Modernism Rediscovered (First Edition)

SHULMAN, Julius (essays Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Owen Edwards, Philip J. Ethington, Peter Loughrey, Wim de Wit & Benedikt Taschen). Modernism Rediscovered. Köln: Taschen, 2007. 3 vols.

Large Folio (38 × 30 cm). All three volumes and slipcase bound in cream cloth with colour pictorial covers. Spines with colour embossed titling — each volume in a distinct colour corresponding to the volume's cover design and endpapers. 1,008 pp total. Vol. I: 1939–1958; Vol. II: 1958–1964; Vol. III: 1964–1981. Over 1,500 colour and duotone photographs throughout. Text in English, French, and German. First edition, first printing.

Julius Shulman (1910–2009) was, in the judgment of everyone who worked alongside him and everyone who has written seriously about the visual culture of postwar America, the most important architectural photographer of the twentieth century. He was discovered in 1936 by Richard Neutra, who encountered him at a job site and asked him on the spot to photograph the Kun House he had recently completed — an assignment Shulman completed with a borrowed camera. Over the following seventy-three years, working almost exclusively in California, he built an archive that eventually reached 260,000 images and documented virtually every significant building produced by the Los Angeles modernist tradition: Neutra's houses, the Case Study Houses of Arts & Architecture magazine, John Lautner's extraordinary concrete structures, Albert Frey's desert buildings, the corporate towers of Craig Ellwood, and the private houses of clients who had access to the greatest architects of the century and chose them specifically. During his active years, between 1936 and 2009, it is likely that Shulman reached more individual viewers than any other photographer.

What Shulman understood, and what his photographs enact with absolute consistency across seven decades, is that an architectural photograph is not a record of a building but an argument about what a building means. His compositions — the chosen light, the chosen angle, the decided presence or absence of human figures — constructed an idea of California modernism as an ideal of rational, graceful, sun-filled living that was as persuasive an advertisement for the modern way of life as anything produced in the postwar period. His 1960 photograph of Pierre Koenig's Stahl House, with two women in evening dress reflected in the glass walls above the night panorama of Los Angeles, remains the single most reproduced image in the history of architectural photography.

Publisher Benedikt Taschen surveyed the 260,000-strong archive over two years to find the hidden gems and shining moments of Shulman's illustrious career, and sensitively whittled the selection down to 1,008 pages split into three volumes. The result is not merely a monograph but a sustained argument across three volumes and seven decades of work: that the buildings Shulman photographed — many of them overlooked or forgotten, some subsequently demolished, others now restored to recognition — constitute a visual history of California modernism that no other single archive can parallel. It is the mix of previously unseen, quiet portraits and intimate family shots that make us look again, and rediscover modernism as the title asks of us.

The architects represented across the three volumes include Albert Frey, Louis Kahn, John Lautner, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, Craig Ellwood, Bruce Goff, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Oscar Niemeyer, among many others. The essays by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Owen Edwards, Philip J. Ethington, Peter Loughrey, and Wim de Wit provide scholarly and biographical context across the three chronological volumes.

Very good. Some foxing to cloth of slipcase and sporadically to volume covers. Internally all three volumes generally fine: clean and bright. Some minor markings to front-most pages of first volume due to pages sticking slightly.

Please note: This is a very large and very heavy three-volume set. Additional postage costs will apply. Please contact us for a shipping quote before purchase.

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Catalogue Number: HH000624