S everal entries in this catalogue illustrate an obvious and important connection between the Abrams family’s art collecting and their art book publishing—namely, that they published monographs about many of the artists they collected. These monographs were usually prepared with the close cooperation of the artists themselves; one, Tom Wesselmann by “Slim Stealingworth” (1980), was even authored by the artist pseudonymously.
But there are subtler connections as well between art collecting and art book publishing, a few of which I may be in a position to elucidate. I worked under Bob Abrams for almost twenty years at Abbeville Press, the publishing house he and his father Harry founded in 1977, after Harry left his eponymous firm. Harry Abrams I never had the privilege of meeting—in fact, he died before I was born—but at times he seemed to be present in the office. Certain publishing discussions—particularly those concerning sales and marketing— would elicit from Bob an anecdote beginning “Dad always said . . .” For example: “Dad always said that it wasn’t a bad thing for an ad to look a little horsey. When he was working on the Charles Atlas account, one of their ads was printed out of register [blurry], and it got the biggest response ever—it made people stop and look.” (I paraphrase, unfortunately— there’s nothing like the passing of a mentor to make you wish you’d used the Voice Recorder app more frequently.)
One analogy with collecting is implicit in the terminology of publishing: the process of choosing which books to publish is known as acquiring a list. Like the art collector, the publisher most often chooses among the works available in the marketplace at any given time—which will depend to a great extent on his budget and reputation. In other cases, the publisher will elect to commission a new work on a subject of his choosing—which may or may not turn out how he envisions. Ultimately, the publisher’s acquisitions must be guided by his own taste and expertise. Even if his only goal is to publish books that sell (and that is rarely a publisher’s only goal), he must have a keen sense of how any given book both fits into its category and stands out within it. This naturally leads publishers to specialize, often quite narrowly; today most large publishing lists are assembled by a team of acquiring editors, each with his or her own specialty: one editor focusing on interior design, another on pop culture, another on contemporary art. . . .
All the more extraordinary, then, is the breadth of the list that Bob published at Abbeville Press, usually with the help of only a small editorial team. The photograph on the previous page, showing Bob surrounded by Abbeville books circa 1983, is characteristic. Here we have the art of the museums, represented by Audubon’s Birds of America and John Singer Sargent; multiple strands of contemporary art, represented by Botero, Liberman, and Wesselmann; the artist’s book, represented by the first American edition of the Codex Seraphinianus; and popular culture, represented by Fairground Art and Treasures of Disney Animation Art. That last title is noteworthy for containing a preface by Bob himself, one of the few pieces of his own writing he published. In this preface, Bob draws an extended comparison between the cartoons, or preparatory drawings, of Renaissance masters like Raphael and the cartoons of Walt Disney, concluding of the latter that “one should not deny them the status of fine art because they came into being for a commercial purpose.” This evocation of Raphael et al. foreshadows another theme that would come to prominence on the Abbeville list in the years after this photograph was taken—the art of the Italian Renaissance, a subject Bob had studied as an undergraduate at Harvard under such eminent scholars as Sydney Freedberg.
Clearly the Abbeville list reflects the same drive to explore art in all its variety— “without boundaries”—as we see in the Abrams Family Collection. To range this deeply through art requires a certain experience and maturity; Bob, like his father before him, had lived with enough art and learned enough about art history to come to the simple conclusion that great art has taken many forms, in many contexts. One thing I heard Bob say on several occasions—usually in a tone of wonderment before a new discovery—was, “There’s a lot of good art out there!” In a 1972 interview with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, his father elaborated the point:
We love pictures, we love art and we love to live with art all around us. This has been our life style. Art for us does not consist of any particular movement, but rather a variety of movements that depict the kind of world we live in, so that’s why you see in our collection the variety of Pop Art, Optical Art, Abstract Art, Representational Painting, Hard-Edge Painting, Shaped Canvases, etc. I don’t see how Andy Warhol, with his intense interest in the supermarket and movies could be expected to produce the same kind of image that a highly intellectual painter like Robert Motherwell would produce.
One offhand-seeming part of Harry’s statement deserves further attention: that “art depict[s] the world we live in.” This points, I think, to a key aspect of how he and Bob saw art, one that no doubt drove the acquisition of many books on the Abrams and Abbeville lists, and many pieces in the Abrams Family Collection. In our own interactions, whenever I waxed on about the formal qualities of art, Bob would firmly direct my attention back to its content—to him, great artists did not express a merely aesthetic vision, nor a purely inner one, but tried to show us something about the world as they saw it. Bob was delighted, for instance, by the work of the contemporary Chinese photographer Wang Wusheng, which we published in the book Celestial Realm (2005). The gnarled pines, serrated outcroppings, and drifting fogs that Wang captured in his explorations of Mount Huangshan in Anhui province bore a striking resemblance to the landscapes of traditional ink wash painting— underscoring to Bob that the Chinese literati were concerned not only with the calligraphic and the poetic, but with conveying the true essence of the scenery around them.
In publishing, of course, Bob could pursue his curiosity beyond art per se, into popular culture, lifestyle, practical nonfiction, and even children’s books. Abbeville Press became even more of a family affair in 2007, when his wife Cynthia joined the firm to helm its children’s list. In this area of publishing, Bob and Cynthia displayed a characteristic breadth of taste and brought forth many gems overlooked by other houses, such as Flip-o-saurus by the German illustrator Sara Ball. Other American publishers might have considered Flip-o-saurus too European, too old-fashioned, or too expensive to produce. But Cynthia correctly foresaw the delight that children would take in lifting the flaps of this board book to make a thousand different dinosaurs, and Flip-o-saurus and its sequels have gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. For Bob, the children’s list offered an opportunity to return to the question of how artists see the world, which he took as the starting point (and title) for a twelve-volume series designed to teach visual literacy, How Artists See.
The analogy between publishing and collecting applies not only to the publisher’s list as a whole, but to the individual book as well—for every art book presents a curated collection of works of art in reproduction. In The Voices of Silence, published in 1951, at the dawn of the modern art book, Andre Malraux wrote presciently about the promise and perils of art in reproduction, “the museum without walls.” He foresaw that it could open up to us the entire world of art but also subject it to strange distortions—for example, by reproducing a miniature at the same size as a fresco. As one who had grown up with art, and art publishing, Bob was instinctively aware of these pitfalls, and always tried to present art honestly in Abbeville books: a painting had to be reproduced in full, with margins all around, not just in detail, and the temptation of too-sweet, heightened color (“chromatic” was the pejorative he used) was strictly to be avoided.
If the reproductions had to maintain a certain decorum, the books that held them were free to pursue their own kind of beauty. Bob brought a collector’s eye and discernment to the manufacture of art books (as well as the advantage of his father’s long-standing relationships with fine Japanese printers). All Abbeville volumes tended to have better paper, thicker boards, and nicer cloth; some were truly monumental, such as the facsimile of the original Double Elephant Folio edition of Audubon’s Birds of America—with pages measuring 27 by 40 inches—that Bob published in cooperation with the National Audubon Society in 1985. Bob also continued his father’s practice of financing the publication of artist monographs with limited editions. Sometimes these took the form of a signed and numbered print by the artist—like the Tom Wesselmann aquatint in this catalogue. A more novel practice was to bind a certain number of the books in canvas and have the artist paint on the cover— like the Helen Frankenthaler and Karel Appel monographs in this catalogue (published by Abrams and Abbeville, respectively). And more unusual still is the limited edition of Abbeville’s Arnaldo Pomodoro monograph, which came in a metal case bearing a brass relief by the sculptor.
Right: Bob Abrams presenting the facsimile of Abbeville Press’ The Birds of America to Russell W. Peterson, President of the National Audubon Society in 1985
But Bob’s identities as publisher and collector perhaps converged most closely when he selected the works of art to be reproduced in a monograph. As highly as he regarded the vision and creativity of artists, Bob knew from long experience that they were not always the best editors of their own work. He also knew that the art critics and historians tasked with writing artist monographs might sometimes pass over compelling works that did not easily find a place in their narratives. So, for monographs on artists he was personally involved with, he would occasionally make a preliminary selection of works himself, from prints spread out on a conference table or tacked up around a studio. Once I saw him do this in the presence of the artist, who followed along behind him with a look of nervous anticipation but also great respect. And that is how I remember Bob as a publisher—someone with the personal authority to do what others could not.
