The Beautiful Book.

SMITH (Jack), JACOBS (Ken) (Authorial portrait).

Edité par NYC, 1962

A propos de cet article

Handmade artist's book with 19 original b&w silver gelatin contact photos uniform with four copies given to Marian Zazeela by Smith in 1962. One of perhaps 60 or fewer from a projected edition of 200. Tall 8vo. on goldenrod paper, photos tipped in with cow gum, with 18 by Smith and the final image a full-length portrait of Smith under Brooklyn Bridge by Jacobs in the back, saddle stapled? into the publisher's original stiff off-white paper wrapper with silkscreen decoration in black and titles by Marian Zazeela. New York, Dead Language Press, 1962. £11,000.00
Dusty wrappers, spine a trifle worn, inherent seepage and show-through from cow gum where the prints were affixed. A handful of prints have loosened which is inherent to this flimsy book made in a low-rent way with a 'human production line' of publisher Piero Heliczer and Smith. Not in Parr & Badger's histories of the photobook. In The Open Book pp. 190?191. An important countercultural book which this cataloguer, in a previous life, acquired a copy of for the LSD Library in the early 2000s. Granary Books' blurb for their facsimile reprint describes it as "The only autonomous collection of Jack Smith's photographs to appear during his lifetime?". There appear to be two other variant colours of wrapper illustration, yellow and red.
These intimate, bijoux photos taken at Smith's Lower East Side home in 1961 and 1962 are effectively proto-film stills for his most feted and scandalous cult classic film 'Flaming Creatures', which was shot in the open air using rubbish film stock. The film was banned and no doubt the Beautiful Book would've been if it had been distributed more widely. The subjects caught in the monochrome prints are by turns grotesque, humorous and joyful and in their transish way they depict a queer and trashy bacchanal of polymorphous perversity. The cover designer Zazeela appears in many of the photos and in particular in a winsome nude portrait, displaying her pubis and breast and wearing a flapper hat and opened house-dress as the first print in the book ? which is uniform with every copy seen by this cataloguer (and with the benchmark four copies given to Zazeela by Smith in 1962). The remaining sequence of prints tends to vary with each copy but always features the Zazeela portrait as the introductory frame. She appears along with the great Mario (a.k.a. René Rivera), Judith Malina and a troupe of other creative misfits, some of whom became Warhol Superstars in their own right, and indeed, The Beautiful Book and Smith's film Flaming Creatures were in some ways the blueprint for the great Pop Artist's own experiments in film and 'scene' making in The Factory.

N° de réf. du vendeur 666

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Beautiful Book.
• Éditeur: NYC
• Date de parution: 1962
• Reliure: Couverture souple
• État de l'article: Assez bon