Buy this book on-line

Leonard, Baskin : JEWISH ARTISTS OF THE EARLY & LATE RENAISSANCE

Gehenna Press, Northampton, 1993

4to., full green morocco with various color morocco onlays and gilt tooling and titling, in an matching clam-shell case [by Claudia Cohen].This long awaited book, a sequel to Baskin's printed-but-not-published VNKNOWN DVTCH ARTISTS (1983), is limited to but 26 copies, eight of which form the Deluxe Edition (which contains a second suite of the plates "printed variously & on different papers; a water-color drawing & a canceled copperplate"). Copies 9-26 comprise the Regular Edition, of which this is an example; it consists of portraits of 16 imagined Jewish artists along with a note on their invented biographies, their artistic heritages & their achievements. The work is entirely the creation of Leonard Baskin who has arranged the ingenious typography, written the specious lives, etched the copperplates that display the portraits in rich & imaginative color & in odd juxtapositions, including the use of interesting counterproofs, that allow for compositions built of the same portrait. The geometric texts have been set in van Krimpen's Spectrum types and have been printed on a variety of European hand-made papers using an Albion hand-press. The portraits have been pulled on the same sheets as the letterpress employing divers techniques (and many passes through the press), to achieve their color brilliancies. The resulting book Baskin calls, "...this little hoax...a small fantasy inventing & imagining early Jewish artists and their work which happily answer a number of exceedingly difficult art-historical problems." See: Works in Progress. The Gehenna Press the Work of Fifty Years. p. 111.

ONE OF JUST 26 COPIES

Bibliophile Bookbase for antiquarian books, maps and prints.