Best of
Art

1931

Snow Crystals


Wilson A. Bentley - 1931
    The work must be done rapidly in extreme cold, for even body heat can melt a rare specimen that has been painstakingly mounted. The lighting must be just right to reveal all the nuances of design without producing heat. But the results can be rewarding, as the work of W. A. Bentley proved.For almost half a century, Bentley caught and photographed thousands of snowflakes in his workshop at Jericho, Vermont, and made available to scientists and art instructors samples of his remarkable work. In 1931, the American Meteorological Society gathered together the best of these photomicrographs, plus some slides of frost, glaze, dew on vegetation and spider webs, sleet, and soft hail, and a text by W. J. Humphreys, and had them published. That book is here reproduced, unaltered, and unabridged. Over 2,000 beautiful crystals on these pages reveal the wonder of nature's diversity in uniformity; no two are alike, yet all are based on a common hexagon.The introductory text covers the technique of photographing snow crystals, classification, the fundamentals of crystallography, and markings. There are also brief discussions of the nature and cause of ice flowers, windowpane frost, dew, rime, sleet, and graupel.The book is of great value both to students of ice forms and for textile and other designers who can use the natural designs of these snow crystals in their work. Every photograph is royalty-free; you may use up to 10 without fees, permission, or acknowledgement."A most unusual and very readable book." — Nature

Oblagon, Concepts of Syd Mead


Syd Mead - 1931
    As in the first printing, the text written by Syd Mead is in both English and Japanese. With design concepts for Industry (Honda, LearFan). Fantasy (Flying cities, Moon Excavations, etc.) and Motion Pictures such as 2010, Bladerunner, and Tron, OBLAGON -- Concepts of Syd Mead provides a profound stimulus to the senses. Originally published in Japan in 1985, it soon sold out and has been much sought after by collectors and fans of Syd Mead for years.

Gabriel Orozco


Gabriel Orozco - 1931
    Always generously implicating the spectator, Orozco draws on a large material repertoire to produce quiet shifts in commonplace scenarios. This book, published to coincide with Orozco's exhibition at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, is the first substantial monograph on the artist, and testifies to the range of his investigations, from tiny adjustments in everyday locations (such as breath on a piano or reflections in a puddle) to more recent preoccupations with spherical forms in collage and paint. In an extensive interview with Briony Fer, the artist explains some of the conceptual premises of his art. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh situates Orozco�s various sculptural practices within twentieth-century precedents and the climate of postwar consumerism and assesses them as manifestations of a shift in object-subject relations. And Yves-Alain Bois explores Orozco's recent "return" to painting, considering the structural logic of his canvases, in which Orozco deploys self-imposed rules to plot compositions (or "diagrams," as he describes them). With insightful texts and hundreds of illustrations, this big, bold, 360-page book is the definitive work to date on one of the most influential contemporary artists.