E Is for Edward
A Centennial Celebration of the Mischievous Mind of Edward Gorey
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- 27,99 €
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- 27,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
This "big and beautiful gift-worthy holiday art book" (New York Times) is a sweeping, gorgeously produced celebration of beloved American writer, artist, and illustrator Edward Gorey on his 100th birthday. Issued by the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust and produced in creative partnership with The Edward Gorey House.
For more than seven decades, Edward Gorey's work has delighted fans of all ages and inspired artists across multiple disciplines. His collection of self-authored books, which comprises more than 100 volumes including The Gashlycrumb Tinies and The Doubtful Guest, remains a profoundly radical and uncompromised body of work. Viewed either separately or in their entirety, these works represent one of the most unique voices in American arts and letters.
E Is for Edward celebrates Edward Gorey as author, illustrator, humorist, playwright, printmaker, fabric artist, and stage designer, showcasing the vast array of material he created between 1953 and his death in 2000. Curated by Gregory Hischak, Director of The Edward Gorey House, the book is organized by major themes and topics that characterize Gorey's work including hapless children, mutant menageries, the murder mystery, the ballet, sartorial elegance, stylized decor, and the many recurring motifs and latent symbolism that underlie these subjects. In addition, Hischak offers a look into the pages of the dozens of rarely-viewed notebooks kept by Gorey throughout his lifetime.
Illustrated with hundreds of original pieces of art and archival material, E Is for Edward is a must-have for every fan and the most comprehensive, in-depth exploration of Gorey's art in more than a decade.
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In this loving tribute, Hischak (Parts & Labor), director and curator of the Edward Gorey House, does not attempt a comprehensive catalog of the artist's work. Hischak largely sidesteps Gorey's career as a professional illustrator of other people's books, a lucrative day job that allowed him the freedom to pursue his own strange obsessions. Instead, he presents Gorey as a "laudable model of how an artist maintains the equilibrium of creating highly successful commercial work while constantly producing unconventional works," and features mainly the latter. These include masterpieces like The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet book in which 26 children die in increasingly terrible ways, which, though now a classic, was considered unmarketable and incomprehensible when it was first published in 1963. While also incorporating some straightforward biography—Gorey's childhood was itinerant and somewhat troubled—this survey, playful to its core, does more showing than telling, excavating the artist beneath the commercial powerhouse with lovely reproductions of his early strange tales for children, pieces of personal ephemera like his collection of ticket stubs from the New York City Ballet (of which he was a devotee), and notes on his style of dress ("beatnik dandy," a biographer once termed it). It's an inventive and intimate retrospective of the most hallucinatory parts of a surreal body of work.
