Arcana:

Corbett, John & Josiah McElheny. Chicago: Corbett vs. Dempsey Modern Art & Uncommon Objects, 2013. First Edition. Folio. Illustrated Wrappers. Art Monograph. Fine.. np (48pp), profusely illustrated in color. Designed by Sonnenzimmer. "In 1913, the year that the Armory Show hit Chicago, an anonymous local artist gathered every newspaper clipping from the infamous Art Institute exhibition into a sensational handmade document. "Freak Art Scrapbook" presents this folk ledger of the key showcase of American and European art in the early 20th century, a collection of witty and vitriolic snippets, much of it dripping with satire as nearly an entire city took to lampooning modern art. Lovingly reproduced in all its bilious, acidic yellow, sporting pre-jazz cartoons that snicker repeatedly at Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending A Staircase," the scrapbook in fact turns out to be a complex and many layered artifact, not only a register of the Midwestern response to modernism, but a fascinating glimpse of the central arguments about populism and the vanguard". A brand new, most handsome example of this fortuitously discovered, invaluable document lovingly reproduced by Chicago's estimable Corbett vs. Dempsey Modern Art & Uncommon Objects on the hundredth anniversary of The Armory Show. 0-9884492-8-5 Inventory Number: 022881