Black Book by Christopher Wool

Published in 1989, Black Book marks a moment when Wool’s work stirred the New York art scene. His bold and rebellious word paintings have since become canonical: white canvases in which stenciled all-capital black letters spell out phrases like “sell the house sell the car sell the kids.” The planar use of the word as a painterly method has come to symbolize Wool’s stark energy. These works typify a brash, generative moment that resonates still.

The drawings reproduced in Black Book have been exhibited in their own right, notably in 2013, as part of the most comprehensive examination of Wool’s career to date, organized by New York’s Guggenheim Museum and traveling through 2014 to The Art Institute of Chicago. Transposed into an artist’s book, they suggest at least as many layers and diverted streams of information as Wool’s word paintings do. They also index, without conforming to, a crowd of artistic cultures: street art, Conceptual art, Pop. The text-based work finds a paradigmatic and tactile expression in this distributive format. Black Book is printed on smooth wove paper in an edition of 350, each copy being signed and numbered by Wool on the colophon. The book was co-published by Thea Westreich, New York, and Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and produced by Studley Press, in Massachusetts. Westreich and her husband, Ethan Wagner, who have published artist’s books since the late 1980s, are noted collectors of Wool’s work.