Billy Al Bengston: Paintings of Three Decades

Houston, Oakland, and San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Museum, Oakland Museum; Chronicle Books LLC, 1988. 143 pages, chiefly colour illustrations (some folded); 25 cm. Exhibition coorganized by the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston and the Oakland Museum, California. Firm binding, clean inside copy. OVERSIZE! No priority/air, except by special arrangement. West Coast Pop Art/Finish Fetish. "This beautiful volume chronicles the ever-changing work of Billy Al Bengston - art that spans a period of thirty years, encompasses a variety of materials, and consistently defies stylistic classification. With colleagues Edward Kienholz, Edward Ruscha, and Kenneth Price, Bengston was a leader in the art revolution that transformed Los Angeles from art backwater to international art center beginning in the 1960s. His own widely acclaimed work has changed dramatically from decade to decade, reflecting the artist's independent spirit and firm belief in the open-endedness of the creative process. Bengston has said, "A work of art should never be predictable ... if each time you look at it you see something new, find that it means something more, something different, then you are on the track of art." Inspired by the various environments in which he has lived and worked - from California and Hawaii to London and Mexico - Bengston vibrantly evokes in his works the colors, lights, and patterns of these locales. This book visually chronicles the evolution of the artist's pictorial investigations, from his early paintings that conjure up the metallic and chrome-plated car culture of Los Angeles to the later Hawaiian images that opulently evoke this island paradise. Lavishly illustrated with sixty full-color plates of Bengston's paintings, collages, watercolors, screens, and banners, the book reveals the true radiance of his palette and his continual process of experimentation. Insightful essays by Henry T. Hopkins, Jane Livingston, Karen Tsujimoto, and Maurice Tuchman provide a welcome overview for admirers of Bengston's art and a splendid introduction for those as yet unfamiliar with it. This volume offers an illuminating appraisal of an artist of enormous originality, range, and achievement, whose glowing canvases reward the viewer with prolonged visual pleasure." - Publisher. CONTENTS: Preface with acknowledgments, by Linda L. Cathcart and Christina Orr-Cahall; Billy Al Bengston: some retrospective thoughts, by Jane Livingston; Painting as a visual diary, by Karen Tsujimoto; A remembrance of the emerging Los Angeles art scene, by Henry T. Hopkins; The installation of Billy Al Bengston at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1968, by Maurice Tuchman.. 1st. Paperback. Fine. Oblong. Collectible.