THE NANCY BOOK by Joe Brainard

Description:

Joe BrainardErnie BushmillerNancy1963197810050

Leonardo da VinciR. CrumbLarry RiversWillem de Kooning

Albert MobilioBookforum

Brainard was a master of lifes microcomedies, the unheard laughter that courses through any truly alert consciousness. And Nancy, with that bow like a pulsating noodle in her frizzy hair, is as good a Descartes as any for our age.
Albert Mobilio, Bookforum

From 1963 to 1978 Joe Brainard created more than one hundred works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified and complicated by the incongruity of her presence. The Nancy Book is the first collection of Brainards Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of over fifty works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before.

In The Nancy Book, Joe Brainards Nancy traverses high art and low, the poetic and pornographic, the surreal and the absurd. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, and Willem de Kooning, Brainards Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality.

These works exude a beguiling balance of mischief and innocence, irreverence and wonder, spontaneity and calculation. Together they accumulate into a sophisticated and complex work of great wit and joy, rich with metaphor, and equal parts surprise and subtlety.