Jean Dubuffet: Forty Years of His Art.

Chicago, IL The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Paperback Presumed First Ed, but unstated. Presumed First Ed, but unstated. Near Fine in Wraps: shows only a hint of wear at corner tips; backstrip titles very lightly sunned, but remain clearly legible; faintest toning around the outside edges; binding square and secure; text clean. Very close to 'As New'. NOT a Remainder. NOT a Book-Club. NOT an Ex-Library copy. Squarish 4to. Foreword by Richard A. Born and Joseph D. Ketner II. Artist's Statement by Jean Dubuffet. Essays by Reinhold Heller, Dennis Adrian, and Sue Taylor. Text is in French and English. Paperback: Pictorial Wraps. [Published on the occasion of the exhibition at The David and Alfred Smart Gallery, The University of Chicago, Chicago IL, October 4-December 2, 1984 and the Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis MO January 20-March 3, 1985]. The exhibition draws from the collection of the museum's benefactor, Raymond D. Nasher, and his late wife, Patsy. The Nashers built one of the world's major collections of twentieth-century sculpture over the course of forty years. The exhibition includes seminal works by Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, David Smith, Henry Moore, and others. Before sculpture, the Nashers collected ancient American art, Guatemalan textiles, contemporary prints, and paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Many of these works, held in the Nashers' private residence, will be on public view - and published in this full-colour catalogue - for the first time.The book offers a new approach to viewing and thinking about the Nasher Collection, concentrating not on the final, finished product, 'the greatest collection of modern sculpture in private hands', but on the unfolding of the process of building that collection through time, its chronological development from the early 1950s to the present.In the history of any collection, there is a narrative of evolution - a beginning, which includes a motivation, followed by a process of change as the collector works out by experience and experimentation a personal approach to the gathering of objects of art.In the case of the Nasher collection, this personal approach is the result of a remarkable synergy between two individuals, Raymond D. Nasher and Patsy Nasher. The essay by curator Sarah Schroth contextualizes the Nashers as collectors within the history of collecting practices in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Sarah Schroth is the Nancy Hanks Senior Curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.