Eh Joe

Tilson
Pop to Present 
Royal Academy of Arts
London, 2002

I've posted some of these before but this catalogue has better images and the work still looks mighty fine.

Burra Market

Market Day (detail) 1926

Edward Burra 
Hayward Gallery Exhibition Catalogue
Arts Council, 1985

The Tea Shop, 1929

Opium Den, 1933

Harlem, 1934

Newport, 1971

An English Country Scene No.1, 1970

Composition Collage, 1929

The Fruit Seller, 1930

Listen here to hear more about the life of Burra from Jonathan Meades. British visitor may also find a rare documentary film here.

Art Rock

Records by Artists, 1958-1990
Giorgio Maffei
Viaindustriae, Foligno, 2013

Catalogue from an exhibition held at the University of Bologna last year. I like the idea of artists making music. I have no idea of what most of these records sound like, though some of the Tristram Carey has been released by Trunk Records, and recordings of Henri Chopin's excellent poetry and electronics are around. 

I like to project possibilities onto the remainder: Joseph Beuys' motorik krautrock outfit; Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn's free jazz combo; Brion Gysin's trance project; Yves Klein's Kind of Blue... The Blue Album... Eine Kleine Klein Musik...

No Sleep Tilson

A couple of films about Joe Tilson, the first culled from an episode of the BBC's Monitor arts programme in 1964, showing the artist in London during the full bloom of Pop.

 

The second film from the BBC's Private Landscapes series of artist profiles shows a more hirsute Joe 12 years older, disillusioned with consumer society, living and working in the Wiltshire countryside.

Freund Indeed

Gisèle Freund, L'Oeil frontière : Paris 1933-1940
RMN, Paris, 2011

This exhibition catalogue from a show at the Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent contains mostly black and white images, which are very good and make the smaller colour selection from 1939 jump out. Freund had a brief flirtation with Kodakchrome. I wish it had been longer as the hues and saturation are great and give the subjects a jolt of contemporaneity, albeit with a slightly sickly pallor.

Myopic James Joyce

Brainiac Walter Benjamin

Smouldering Colette

Marcel Marceau Duchamp

Sideshow Jean Cocteau

Puffin' André Breton

Smokin' Jean-Paul Satre

Chintzy Virginia Woolf

Cheery Herbert Read and Anytime Peggy Guggenheim

Old Possum T.S.Eliot

Wild Man Thornton Wilder

Ars Longa Vita Sackville-West