Stockhoolm: Moderna Museet, 1970. Very Good. Item #11450

Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1970. First Edition. Quarto (27x21.5x1.5cm); unpaginated [162pp], including biography, chronology, and bibliography. Twelve photographic gatefold spreads, each followed by numerous full-page B&W photographs. Text in parallel Swedish and English.

Deliberately rudimentary stab-stapled binding covered in binder's tape, with coated card front and thick cardboard back, as designed and published. Textblock in repeated sequences, each beginning with a gatefold on coated paper, followed by a textual page on yellow wove paper, followed by a sequence of B&W stills for 12 tableaux.

The binder's tape serving as spine is peeling (about 1.5cm) at crown and foot, but this is probably as much a desired outcome for Kienholz and Pontus Hultén as anything. Some rubbing to front surface, but otherwise unmarred and unmarked.

Edward Kienholz (1927-1994) was an American installation and sculptural tableau artist, and a sardonic, sometimes gruesome, critic of modern life. Pontus Hultén (1924-2006), curator of this show, would go on to create major shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and to become the first director of the Pompidou Center in Paris. He remains renowned for his funky and eccentric exhibition catalogs, bound in atypical ways, of which this is an early example.

This volume is the catalog of the Kienholz exhibition held at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm from 17 January to 1 March 1970, and traveling afterward to Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Paris, and London.

Price: $100.00