Jim Shaw: Paperback Covers


Book Description

Dream-inspired book covers for imaginary pulp novels by Americana connoisseur-bricoleur Jim Shaw Since the 1970s, American artist Jim Shaw (born 1952) has used his multimedia artistic practice as a means of exploring and exploiting pop-culture iconography. This publication focuses on one of the key series in Shaw's corpus, in which he draws inspiration from the Anglo-American graphic design and illustrative tradition of cheap paperback books. Inspired by the artist's intense dreaming life, the Paperback Covers series (1996-2013) recreates the lurid imagery associated with pulp novels, with vertical canvases that depict fantastical and irreverent imagery: in one, a werewolf in suspenders is struck by an oncoming 18-wheeler; in another, a line of chorus girls dance in front of a vampire and a woman in red as the couple is in engulfed by flames. Though these "books" bear no text, Shaw's paintings evoke exciting narratives within a single image. All the inventoried Paperback Covers are collected in this softcover volume along with a text by Charlie Fox.




Jim Shaw


Book Description

Blending the reflected cultural climate of his adopted home, Los Angeles, with the multi-layered world of American popular culture, Jim Shaw creates rich dreamlike worlds within distinct bodies of work. Addressing, for the first time, how the artist's oeuvre inter-relates, this substantial monograph argues that the artist's seemingly disparate series actually function together to present a lucid and insightful portrait of America today. Emerging out of the long West Coast shadows of California Assemblage by way of LA Pop and Conceptualism, Shaw's narrative-driven art marries art history and contemporary existence, as well as literature and comic books, ancient myths and modern movies, science and its variations in popular psychology--not only blurring the boundaries between art and life, but also cultivating that confusion to consider the relationship between fact and fiction that seems to define so much of the world we inhabit today. Giving contemporary viewers an effective way to think about art, this publication is an invaluable resource for those interested in painting today and its interaction with modern life.




Jim Shaw


Book Description

A long-overdue survey of an essential West Coast artist whose humorous works delve into America’s underbelly and evolving counterculture. Over the past thirty years, Jim Shaw has become one of America’s most visionary artists, moving between painting, sculpture, and drawings, while building connections between his own psyche and the larger political, social, and spiritual history of America. Shaw’s imagery is mined from comic books, record covers, conspiracy magazines, obscure religious pamphlets, and other cultural refuse to produce a portrait of the American subconscious out of his personal obsessions. Shaw, along with fellow Michigan native Mike Kelley, moved to California in the 1970s to attend Cal Arts and was one of a number of notable artists to emerge from the school in the early 1980s. Shaw’s work is distinguished by rigorous formal and structural analyses of neglected forms of vernacular culture. Accompanying a major exhibition, this is the first major monograph devoted to the entirety of the artist’s unique, multifaceted career.







Flash Art


Book Description




Crosscurrents at Century's End


Book Description

This selection of art since 1990 is drawn from a collection of approximately 600 works that reflect various directions emerging in today's art, from fascinating reprises of tradition to phenomena that appear startlingly new. The focus is on particular works of art rather than representations of a movement or direction. However, certain trends can be identified: a theme of whimsy, the prominence of photographically-based work, the equal importance of figuration and abstraction. Fifty-four artists are represented, among them Fatimah Tuggar (Nigeria), Neo Rauch (Germany), Mike Kelley (U.S.), Marlene Dumas (South Africa), and Vik Muniz (Brazil). Neuberger Berman has a history with contemporary art reaching back over sixty years. Roy Neuberger went to Paris in the 1920s with the thought of becoming an artist; he returned home and founded the financial management company in order to earn the money necessary to fulfill his passion for collecting.




The Blighted Eye


Book Description

The Blighted Eye is the most copious, the most diverse, and the most lavish compilation of original comic art ever published ― all from the mind-boggling collection of Glenn Bray. Bray was an enthusiast of marginal or outsider American pop culture when he started to collect original comic art in 1965 ― a time when very few people, including the artists themselves, truly valued the original art. Bray has, over the last nearly 50 years, amassed the most eclectic collection of original comic art in private hands. The book features work by a pantheon of cartooning masters, including Charles Addams, Carl Barks, Charles Burns, Al Capp, Dan Clowes, Jack Cole, R. Crumb, Jack Davis, Kim Deitch, Will Elder, Al Feldstein, Virgil Finlay, Drew Friedman, Chester Gould, Justin Green, Rick Griffin, Bill Griffith, Matt Groening, George Grosz, V.T. Hamlin, Jaime Hernandez, George Herriman, Al Hirshfeld, Graham Ingels, Bernard Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Gary Panter, Virgil Partch, Savage Pencil, Peter Pontiac, Charles Rodrigues, Spain Rodriguez, Charles Schulz, Gilbert Shelton, Joost Swarte, Stanislav Szukalski, Irving Tripp, Chris Ware, S. Clay Wilson, Basil Wolverton, Wallace Wood, Jim Woodring, Art Young, and ― it should go without saying ― many more.




Eden's Edge


Book Description

Accompanies the exhibition of the same name held at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May 13-Sept. 2, 2007.




The Art of Painted Comics


Book Description

The history of painters in comics goes back to the dawn of pulp magazine covers. From "The Shadow" and "The Spider" to "The Black Bat" and so many other characters, painter's works have graced the covers of comics and pulps, which have influenced many artists over the decades. This deluxe coffeetable art book, edited and overseen by Alex Ross — one of the comic industry's most recognized painters, whose expertise has helped guide and define its contents — is the most important, most comprehensive prestige hardcover retrospective of the history of painters in comics, of all time.




The Writer


Book Description