Artist's book
[2][8] Books such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience were written, illustrated, printed, coloured and bound by Blake and his wife Catherine, and the merging of handwritten texts and images created intensely vivid, hermetic works without any obvious precedents.
As Europe plunged headlong towards World War I, various groups of avant-garde artists across the continent started to focus on pamphlets, posters, manifestos and books.
The publication of the "Futurist Manifesto", 1909, on the front cover of the French daily newspaper Le Figaro was an audacious coup de théâtre that resulted in international notoriety.
In London, for instance, Marinetti's visit directly precipitated Wyndham Lewis' founding of the Vorticist movement, whose literary magazine BLAST is an early example of a modernist periodical, while David Bomberg's book Russian Ballet (1919), with its interspersing of a single carefully spaced text interspersed with abstract colour lithographs, is a landmark in the history of English language artists' books.
Whilst some of the books created by this group would be relatively straightforward typeset editions of poetry, many others played with form, structure, materials, and content that still seems contemporary.
Dada in Zurich and Berlin, the Bauhaus in Weimar, and De Stijl in the Netherlands all printed numerous books, periodicals, and theoretical tracts within the newly emerging International Modernist style.
Berlin Dada in particular, started by Richard Huelsenbeck after leaving Zurich in 1917, would publish a number of incendiary artists' books, such as George Grosz's The Face Of The Dominant Class (1921), a series of politically motivated satirical lithographs about the German bourgeoisie.
Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté (1934), collaging found images from Victorian books, is a famous example, as is Marcel Duchamp's cover for Le Surréalisme' (1947) featuring a tactile three-dimensional pink breast made of rubber.
A fine example of the latter is Isidore Isou's Le Grand Désordre, (1960), a work that challenges the viewer to reassemble the contents of an envelope back into a semblance of narrative.
Two other examples of poet-artists whose work provided models for artists' books include Marcel Broodthaers and Ian Hamilton Finlay.
[18] Other examples from this era include Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's two collaborations, Fin de Copenhague (1957) and Mémoires' (1959), two works of Psychogeography created from found magazines of Copenhagen and Paris respectively, collaged and then printed over in unrelated colours.
Roth was also the first artist to re-use found books-comic books, printer's end papers and newspapers (such as Daily Mirror, 1961,[21] and AC, 1964).
[24] Like Roth, Ruscha created a series of homogenous books throughout the sixties, including Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, and Royal Road Test, 1967.
Growing out of John Cage's Experimental Composition classes from 1957 to 1959 at the New School for Social Research, Fluxus was a loose collective of artists from North America and Europe that centred on George Maciunas (1931–78), who was born in Lithuania.
[25] The collective survived, and featured an ever-changing roster of like-minded artists including George Brecht, Joseph Beuys, Davi Det Hompson, Daniel Spoerri, Yoko Ono, Emmett Williams and Nam June Paik.
It was at this time too that a number of artist-controlled alternatives began to develop to provide a forum and venue for many artists denied access to the traditional gallery and museum structure.
"The format changed over the years and eventually included an Annual Bookworks Edition, which contained a box of small handmade books from the I.S.C.A.
After the advent of home computers and printers made it easier for artists to do what the copy machine formerly did, Volume 21, #4 in June 2003 was the final issue.
[32] The complete I.S.C.A quarterly collection is housed and catalogued at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the Florida Atlantic University library.
Artists such as Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer and PINK de Thierry, with her series Encyclopaedia Arcadia,[34] routinely make unique, hand crafted books in a deliberate reaction to the small mass-produced editions of previous generations; Albert Oehlen, for instance, whilst still keeping artists' books central to his practice, has created a series of works that have more in common with Victorian sketchbooks.
In the early 1970s the artist's book began to be recognized as a distinct genre, and with this recognition came the beginnings of critical appreciation of and debate on the subject.
