This series is the last work of Japanese master woodblock-print artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, expressing his personal fascination with the supernatural by illustrating traditional Japanese ghost stories. Prints—such as Kiyomori Sees Hundreds of Skulls at Fukuhara, Tametomo’s Ferocity Drives Away the Smallpox Demons, The Old Woman Retrieving Her Arm, and “The autumn wind blows, there is nothing more to say, grass grows through the eye-sockets of Ono’s skull.”—Narihira—are reproduced in this collection in full color, one per page countered by text which explains the supernatural tale being illustrated.

Publisher: University of Washington
Hardback: 92 pages
Illustrated

A concise overview of the French protomodernist’s career, containing brilliant reproductions of many of his major efforts, plus a text which achieves (inadvertently or not) just the right tone of elitist obscurantism to carry off the relentless myth-making that was so integral to his oeuvre. “Klein never learned the trade of painting; he was born to it,” enthuses author Hannah Weitemeier, paving the way for Klein’s own claim to having “absorbed the taste of painting with my mother’s milk.” Perhaps there wasn’t all that much to learn, seeing as how the paintings in question were mostly one color, mostly blue—a particular hue Klein went on to patent as “International Klein Blue.” This same blue was also applied to sculptural objects as well as naked women whom he employed as living stamps in the production of his “Anthropometries” series. Elaborately ritualized, with a full orchestra and a tuxedo-clad Klein as MC, the process was documented in the film Mondo Cane, and thereby doomed to go down in history as an emblem of avant excess. Here it is, then, “a life like a continuous note,” which Klein meant literally of course, composing the famous paean to himself The Monotone Symphony-Silence, and having it performed at openings, at his wedding and finally at his funeral. JT

Publisher: Taschen
Paperback: 96 pages
Illustrated