NYTBR review of Taschen’s Hiroshige

Hiroshige: 100 Views of Edo, by Melanie Trede and Lorenz Bichler
978-3822848272 | $170 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

Taschen’s Hiroshige was reviewed in the December 7 edition of The New York Times Book Review:

Japan

By ALIDA BECKER 

Paging through two luxurious new books filled with the work of Hiroshige, one of the great figures of 19th-century Japanese art, it’s hard to believe that his woodblock prints once sold for the price of a bowl of rice, and that their initial success depended largely on their appeal to souvenir-hungry tourists — as well as advertisers who understood the concept of product placement long before Hollywood studios began putting Coke cans into close-ups.

But Western artists like Whistler, Pissarro and Van Gogh, who championed these ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” didn’t care about that and neither should we. Instead, we can admire the elegant wintry stillness of a scene like “Bikuni Bridge in Snow” in Melanie Trede and Lorenz Bichler’s HIROSHIGE: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Taschen, $150), and only later be amused to discover that its most prominent piece of calligraphy is a restaurant billboard offering “mountain whale,” a euphemism for wild game in a rapidly changing society where Buddhist dietary strictures hadn’t entirely faded. Bichler and Trede’s book is filled with this kind of striking detail, but its main appeal is its brilliant reproduction of one of the rare complete sets of Hiroshige’s original views of Japan’s bustling commercial capital, owned by the Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo, the city of Edo’s modern-day successor. Bound from the first run, it illuminates the subtle, painterly effects that were often lost as individual images were reprinted over and over, with less attentiveness and skill, as many as 15,000 times.

Arranged by the seasons and containing some of his most popular works, “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” was Hiroshige’s final masterpiece, not quite finished when he died, probably in a cholera epidemic, in 1858. He had come to prominence in the 1830s with a series of prints of “The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido,” the great highway between the shogun’s seat of power in Edo and the old imperial city of Kyoto.

This led to another project, completed in the early 1840s, documenting an important route through the central highlands,which he was asked to finish after a fellow samurai artist, the talented but feckless Keisai Eisen, left after contributing 24 prints. As Sebastian Izzard points out in his introduction and commentary in hiroshige/eisen: The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido (Braziller, $80), Hiroshige seems to have become less interested in documenting particular places than in capturing their atmosphere, using graphic elements and blocks of color to suggest elusive emotions. Especially in his haunting night scenes, bathed in moonlight, he can be seen developing the innovative impressionistic techniques that would make him, as the critic Mary Fenollosa put it, “the master of mist, snow and rain.”

Circus reviewed in the NYTBR

The Circus: 1870-1950, by Noel Daniel
978-3822851531 | $225.00 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

The New York Times Book Review ran a review of Taschen’s Circus on December 7:

Circus

By GREGORY COWLES

Before she was a book editor, Noel Daniel was a gallery director and a Fulbright scholar, and in her new book she gestures gamely toward academic dispassion. The book’s title is simply The Circus (Taschen, $200), and its subtitle, equally plain, is “1870-1950.” Open the covers, though, and all pretense of humble objectivity falls away.

This is a gee-whiz spectacle of a book, a three-ring extravaganza as bright as a pinball machine and almost as big. Of course, its subject matter has something to do with that. Daniel has combed archives and private collections for posters, handbills and behind-the-scenes photos of the American circus in its heyday, and the results are stunning. A 1916 Barnum & Bailey lithograph features an all-female cast of acrobats, aerialists and showgirls, boasting “A World’s Congress of Famous Performing Beauties.” A 1950 snapshot captures a trapeze artist from the Dailey Bros. circus, sitting on the back lot before her act with a playful lion cub gnawing at her wrist. A 1940s photograph by Lisette Model, reproduced here on a full page, shows the Wallendas forming their human pyramid — balanced on bicycles! on a high wire! — while far, far below, a dozen or so people grip a pitifully small net in case they fall. Then as now, the circus tried to be a little bit of everything, and it succeeded admirably: part museum, part zoo, part athletic exhibition, part vaudeville routine, all adding up to the greatest show on earth. In a useful introduction (yes, it’s scholarly), the writer Linda Granfield accounts for the range of years covered in the book. By 1870, the railroad made it possible for circuses to visit even the smallest cities, eventually turning the shows into the nation’s dominant form of mass entertainment. But 80 years later, a new diversion had arrived in the form of television, and circuses gradually dwindled in audience and prestige, becoming more cult than culture. Looking through this book, one can’t help feeling that’s a shame.

Daniel has turned to expert collaborators — the circus historian Fred Dahlinger Jr. and the former associate artistic director of the Big Apple Circus, Dominique Jando, both lend big hands — but she is no remote curator; she’s a ringmaster with a megaphone, and like all the best barkers she’s shamelessly in love with the spectacle she’s selling. “The circus was the Super Bowl, the Olympics and the Hollywood blockbuster all in one, brought right to your backyard,” she writes in her foreword, a “yearly coast-to-coast circuit of bombast and flair.” In hindsight, cable TV seems a dim substitution.

Globe to feature Godfather Family Album

The Godfather Family Album, by Steve Schapiro
978-3822837306 | $800 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

The Globe and Mail will feature The Godfather Family Album this weekend.

Taschen’s Circus on Good Morning America’s top 10 books

The Circus: 1870-1950, by Noel Daniel
978-3822851531 | $225.00 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

Good Morning America included Circus among the Top Ten Best Coffee table books for this season.

Vanity Fair Insider features 3 Taschen titles

China, Portrait of a Country, by Liu Heung Shing
978-3836505697 | $65.99 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

Ballet in the Dirt: The Golden Age of Baseball, by Neil Leifer
978-3822845509 | $49.99 hc | available September
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

The Circus: 1870-1950, by Noel Daniel
978-3822851531 | $225.00 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

Vanity Fair Insider, the magazine’s online style, culture and shopping guide, is featuring Taschen’s China, Ballet in the Dirt, and The Circus this month:

China, Portrait of a Country
This book brings together a vast selection of images by Chinese photographers since 1949, giving readers a visual journey across the great People’s Republic; edited by esteemed photojournalist Liu Heung Shing, longtime Associated Press correspondent and Time magazine contributor.

Neil Leifer Baseball, Ballet in the Dirt

This superb collection of 60s and 70s baseball images commemorates the sport’s finest moments via the lens of legendary sports photographer Neil Leifer. Featuring over 300 photos, the book is divided into four chapters: The Game; the Heroes- the Rivalry (infamously, between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox and the Giants and Dodgers); and the World Series championship.

The Circus, 1870 to 1950

With 670 pages and nearly 900 color and black-and-white illustrations, this book brings to life the grit and glamour behind the circus phenomenon. About 180 of the earliest color photographs ever taken of the circus from the 1940s and 1950s, 200 posters by the famous Strobridge lithographers, iconic circus photographs by Mathew Brady, Cornell Capa, Walker Evans, Weegee, Lisette Model, and little-known circus images by Stanley Kubrick and Charles and Ray Eames.

Taschen’s China in NYT’s Freakonomics blog

China, Portrait of a Country, by Liu Heung Shing
978-3836505697 | $65.99 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

The New York Times’ “Freakonomics” blog has a guest post up from the editor of Taschen’s China pictorial:

Today’s China: Communist Millionaires, Kissing Contests, and Oh Yes, the Olympics

By Stephen J. Dubner

August 11, 2008,  2:41 pm

Liu Heung Shing was Time magazine’s first photojournalist based in Beijing; his earliest work covered the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. He has since worked for the Associated Press in Beijing, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Seoul, and Moscow. His books include China After Mao and USSR: Collapse of an Empire, and he shared a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for coverage of the Soviet Union.

His latest project is an impressive book of photography that he edited, China: Portrait of a Country. We selected some photos from the most recent period in Chinese history and asked Liu to comment on them. Below is his guest post as well as the captions that accompany the photographs in the book.

Today’s China: Communist Millionaires, Kissing Contests, and the Olympics
A Guest Post
By Liu Hueng Shing

China has undergone a few important periods such as the brutal land reforms when the landlords were publicly humiliated, land and property being nationalized, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and, of course, the 1989 Tiananmen Incident.

The book is meant to be a visual chronicle of the People’s Republic since 1949. To lay out the chapters as I have done, the transport of time and events could also let the readers appreciate the gradual changes, the clothing, and the body language of the people in their daily lives.

“I have lived for three-fourths of the last century, and I can tell you with certainty: should China embrace the parliamentary democracy of the Western world, the only result would be that 1.3 billion Chinese people would not have enough food to eat.”

– Jiang Zemin, President of the People’s Republic of China (1993 to 2003)

Today the important absence in people’s daily lives are these endless ideological campaigns of what is considered “Political Left” and “Political Right” (e.g. liberal vs. conservative in terms of political and economic reforms), and people just get on with their lives and want to achieve materially as much as possible within their respective generations.

Chinese people also have their own “never again” determination of not letting the country reverse back to the periods preceding the Cultural Revolution and the period itself, which lasted nearly 10 years. The tumultuous events for the Chinese people have lasted almost 30 years from the establishment of the new republic.

“China is more prosperous than before. The people have better lives but they are not happy and confident because the scars are still there.” — Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans

By hosting the 2008 Olympics, China has invited the global community and subjected herself to the intense scrutiny of the last 7 years while Beijing prepared for the games. Almost all countries change for the better after hosting the games, and China should be no exception.

Today, ordinary Chinese — by way of pirated DVD’s — can see every Hollywood film the moment it opens in the U.S cinemas. The lifestyle magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazzar all have their local Chinese language editions. China is now home to 400 million mobile phones.

In the last couple of decades, China has produced 450,000 U.S. dollar millionaires and one-third of them have joined the Chinese Communist Party; 30 million Chinese tourists travel abroad. This paradox is indeed spellbinding.

Two reviews of racy Taschen titles

The Big Penis Book, by Dian Hanson
978-3836502139 | $59.99 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

America Swings, by Naomi Harris
978-3836502146 | $500.00 hc | available October
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

Taschen’s Big Penis Book got a great review in Women’s Health Magazine, and their forthcoming America Swings by Canadian photographer Naomi Harris received a write-up in the New York Post.

Big Penis Book

I’ve had The BPB on my desk for a week now and still haven’t read a word of it. Neither will anyone else. TASCHEN shouldn’t have bothered including the dozen or so write-ups about the Johns Holmes and James Bidgoods of the world (real-life Dirk Digglers), or the photo studios that, over the past few decades, have specialized in shooting giant schlongs. When I accidentally skimmed a page of text, I realized that every paragraph is printed once in English and again in both German and French. Too bad I didn’t use that trick when trying to reach my 120-page thesis quota.

Anyway, back to what makes this book a priceless treasure for any woman heading to a bachelorette bash, coming-out party, or horny grandma’s birthday: 396 pictures—most of them huge and in full-color—of wieners, wangs, willies, johnsons, units, rods, packages, peters, poles, dicks, and donks. And every one of them ranging from merely huge to shockingly ginormous.

From the moment I removed the sheer plastic dust jacket (and with it the tightie whities that enable book stores to display the cover without incurring indecency charges), I was surprised by the range of emotions that, er, throbbed through me. I felt alternately curious, amused, awed, disgusted, and—when a penis belonged to a gorgeous guy that gave off a distinctly hetero vibe—lusty as hell.

Penises, it turns out, are fascinating. As positive an experience as browsing The BPB turned out to be, the real value here is still the shock value. So swathe it in some Garfield wrapping paper and add it to the bride-to-be’s pile of presents. You’ll know it’s been opened when the room fills with high-pitched squeals.

–Nicole Beland

America Swings

“The nation’s traditional Super Bowl parties take on a whole new dimension in Naomi Harris’ new photo book, America Swings, from TASCHEN. It shows naked, real-life couples going at it as they watch the big game, drink Bud Light and munch potato chips. Harris, who spent two years on the road to snap suburban swingers of all shapes and sizes in action – watching TV, barbecuing, and having Thanksgiving dinner in the nude – concludes: ‘These people are definitely having better sex than the rest of us.’

New York Post, New York

Taschen’s Michelangelo features in ABC documentary

Michelangelo, by Prof. Dr. Frank Zöllner, Prof. Dr. Christof Thoenes, Dr. Thomas Pöpper
978-3822830550 | $225.00 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services/IPS)

Petra Lamers-Schuetze, editor of Taschen’s Michelangelo, was interviewed for an ABC news special on Michelangelo that aired on Friday, May 2. The interview pictured the book as well.

Taschen’s Circus in Vanity Fair’s June issue

The Circus: 1870-1950, by Noel Daniel
978-3822851531 | $225.00 hc | available June
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

Circus will be in the Vanity Fair June issue. They will include this title in their “Hot Type” page.

Taschen and…hockey players?

In a recent New York Times interview with New York Ranger Sean Avery (Oct. 14, 2007), his answer regarding what household item defines him is his collection of art books…

Rinkmaster

Interview by EDWARD LEWINE

Household item that defines him: My Taschen books. I love them and always have them around. They’re art books. The pictures are big and colorful. They are works of art as well as books.