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Arnold, Steven (Photographer) & Weiermair, Peter (Editor).
STEVEN ARNOLD: EXOTIC TABLEAUX.
Zurich, Switzerland: Editions Stemmle, 1996. Hardcover. First Edition/First Printing. 143 pages. Fine/Fine. Posthumous retrospective exhibition monograph on the artist/photographer's work. A splendid production by Peter Renn: Oversize-volume format in oblong shape. Handsome black hard boards with white titles printed on spine, as issued. Photographs and photographic tableaux by Steven Arnold. Essay by Peter Weiermair. Printed on thick coated stock paper in Milan, Italy to the highest standards. In pictorial DJ with white titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Published on the occasion of the first retrospective exhibition of the American artist/photographer's work in Germany, Steven Arnold actively participated in its preparation until his death in 1994. The work presents some of the finest and most representative images from his four previous collections: "Reliquaries", "Epiphanies", "Angels of Night", and "Cabinet de Curiosite". Influenced by Jean Cocteau, befriended by Salvador Dali, and inspired by the fusion of American kitsch with European High Renaissance imagery, Steven Arnold created photographs which are among the most idiosyncratically beautiful male, female, male/female, and orgiastic nude tableaux. Meticulously conceived and brilliantly realized, they have much more in common with the work of such Old Masters as Bernini, Bronzino, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio than with modernist art. Steven Arnold is the artist-as-dreamer. His dreams and epiphanies are erotic reveries whose main theme, if it could be discerned, is the dissolution of sexuality, gender and even biology, polymorphous perverse and sublime. "There are drag queens and gods, fishes and angels, nudes and fools; trivia mingles with idealism, esoterica with kitsch. He wants you to have a good time, he wants you to be transformed forever, he wants to trouble and amuse you, poke fun at you and put you in a sweat, he wants you to feel wonderful and we are all invited to the party he's giving in heaven" (James Leo Herlihy). The curator, Peter Weiermair, regards his best work as one-of-a-kind (despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the disparate strands of influences), and important in the history of "staged photography", where everything and nothing are left to chance. Steven Arnold died of AIDS in 1994. His work is in the Permanent Collections of the Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among other major venues, as well as major private collections such as those of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Yves Saint Laurent, Cher, and Lauren Hutton, among many others. A dazzling and moving retrospective. This is an Import title, was not commercially distributed in the United States, and has been out-of-print for a very long time. This is one of very few copies still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. A very scarce copy thus. One of the most brilliant American artist/photographers of the 20th century. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER STEVEN ARNOLD TITLE IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 3905514982. $75.00 |
