"John Baldessari: Close-Cropped Tales" Buffalo, New York: CEPA Gallery / Albright Knox, 1981

1st Edition, Ltd edition (3,000), 9 x 7.25 inches. 

First edition, first printing. Soft cover. Gray printed wrappers; no dust jacket as issued. Artist's book by John Baldessari. Unpaginated (84 pp.), with 35 halftone plates. 8-7/8 x 7 inches. This first edition was limited to 3,000 copies. Published on the occasion of exhbitions at CEPA Gallery and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, both of Buffalo, New York, April-May 1981.

Cited in Moeglin-Delcroix, Anne: Esthétique du livre d’artiste 1960/1980: Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 2011), p. 320; and Drucker, Johanna: The Century of Artists’ Books p. 223.

Polygonally cropped photographs are grouped according to number of sides. The resulting "chapters" thus contain images that are evocative of illustrations, and suggest how just a little photographic information can stand for greater meaning--or not.

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