The Catalog

In the spring of 1982 a book dealer I knew asked me if I would like to design his special list of books on Louise Nevelson, Alexander Calder & David Smith. I of course said yes and began to design the pages using snippets and parts of their work in the layouts. Now this was before computers and the dealer only had this huge electric typewriter which he used to type out his descriptions. The hard part was that he had to fit his descriptions to my layouts and not the other way around. We both were pleased with the results, and off I went to teach out west for a few months. When I came back the dealer told me that while I was gone Louise Nevelson’s gallery had called him threatening a law suit because of the use of her work without her permission or because the catalog made use of different parts of her work misrepresenting her art. The dealer laughed at them and said please do sue me or something like that. He told them that this catalog was designed by a highly regarded artist and that it was a honor for Nevelson to have such a nice homage etc. My response was oh yes I would love to go to court over this, think of all the publicity. Of course the stupid fools at Pace Gallery backed down when they realized how stupid they would look, not to mention all the money that it would have cost them to take us to court. I found the catalog the other day while going through some stuff and thought I would post some of the pages.