Art & Architecture Library

Thirty-three catalog boxes from the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach [Mönchengladbach] : Städtisches Museum, late 1960s-1970s call numbers vary During the 1960s and 1970s, curator Johannes Cladders organized a large series of contemporary exhibitions at the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach. While the shows themselves were groundbreaking—Cladders’ 1967 solo show for Joseph Beuys, for example, was a career-launching event—the catalogs produced alongside them are truly remarkable. These small boxes (mostly 8 ¼ x 6 ¾ x 1 ½ inches) included such standard elements as catalog essays and exhibition checklists, but they also often included an artist's production, usually a multiple of some sort. Taken as a whole, the thirty-three catalogs the Art & Architecture Library has acquired show evidence of Cladders’ innovative and nuanced artistic outlook: the boxes’ cheapness of packaging (some are literally of plain cardboard, others a bit more elaborate) reinforces an assumed ephemerality; their editioned status acts as a wink toward the high art notion of rareness and at the same time reveals a concerted effort to push art material towards a more common arena. Artists featured include Bernd and Hilla Becher, Panamarenko, Janis Kounellis, Blinky Palermo, Joseph Beuys, and James Lee Byars.

Fluxus 1
George Maciunas, editor and designer
New York: Fluxus Editions, 1964
Green Library, Special Collections XX(5411348.2)

The international Fluxus group is known for two principle contributions to the history of modern art. As a collective or collaborative artistic movement, it staged performances, games, and happenings that put into the question the conventional notion of the art object, emphasizing audience participation and interaction instead. Fluxus artists were also key players in developing and distributing multiples (artists' publications typically run in small editions) and small games. These objects challenged the criteria of what constituted "good" or "high" art while at the same time inviting audiences to take a more active role in the process of art-making. Fluxus 1 is the group's very first published anthology and includes work in various media by such artists as George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Shigeko Kubota, Jackson Mac Low, George Maciunas, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, Ben Vautier, and La Monte Young. Editions are unnumbered and it is estimated that Fluxus founder George Maciunas assembled more than 100 copies, with an evolving list of contents, over time.

[Everson Catalogue Box]
Yoko Ono
[New York : Fluxus], 1971
Green Library, Special Collections XX(5411365.2)

This is a rare edition of one of Fluxus's most famous artists: Yoko Ono. Specially designed by George Maciunas, the box contains assemblage, inked footprints of John Lennon and Yoko Ono on paper, a glass key, miniature plastic boxes, printed scores, a painted work on paper, and a paperback copy of Yoko Ono's artists' book Grapefruit--a compendium of Ono's instruction works, dated by year and season, and a seminal work of conceptual art. As the recent traveling exhibition of Yoko Ono's work at the San Francisco Museum of Art demonstrated, Ono's longstanding reputation as a Fluxus affiliate, a performance artist, film and bookmaker, transcends her more popular reputation as the wife of John Lennon. The Everson show of the early 70s was critical in solidifying that reputation for an art world audience.

Before the Waiting Dog
Gabriel Orozco
New York : s.n., 1993
Five signed color coupler photographs and a VHS videotape in a handmade solander case. Copy 6 of 10.
Green Library, Special Collections XX(5411380.1)

The Mexican artist Orozco is widely recognized as among the most important artists to emerge in the last ten years, and is internationally lauded for his mixed-media work that includes film, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. Before the Waiting Dog constitutes one of the artist's earliest ventures into the domain of video, coupled with signed photographs that well demonstrated his singularly poetic photographic sensibility. Before the Waiting Dog was made for the exhibition Real Time (1993) at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, organized by the NY-based gallerist and curator Gavin Brown.

391 [Numbers 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 19]
Francis Picabia
Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1920-1924
Green Library, Special Collections NX456.5 .D3 A17 F Rare Books

French writer, painter, and leading figure of the Dada movement, Francis Picabia was the mastermind behind this playful and unpredictable art and literary review. The earliest issues were published in 1917 and continued through the Dada years. A cover illustration by Picabia, incorporating the machine-like linear forms characteristic of his work at the time, can be found on the cover of one Stanford's issues. Other contributors included New York Dada provocateurs Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, and Tristan Tzara.

Les Dix Livres d'Architecture de Vitruve: Corrigez et Traduits Nouvellement en François, avec des Notes & des Figures
Vitruvius Pollio
Paris: Chez Jean Baptiste Coignard ..., 1684
Green Library, Special Collections, XX(4743239.1)

The De Architectura Libri Decem of Vitruvius (c90-20 B.C.) is the only architectural treatise to survive from the Greco-Roman period and is perhaps Western civilization's most important single architectural text. Monastic copyists preserved it during the Middle Ages; it was rediscovered in about 1414 in the library of the monastery of St. Gall by Poggio Bracciolini, a humanist. The first printed version appeared in the 1480s, and the work gradually became enormously influential among Renaissance architects and antiquarians, with as many as 166 editions published thereafter, according to a survey done in 1978 by Luigi Vagnetti. In this edition, Claude Perrault (1613-1688), who was both an architect and a classical scholar, provided a French translation and an encyclopedic commentary. To illustrate the text, Perrault also collected many excellent engravings, after such leading artists as Antoine Le Pautre and Sebastien Le Clerc.

Plans (Paris, France)
Ed. P. Lamour, H. Lagardelle, Le Corbusier, F. de Pierrefeu, P. Winter
Paris : [Plans], 1931-1932
NX2 .B8 V.1-13

A rare, lavishly illustrated avant-garde journal that analyzes developments in European architecture, politics, literature, and the arts of the 1930s. Plans evokes a strong international flavor, and the volumes refer frequently to trends in the United States, the Soviet Union, Germany in the last years before Nazism, and Italy under fascism. Le Corbusier, a provocative and monumental figure in the history of modern architecture, played a seminal role in the formation of this journal and contributed many of his drawings for its illustrations. Le Corbusier scholars in recent years have become increasingly interested in his political involvements in the 1930s. Plans is probably the principal documentation of this aspect of Le Corbusier's life.

[In Apocalipsin] Beato de Liebana, Codice de San Pedro de Cardena [2001 facsimile edition]
Saint Beatus, Presbyter of Liébana
Barcelona : M. Moleiro, c2001
BS2825 .A2 B37 2001 F V.1-2 ARTLCKL

This set is a facsimile of an illuminated manuscript of the eighth-century commentaries on the Apocalypse by a Spanish monk, Beatus of Liébana (d. 798). The copy on which this facsimile is based was made between 1175 and 1185 at the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña in Spain. Its leaves--some of which have been separated from the codex over the years and have ended up in various collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York--were reunited by the publisher for this edition.