In the spring semester of 2025, I debuted an upper-level undergraduate art history course called The Book as Art: A Hands-On History from 1750 to Today. It was as much a survey of Western art told through artist books as it was a history of artist books. The tension between the two was part of what inspired the course. I had long wondered why artist books are so often excluded from mainstream art history courses, and why art history is often absent from book arts curricula. I aimed to insert artist books back into the flow of art historical movements and styles. And if they fit uneasily, so much the better — I would rather use artist books to trouble the canon of Western art than try to create a canon of artist books.
Even before I began my research, I knew that some periods would be easier to address through artist books than others. I had no trouble conveying the core tenets and technical innovations of Surrealism through books alone. Meanwhile, Abstract Expressionism was a glaring absence in my syllabus. Toward the end of the semester, which proceeded chronologically, I posited speculative new periods to address artist books from the 1990s–2020s (perhaps these can be the subject of a future blog post). However, some of the most interesting periods were those with some artist books but not many.
In the rest of this blog post and the following one, I will introduce two examples of this generative friction: Pop and Minimalism. In my view, each is a case where a discovery was made more quickly through books than other media and, as a result, artist books moved on to other questions.
Arguably, two of the most influential book artists could be considered Pop: Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha. Furthermore, the early Pop collages of Eduardo Paolozzi echo in books by Benjamin Patterson and Italian artists like Stelio Maria Martini, Michele Perfetti, and Gianni Bertini, which use similar cut-up strategies to explore the libidinal economy of advertising and mass media.[1] Why, then, did books fall by the wayside when Pop migrated to the United States? And why have the books that were produced been underappreciated? (For example, books were a major part of Andy Warhol’s oeuvre but hardly figure in his popular reception.)[2]
Gianni Bertini. Oppure. Torino: Galleria il punto, 1970. Photo credit: The Idea of the Book.
Pop art, as I would teach it in a survey course, is about the appropriation of everyday life into art. But Pop appropriation differs from Dada’s readymade strategy: artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol translated the mass media they appropriated back into traditional media like paint on canvas. The erosion of the art-life boundary also worked the other way: Pop reminded viewers that art existed in the everyday and not a separate realm.
For artist books, crossing the art-life boundary, in either direction is less radical, less subversive. Unlike Lichtenstein’s painted cartoons, when Dieter Roth appropriates comics and coloring books, the medium remains the same: ink on paper. Arguably, such works are more like assisted readymades than true appropriation. Roth sequences the books at random and removes content (by die cutting holes) rather than creating it. Like Dada, Roth challenged authorship through radical negation, whereas painters like Warhol or Lichtenstein retained a signature style even when appropriating content.
Dieter Roth. Gessamelte Werke Band 7: Bok 3a und 3b. Stuttgart: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1974. Photo credit: The Idea of the Book.
While Pop painting comments at once on fine art and mass media, Roth’s books mainly comment on the latter. (When Roth does challenge traditional media, it is by refusing to use them or abide by their standards. For example, a painting by the likes of Lichtenstein is meant to endure, no matter how ephemeral its pop culture subject matter, whereas Roth’s Literaturwurst — shredded printed matter mixed with lard and spices then stuffed into a sausage casing — were meant to be perishable.) Just as the continuity from printed source to printed artwork lessens the power of appropriation, the realization that artist books can immerse a reader within them yet simultaneously exist in real space is less subversive than, say, a Brillo box by Warhol. Unlike a painting, which remains a window into another reality, a book is eventually closed. Anyone who ever finished reading a book, fully engrossed until the very last word, then found a place for it on a shelf had already crossed the boundary from art into the everyday.
In summary, printed books had already demonstrated that the distinction between high art and low was not to be found in the medium. So too had books recognized their physical existence in the everyday. Artists who made books had to find other ways to pursue the problems that motivated Pop art, to investigate mass media and dissolve the boundary between art and life.
My next post will address similar concerns at play in Minimalism.
1. For works by these artists, see: Maffei, Giorgio and Maura Picciau. Il libro come opera d’arte / The Book as a Work of Art. Corraini Edizioni, 2006.
2. Fortunately, there is an excellent study by Lucy Mulroney, which nicely distinguishes between making books and publishing. While offering close readings of Warhol’s books, she emphasizes how important the collaborative and social aspects of publishing were to Warhol. Mulroney, Lucy. Andy Warhol, Publisher. The University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.
