Buy this book on-line

Neumann, Max (Artist/Subject); Nooteboom, Cees & Sartorius, Joachim (Contributors) : Max Neumann: The Museum Folkgang Essen Exhibition Monograph

Museum Folkwang Essen/Druckerei Heinrich Winterscheidt, Essen, Germany, 1994

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in No Dust Jacket, As Issued. 170 pages. Retrospective Exhibition Monograph. One of the single most beautiful books on the art of Max Neumann. The first and only edition. Published in a one-time-only print run as a hardcover original only. There is no ISBN. The Exhibition Monograph is now rare. An austerely elegant production by Max Neumann: Oversize-volume format. Cream hard boards with titles on the cover and black cloth spine, as issued. Art by Max Neumann. Essays by Cees Nooteboom, the greatest Dutch novelist of our time, and Joachim Sartorius in the German originals and felicitous English translations. Printed on pristine-white, thick coated and uncoated stock papers in Dusseldorf, Germany to the highest standards. The reproduction quality is exemplary in every respect. Without DJ, as issued. Published on the occasion of the landmark retrospective exhibition held at the Museum Folkgang Essen in 1994. Presents "Max Neumann". The exquisite art of the most important German lapidary painter of our time. Neumann's subject is profoundly radical in contemporary figurative painting: It is literally the human figure itself, pared clean of the flamboyant (and currently fashionable) cultural referents in the West (gender, class, ethnicity, race), a ghostly presence, the skeletal human anatomy as it appears to us in a dream. If his art can be summed up "ideologically" in one word in English, it is "but": "He has developed his very own iconography. There are forms and figures that recur, but in a different context. Never as mere repetition, but rather as a reminder of something that needs to be conquered anew. There are constants, both formal and substantive, but they renounce the central perspective, which for centuries has been an integral part of the canon of Western art. In this respect, they are part of the Modernist break from tradition that took place at the beginning of the 20th century. If Neumann has different image planes, and there is a foreground and a background, they are not designed 'according to Nature', according to the illusion of mimesis. They obey formal principles, the sense of color and contour, but these are always precarious in their hierarchy. His drawings are integrated to his paintings, but there is no 'ranking' that assigns a special place to painting. He 'draws' with the brush, color surfaces rarely dominate, and even if they appear to shape a picture, one observes the limiting line" (Publisher's blurb). "Neumann has labored to develop, refine, and elaborate a visual vocabulary that is dark, obsessive, and intense. Neumann's paintings have accompanied the work of Cees Nooteboom, Seamus Heaney, and Fernando Pessoa, among others. The success of his most recent collaborations, with Laszlo Krasznahorkai on 'Animalinside' (2010), and with the journal, 'Music & Literature' (2012), testify to the universal appeal of his howling, primal language" (Joachim Sartorius). "It's as though you'd like to speak, but have no language" (Max Neumann). That "but" again. An absolute "must-have" title for Max Neumann collectors. This title is a great art book. As far as we know, this is the only copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. A rare copy thus. 87 color plates. One of the greatest artists of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER MAX NEUMANN TITLES IN OUR CATALOG).

1
0

Bibliophile Bookbase for antiquarian books, maps and prints.