A Century of Artists Books - Softcover

Kasimir Malevich was born in Kiev, Russia in 1878, the eldest of 14 children, four of whom died in childbirth. He claims to have begun exhibiting his work in 1898, but 1905 is his first exhibition on record, a joint show of Moscow and Kursk artists. In 1915 he exhibited his first Suprematist paintings at the 0.10 Last Futurist Exhibition, and continued to produce Suprematist works and manifestos well into the next decade. He held posts at the Vitebsk School of Art, the State Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad, the State Institute of the History of the Arts, and the Kiev Institute of Art, and was one of the founders and leaders of UNOVIS. Malevich died in 1935; the site of his ashes is marked by a white cube and a black square.

In artists' books, according to Castleman, a curator at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, art is not subsumed by text but ``translates it into an a language that has more meanings than words can convey.'' In this handsome companion to a MoMA exhibition, Castleman showcases a wide selection of books by fine artists. She explains that the advent of photography and chromolithography in the mid-19th century allowed mass-produced prints to convey the colorful aspects of painting, leading major artists, such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Gaugin, to produce books in editions of more than 100 copies. Profiling enterprising early publishers--like art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who in 1900, commissioned Pierre Bonnard to illustrate a volume of Paul Verlaine's poetry--Castleman throws light on the collaborative work that characterized such books. Also examined are artists' typical subject matter (moral fables, literary classics and political allegories); early prototypes, such as 16th-century illustrated codexes by Durer; and the fate of artists' books in the electronic age.

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