Dawn Ades, Simon Baker (eds.): Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS (2006)

“In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled “enemy within” surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille’s still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso’s Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille’s radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.”

With contributions by Fiona Bradley, Neil Cox, Caroline Hancock, Denis Hollier, William Jeffett, CFB Miller, Michael Richardson, and Ian Walker.

Publisher Hayward Gallery, London, with MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 2006
ISBN 1853322504, 9781853322501
272 pages

Exh. reviews: Peter Suchin (Frieze), Benjamin Noys (Radical Philosophy), John Phillips and Ma Shaoling (Theory, Culture & Society).
Wikipedia

Publisher
Publisher

PDF (104 MB, updated on 2020-2-20)

László Moholy-Nagy: Painting, Photography, Film (1925–) [DE, EN]

This book presents Moholy-Nagy’s photograms, X-rays, super-wide-angle fisheye pictures, double prints, collages, montages, and the Bauhaus artist’s thoughts on the interrelationship of type, audio, and visual perception.

From the English edition: “The layout of the pages designed by Moholy-Nagy in 1927–bold sans-serif captions surrounded by lots of white space; compositions composed of arrows, dots, photographs, and heavy ruled lines — is much more like a movie storyboard or a musical score. It conveys a suggestion of imploding optical and retinal phenomena, much like driving down the Los Angeles Freeway at 70 mph or jolting through Philadelphia on the Metroliner.. This edition is a translation and facsimile of the second German edition of Malerei, Fotographie, Film published in 1927 by the Bauhaus Press; and it serves as a valuable reminder of the graphic design pioneered at the Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer..”

“Gropius had invited the twenty-eight-year-old Hungarian phenom onto the Bauhaus faculty in 1923, and Malerei Fotografie Film is Moholy-Nagy’s first attempt to lay out his entire theory and program for photography, and ultimately, for the transformation of human vision.. The book’s bold typography and design enacted Moholy’s concept of ‘typofoto,’ involving the integration of type and images, which was further elaborated in his two later theoretical works, Von Material zu Architektur and Vision in Motion..” (Randell Roth)

Contains photographs by Alfred Steiglitz, Albert Renger-Pazsch, L. Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Lucia Moholy, Hannah Hoch and others.

Publisher Albert Langen, Munich, 1925
Volume 8 of Bauhausbücher series
Second edition, 1927
140 pages
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

English edition
With a Note by Hans M. Wingler, and a Postcript by Otto Stelzer
Translated by Janet Seligman
Publisher Lund Humphries, London, 1969
150 pages
via Sorin Danut

Moholy-Nagy at Monoskop wiki

Malerei, Fotografie, Film (German, 2nd ed., 1925/1927, 131 MB, via Bibliothèque Kandinsky, updated on 2022-4-13)
Malerei, Fotografie, Film (German, 2nd ed., 1925/1927, PDF, JPG, in Heidelberg U Library, added on 2019-7-7)
Painting, Photography, Film (English, trans. Janet Seligman, 1969, added on 2014-8-17)

See also other titles in Bauhaus Books series.

László Moholy-Nagy: Von Material zu Architektur (1929–) [DE, EN]

László Moholy-Nagy coined the term “the New Vision” for his belief that photography could create a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not. His theory of art and teaching is summed up in this book.

Publisher Albert Langen, Munich, 1929
Bauhausbücher series, 14
241 pages

Facsimile reprint
Edited by Hans M. Wingler
Publisher Florian Kupferberg, Mainz and Berlin, 1968
Neue Bauhausbücher series
ISBN 3786114668, 9783786114666
251 pages
via Di Tutiya

English edition
Translated by Daphne M. Hoffman
First published as The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, Breuer Warren and Putnam, New York, 1930
Expanded and revised edition as The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist
Publisher George Wittenborn, New York, 1947
92 pages

Von Material zu Architektur (German, 1929, PDF, JPG, in Heidelberg U Library, added on 2019-7-7)
Von Material zu Architektur (German, facs.repr., 1929/1968, 21 MB, no OCR)
The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist (English, 1930/1947, 10 MB, no OCR, added on 2015-2-5)

See also other titles in Bauhaus Books series and other works by Moholy-Nagy on Monoskop wiki.