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TITLE: Bernhard and Hilla Becher: Anonyme Skulpturen: Eine Typologie Technischer Bauten (Anonymous Sculptures: A Typology of Technical Buildings)
BY: Bernhard and Hilla Becher
PUBLISHED: 1970, Art-Press, Düsseldorf
SIZE: 280×218 mm
PHOTOGRAPHS: 194 b&w
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First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Navy blue cloth-covered boards with title stamped in white on cover and spine, with photographically illustrated dust jacket. Photographs and brief descriptive texts (in English, French and German) by Bernd and Hilla Becher. Includes photographs of lime-kilns, cooling-towers, blast-furnaces, winding-towers (mineheads), water towers, gas-holders and silos. Unpaginated (236 pp.), with 194 black and white plates. 11-1/4 x 9 inches. Out of print. An extremely scarce and important early major monograph by the Bechers. CONDITION: Near Fine (boards clean and without any wear or bowing; binding tight; previous owner's name and address stamp (in an unobtrusive "Helvetica-like" font) on the front free endpaper; all pages and plates otherwise Fine) in Near Fine dust jacket (light soiling to the dust jacket and some wear at the extremities, else Fine with no tears, chips or other flaws). A beautiful and very presentable rare Near Fine copy. [Cited in Andrew Roth, ed., The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. (New York: PPP Editions in association with Roth Horowitz LLC, 2001), in Andrew Roth, ed., The Open Book. (Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center in association with Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2004), and in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume II. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2006).] From Martin Parr and Gerry Badger: "The extensive series that the Bechers later made for Schirmer/Mosel and MIT Press...while preserving the aesthetic rigour of their earlier work, emphasizes the documentary aspect, and has a particular archival, historical value. Anonyme Skulpturen, though it hardly neglects the informational importance of their practice, seems much more about making an aesthetic statement and establishing the artists' position in late twentieth-century art. All their books are polemical, but this represents their primary artistic credo. For those who are more interested in the Bechers as artists than as industrial archaeologists, this is the one to have on one's shelf."