistakable face, depicted in over fifty extraordinary self-portraits, has been admired by generations; along with hundreds of photographs taken by notable artists such as Edward Weston, Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo, Nickolas Muray, and Martin Munkácsi, they made Frida Kahlo an iconic image of 20th century art.
 
After an accident in her early youth, Frida became a painter of her own free will. Her marriage to Diego Rivera in 1929 placed her at the forefront of an artistic scene not only in the cultural Renaissance of Mexico, but also in the United States. Her work garnered praise from the poet André Breton, who added the Mexican painter to the ranks of international surrealism and exhibited her work in Paris in 1939 to the admiration of Picasso, Kandinsky, and Duchamp.
 
We access the intimacy of Frida’s affections and passions through a selection of drawings, pages from her personal diary, letters, and an extensive illustrated biography featuring photos of Frida, Diego, and the Casa Azul, Frida’s home and the center of her universe.
 
This large-format XXL book allows readers to admire Frida Kahlo's paintings like never before, including unprecedented detail shots and famous photographs. It presents pieces in private collections and reproduces works that were previously lost or have not been exhibited for more than 80 years, forming the most extensive study of Kahlo's work and life to date.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 18, 2021

Book of the Day > Pastel

Purchase ● Commemorating Nicolas Party's acclaimed transformation of the FLAG Art Foundation into a walk-in celebration of pastel
 
In 2019, Swiss-born painter Nicolas Party transformed the FLAG Art Foundation in New York into a rose-colored stage set for a suite of four soft pastel, Rococo-inspired murals that serve as a foil to, and occasional backdrop for, a selection of pastels from the 18th century to the present. Pastel commemorates this extraordinary unified environment, its celebration of pastel, and the range of contemporary artists who are giving new energy to this uniquely fragile medium.
 
Artists include Rosalba Carriera, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Louis Fratino, Marsden Hartley, Loie Hollowell, Julian Martin, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Chris Ofili, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Billy Sullivan, Wayne Thiebaud and Robin F. Williams.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 17, 2021

Book of the Day > Along for the Ride

Purchase ● Along for the Ride is a documentary film that explores the highs, lows, and ultimately the phoenix-like ascension of iconic Hollywood maverick Dennis Hopper, as seen through the eyes of his mysterious longtime “right-hand man,” Satya de la Manitou. Filmmaker Nick Ebeling chronicles the unlikely duo’s incredible 40-year journey, an enduring and intense brotherhood as intimately complex as Hopper’s own legendary career. De la Manitou re-examines his dedication to his friend’s idiosyncratic and uncompromising genius, reminiscing with a fascinating cast of characters—Hopper’s co-conspirators, family, and friends, including Frank Gehry, David Hopper, Ed Ruscha, Tony Shafrazi, Wim Wenders, David Lynch, Michael Madsen, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Linda Manz, Damon Albarn & Jamie Hewett, Julian Schnabel, and Dwight Yoakam.
 
Hat & Beard Press is pleased to announce the companion book, which includes cutting-room-floor material, original essays from Richard Linklater and Tim Hunter, among others, extended interviews, and never-before-seen photographs, as well as personal mementos from Dennis Hopper's incredible career. Plus, each book will come with a digital download of the film.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 14, 2021

Book of the Day > Nicole Eisenman

Purchase ● With a body of work that explores a broad spectrum of subjects - from lesbianism and feminism to contemporary politics and the natural world - Nicole Eisenman (b.1965) challenges convention and encourages viewers to construe meanings from images that demand interrogation and debate.
 
Illustrating paintings spanning the early 1990s to the present day, Dan Cameron unpacks the complexities of Eisenman's oeuvre via thematic chapters that address key ideas which emerge when drawing specific works together. As such, this first major account of Eisenman's painting career, presents a clear analysis of the primary motivators that have fuelled the imagination of one of the most interesting and original contemporary artists working today.
Events Posted Sep 14, 2021

9/15/21 - Show & Tell with Jason E.C. Wright / Burnt Sienna Research Society!

Tomorrow, Wednesday 9/15/21, please tune in to Instagram (@arcanabookss) at 5:00pm for the latest and greatest Show & Tell with Jason EC Wright of @BurntSiennaResearchSociety !
 
Gather up your art books, design books, coffee table books or rare magazines and come nerd out with Jason!
 
Here’s how it works: Jason will be live @arcanabooks sharing some of his favorites with you. Raise your hand to share and he will tap you in. Enjoy the hour, meet some interesting people, and support your local bookstore. There’s nothing like a little book fun in the middle of the week. If there's something in the discussion that piques your interest and we have it in stock, we'll even give you a 10% discount for mentioning that you participated!
 
Jason E.C. Wright is the Founder of Burnt Sienna Research Society, a critical-thinking research consultancy for design histories, intangible culture, and reference materials. Jason is Indiana born and raised, who now considers Los Angeles home. He is an accomplished designer, researcher, writer, with 20+ years as a retail and fashion professional, who takes his love of books seriously, serving as librarian-in-residence at home in Treehouse Hollywood.
 
Thanks to Frances Anderton & Angela Anthony / @HelmsBakeryDistrict.

 

Book of the Day Posted Sep 10, 2021

Book of the Day > Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s

Purchase ● A timely reassessment of the artist’s early performances and feminist sculptures, affirming their radical engagements and art historical significance
 
This volume is a focused look at two bodies of work, the Tirs (“shooting paintings”) and Nanas (“dames”), in the experimental 1960s practice of the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002). Alongside a poetic response to the work, four essays treat Saint Phalle’s oeuvre as works of radical performance and feminist art, as well as highlighting her transatlantic projects and collaborations. A chronology with photo-documentation and known participants details for the first time all Tirs shooting events in Europe and the United States, and another timeline recaps Saint Phalle’s life in the 1960s.
 
Tirs were made by firing a .22 caliber rifle at the surfaces of paintings. The bullets pierced bags of pigment, aerosol paint cans, or even food embedded in dense assemblages covered in painted plaster. Saint Phalle’s increasingly liberated female figures with outstretched arms, curvaceous forms, and powerful poses developed into her well-known Nanas, an evolution contemporaneous with the rise of a Euro-American feminist movement.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 09, 2021

Book of the Day > Toyin Ojih Odutola: The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi

Purchase ● A seminal work by one of today’s most vital figurative artists explores the complexity of race, wealth, and class through storytelling and multimedia drawings.
 
This extraordinary illustrated story—Toyin Ojih Odutola’s best-known body of work—chronicles the private lives of two fictional aristocratic Nigerian families, the UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi, if colonialist and slave-trade interventions had never disrupted the country. Rendered life-size in charcoal, pastel, and pencil, Ojih Odutola’s figures appear enigmatic and mysterious, set against the artist’s larger conceived narrative, highlighting the malleability of identity and assumptions about race, wealth, and class. The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi presents the story of these families in four chapters illustrated and authored by Ojih Odutola, accompanied by the artist’s sketches and notes. Also included are several insightful essays on the artist herself by noted writers and critics Zadie Smith, Leigh Raiford, and others.
 
An introduction to the artist’s vivid fictionalized world, as well as a reflection on the role of this body of work within her broader practice, this remarkable volume serves as the essential guide to Ojih Odutola’s unique form of storytelling.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 08, 2021

Book of the Day > Helen Frankenthaler: Imagining Landscapes: Paintings 1952–1976

Purchase ● This gorgeously illustrated volume offers new perspectives on Helen Frankenthaler’s art, taking a detailed look at her large-scale paintings that allude to landscapes, both real and imagined.
 
Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A member of the second generation of postwar American abstract painters, she is widely credited with expanding the possibilities of abstraction through her invention of the soak-stain technique, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in highly personal ways.
 
This volume explores references to landscape in Frankenthaler’s paintings over a period spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1952, just prior to her breakthrough to stain painting. Focusing on fourteen works, it examines an extraordinary variety of gesture, from linear drawing to areas of lush, stained color and flatter, more opaque applications of paint. An essay by art historian Robert Slifkin considers the complex evocations of space in Frankenthaler’s works of this period. Richly illustrated with full-color plates, details, and documentary photographs, Imagining Landscapes offers a close and detailed look at the artist’s approach to painting over this twenty-five-year period.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 07, 2021

Book of the Day > Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful

Purchase ● A sweeping retrospective of Alma W. Thomas’s wide-reaching artistic practice that sheds new light on her singular search for beauty
 
Achieving fame in 1972 as the first Black woman to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Alma W. Thomas (1891–1978) is known for her large abstract paintings filled with irregular patterns of bright colors. This insightful reassessment of Thomas’s life and work reveals her complex and deliberate artistic existence before, during, and after the years of commercial and critical success, and describes how her innovative palette and loose application of paint grew out of a long study of color theory. Essays trace Thomas’s journey from semirural Georgia to international recognition and situate her work within the context of the Washington Color School and creative communities connected to Howard University. Featuring rarely seen theatrical designs, sculpture, family photographs, watercolors, and marionettes, this volume demonstrates how Thomas’s pursuit of beauty extended to every facet of her life—from her exuberant abstractions to the conscientious construction of her own persona through community service, teaching, and gardening.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 04, 2021

Book of the Day > Fulvio Ventura: SAGACITY

Purchase ● Nearly 50 years after its inception, Italian photographer Fulvio Ventura’s Sagacity is finally seeing the light of day. Begun in 1975 and originally scheduled for publication in 1978 by Luigi Ghirri’s ill-fated Punto e Virgola imprint, Ventura continued to amass his photographic archive organically for the next four decades as an open-ended project called Sagacity, Sunstar and Salamandra (a title copied from a portentous inscription discovered by chance on a brass plate in the window of a typesetter). This was Ventura’s living body of work, inspired by an evolving passion for esoteric philosophies, the mysteries of happenstance, the sound of jazz, and the literature of surrealism and mythology.
 
Designed by Jason Fulford, the current monograph was edited and sequenced by Giulia Zorzi of Micamera Milan, who worked closely with Ventura on the selection until his death in 2020 (at his home in Ghiffa, Italy). The images in this volume, gathered over many years in various locations around Europe, are spontaneous yet full of intention, cryptic but playful, and often strikingly cinematic – an altogether cohesive and self-contained psychic world, bound by visible and invisible energies…

 

more