Oct 22, 2009 - Sale 2191

Sale 2191 - Lot 291

Price Realized: $ 8,400
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
SMITH, JACK (1932-1989)
Double composite from "The Beautiful Book," with 2 identical studies of Smith (by Ken Jacobs). Silver print, overall size 9 3/4x5 inches (24.8x12.7 cm.), with Jack Smith pictured in the upper left and lower right panels. 1962
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Additional Details

Jack Smith, the artworld's fairy godfather of camp and kitsch, was a filmmaker and performance artist who published a single monograph during his lifetime, The Beautiful Book, which contained 19 original small silver prints. The photographs were produced during the course of extended shooting sessions in Smith's Lower East Side apartment. Nearly half of them feature the artist Marian Zazeela, who provided the design for the book's silk-screened cover. Others include Frank di Giovanni (a.k.a Francis Francine), Joel Markman, Rene Rivera (a.k.a Mario Montez), and Arnold Rockwood would also appear in Flaming Creatures.


Filmmaker Ron Rice wrote about the pictures: "We studied these photographs with a keen eye discovering new & more beautiful images hidden in every dissolve & curve of the draperies & silks which ran through these masterpieces like some long lost mysterious fume from byzantium."


The Beautiful Book, unpaginated.