Objects

Abstract painting meets theosophical spirituality in 1930s New Mexico: the first book on a radical, astonishingly prescient episode in American modernism

Founded in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in 1938, at a time when social realism reigned in American art, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) sought to promote abstract art that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. The nine original members of the Transcendental Painting Group were Emil Bisttram, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce and Stuart Walker. They were later joined by Ed Garman. Despite the quality of their works, these Southwest artists have been neglected in most surveys of American art, their paintings rarely exhibited outside of New Mexico. Faced with the double disadvantage of being an openly spiritual movement from the wrong side of the Mississippi, the TPG has remained a secret mostly known only to cognoscenti.

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group aims to address this slight, claiming the group’s artists as crucial contributors to an alternative through-line in 20th-century abstraction, one with renewed relevance today. This volume provides a broad perspective on the group’s work, positioning it within the history of modern painting and 20th-century American art. Essays examine the TPG in light of their international artistic peers; their involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy; the group’s sources in the culture and landscape of the American Southwest; and the experience of its two female members.

This definitive study of the 1980s Jamaican Dancehall scene features hundreds of exclusive photographs and an accompanying text that capture a vibrant, globally influential and yet rarely documented culture that has mixed music, fashion and lifestyle since its inception.

With unprecedented access to the incredibly exciting music scene during this period, Beth Lesser’s photographs and text are a unique way into a previously hidden culture.

Dancehall is at the center of Jamaican musical and cultural life. From its roots in Kingston in the 1950s to its heyday in the 1980s, Dancehall has conquered the globe, spreading to the USA, UK, Canada, Japan, Europe and beyond.

This jam-packed visual history tells the story from its roots to its heights from the vantage of the true, respected insider. In the early 1980s, as Jamaica was in the throes of political and gang violence, Beth Lesser ventured where few others dared, and this book is a never-before-seen record of the exciting, dangerous world of Dancehall.

12 in x 12 in

216 pages

Release date: October 18

Published by Apartamento Publishing S.L.
October 2021
Third edition

Dimensions: 240 x 285mm
Binding: Hard cover
Pages: 120

New York Living Rooms is the first instalment in Dominique Nabokov’s holy trinity of interior photography works, re-issued by Apartamento Publishing more than two decades after it was first published in 1998. Originally commissioned as a photo essay for the New Yorker in 1995, it offers a frank and intimate study of the interior living spaces of some of the city’s most fabled cultural figures, including Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Allen Ginsberg, and Joan Didion.

With nothing added and nothing altered, Nabokov calls these images her interior ‘portraits’. Some spaces are indulgent and ostentatious, others shelter the bare necessities, but Nabokov simply records them all for her fellow voyeurs and leaves us to decipher the rest. Long out of print, this updated edition brings back to life an era of New York City history, seen through Nabokov’s original Polaroid photos and the original introduction by English poet James Fenton. It also sets the stage for the following editions in Paris and Berlin, which Apartamento will be re-issuing later in 2021.

Published by Apartamento Publishing S.L.
First edition, June 2021
Dimensions: 240 x 285mm
Binding: Hard cover
Pages: 116