PRESENTATION/ASSOCIATION FIRST EDITION OF FROM BAUHAUS TO OUR HOUSE, BOLDLY INSCRIBED BY TOM WOLFE TO FILM DIRECTOR PAUL BARTEL

(BARTEL, Paul) WOLFE, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, (1981). Octavo, original blue and yellow cloth, original dust jacket. $1800.

First trade edition of Wolfe's satiric look at trends in American architecture, a key presentation/association copy boldly inscribed by him with his characteristic flamboyant flourish to the maverick film director of Eating Raoul and other cult classics, "To Paul Bartel, Tom Wolfe."

"Wolfe's writing is the most vivid instance of the role of the journalist in American literature, a role that has played a major part in the development of 20th-century prose" (Critique 23:2). In Bauhaus Wolfe "shows how a status-related infatuation with things European in the 1930s and 40s led to a redirection of American music, art, psychology and especially architecture that was ultimately reductive, excessive and nonsensical" (Bellamy in Purple Decades). On publication Bauhaus won praise by critics who said Wolfe "continues to dazzle… this book is the hottest topic in Manhattan's architectural salons." This distinctive copy is inscribed by Wolfe to film director, screenwriter and actor Paul Bartel who, like Wolfe, achieved fame for a brilliantly satiric take on American culture. Bartel's "taste for farce, black humor and social satire was reflected in films like Eating Raoul, Death Race 2000 and Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills." Critic Vincent Canby praised Bartel, who died in 2000, for a cinematic vision that was "full of smiles, punctuated here and there by marvelously unseemly guffaws, but most of the time it works its little wonders quietly. The comic style is purposely flat, plain and ordinary, like a piece of Pop art" (New York Times). "First printing, 1981" on copyright page: issued the same year as a signed limited edition (350 copies), no priority established. Featuring over 30 in-text and full-page photographic illustrations; with duplicate half title, one bound after title page.

A fine presentation copy with a memorable association.