Artists' Postcards: A Compendium

by Jeremy Cooper

Over the last twenty years an increasing number of artists have turned to expressing themselves through postcards. Whether by way of installation, collage, addition to, or alteration of existing postcards, or the production of postcards themselves, many prominent artists employ the medium in some form. Artists’ Postcards traces the origin of artists’ fascination with postcards from the early 1900s but with a focus on the contemporary, revealing the significant number of artists who have made creative and unusual artworks in postcard form.

 

With 400 images of postcards created by many well-known artists, Artists’ Postcards is the first critical guide to the subject. From surrealists to Fluxus and conceptual artists, this book includes an array of historical and contemporary postcards by such artists as George Grosz, Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, Susan Hiller, Joseph Beuys, Ben Vautier, Dieter Roth, Ray Johnson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gavin Turk, Tacita Dean, Gilbert and George and Rachel Whiteread.

 

Artists’ Postcards will be of interest to artists and graphic designers, as well as to postcard collectors.

Genres: Art

344 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2012

About the author

Jeremy Cooper is a writer and art historian, author of six previous novels and several works of non-fiction, including the standard work on nineteenth century furniture, studies of young British artists in the 1990s, and, in 2019, the British Museum's catalogue of artists' postcards. Early on he appeared in the first twenty-four of BBC's Antiques Roadshow and, in 2018, won
the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Ash before Oak.