The Lithographs of Ralston Crawford [signed by editor]

39 x 29cm. Oblong hardcover with illustrated dustjacket, 72pp. Inscribed to artist Tom Phillips "with warmest personal regards, Dick Freeman". From the jacket: "Ralston Crawford is best known as a painter, but during the past twenty years he has come to occupy an important place in graphic art. The more than one hundred lithographs he has produced since 1940 provide a rich opportunity for study of the development of a twentieth-century American artist whose incisive pictorial comments are deeply concerned with humanity. 'The apparent changes in Crawford's art from one year to the next,' writes Richard B. Freeman in the critical essay which introduces this volume, 'are more in idiom than in language, more in form than in content. Overseas Highway in 1940 is just as much Crawford as Crack-Up in 1949 or Dying Toro in 1959; the basic clarity and control which lie at the root of his unmistakable style are the same in each.' These three and thirty- six other lithographs, eight of which are in colour, are reproduced. As painter, printmaker, and photographer, Ralston Crawford has made substantial contributions to contemporary American art; as a teacher in more than a dozen professional schools and university art departments, he has demonstrated his interest in young artists and his ability to communicate with them. Included in this volume is a provocative address delivered by the artist at the University of Alabama, in which he discusses the role of the artist in the twentieth century and his place in the university community. In a brief statement on lithography, Crawford writes of the importance of the medium to him and of the production of lithographs in Paris. Mr. Freeman has compiled for this volume a complete catalog of Crawford's lithographs from 1940 to 1961, which Gustave von Groschwitz, curator of prints at the Cincinnati Art Museum, has described as 'everything a print catalog should be'". Jacket is slightly chipped with some closed tears at spine, otherwise complete and unclipped.…