SCHEMES & VARIATIONS
Stuttgart and London: Hansjörg Mayer, 1981. First Edition. Paperback. Paperback. Single volume (6.75” x 9”); 254 pages. With 185 plates. In white cardstock wrappers with illustrated dust jacket attached at the spine. In English with German translation. Schemes & Variations was published on the occasion of a one-man exhibition of Williams’s serial work at the Gemeente Museum, The Hague. It includes “13 Variations on 6 Words of Gertrude Stein,” 10 Autobiographical Sketches,” “Berlin, Berlin,” among others, along with a list of Williams’s books, a short biography, and a list of recent exhibitions. Some creasing and marks on the jacket, with significant creasing along the spine and wear at tail and corners. Small mark on fore-edge and tail. Pages are clean. Very good. Very good. Item #16040
Williams was a poet and an artist who embraced a variety of visual art forms, from printmaking and painting to conceptual and performance art. He was an important contributor to the concrete poetry movement and he was a member of Fluxus, the avant-garde group of artists founded in the early 1960s by George Maciunas. Williams was the author of many books, such as Sweethearts (1967) and An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), he was a professor and visiting artist at several colleges and universities, and he served as editor of Something Else Press from 1966-1970. He had a significant influence on Pop artists such as Richard Hamilton, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg. While born in the U.S., Williams spent much of his life in Europe; he died in Berlin in 2007. His archive was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 2020.
Price: $45.00