j'aime la mime

OK, getting sick of looking at that fried chicken. Moving on, then. The aforementioned bookstore coughed up more than just a painting. We also found seven volumes of what looks to be a French-speaking Swiss series of artbooks from 1962. Each book presents a photo-essay on a particular art form (the cinema, the theatre, dance etc.), so that the collection as a whole offers a kind of illustrated typology of the arts at mid-century.



Absolutely stunning modernist design. There is something appealing about the stylistic uniformity of the series, the minimalist stock typeface and pared-down quasi-ethnographic presentation. Here they are in profile.



As you can see, we are obviously going to have to hunt down the rest of the books in the series. Remaining volumes are devoted to cartoons, strip-tease, opera, and "les marionnettes." It is amusing to see just what constitutes "art" in these circumstances. Strip-tease and bullfighting? At any rate, the photos really do carry the books, and I say this only partly because I cannot read the French text accompanying them. Foux de Fa Fa! Have a look at some of these images while I go find out my leotard. BG

amber waves of grease

Fried chicken y'all.

achromatic circle composition (1968)

We rescued a painting from an old dusty bookshop the other day. The bookshop is on a second floor walk-up, and the painting was perched high above the stairwell. Not high enough to escape Joyce's cool art radar. It didn't appear to be for sale, but the nice couple running the store didn't require too much prodding to part with it. The artist, a man of few words, turned out to be none other than the owner of the store, William Downing, who keenly remembered the painting's title even though he had completed it almost forty years ago: "Achromatic Circle Composition." He appeared quite unattached to it. He just took out a ladder and retrieved the thing as if he were changing a lightbulb. Anyway we really like it. I don't know what Achromatic means (Ian?) but perhaps it has to do with the fact that there are no actually circles or bent lines in the painting. Merely the suggestion of circles.