Contemporary Illustrated Books

From the earliest period of its existence, the book had a coherent sequence of numbered pages and offered a spatial and temporal experience of cogent messages in a portable three-dimensional format.

Artists’ creativity and printers’ ingenious techniques have kept pace with all that twentieth-century technology can offer to the art of book production. In the 1960s, there was a radical change in printmaking. Artists stopped being concerned with the chemistry of ‘fine’ printmaking and became interested in the final image, causing a new collaborative arrangement to develop between painters, sculptors, and craftsmen. New media, photographic aids, mass production, and a diversity of materials (including aluminum, canvas, rubber, mylar, vinyl, and other plastics) advanced a tendency toward three-dimensional work introduced through collage, assemblage, die-cutting, and the use of molds, and gave rise to the multiple object. There was a crossover of ideas: methods used in graphic editions came to be used in the creation of illustrated books.

Donna Stein, Deputy Director of the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City is also a curator and essayist. She has worked as an art historian and curator for more than 30 years, moving between Los Angeles and New York City, Europe and Asia.

Language. English