DAMIANI Catalogue page
Stock is limited.
Please contact the studio to purchase.
Jenny Lynn’s EYEBOOK — a work she conceived and edited — is a unique collection of 60 remarkable images that feature the eye, by historic and contemporary artists, from the famous to the lesser-known. The book is arranged chronologically, from the 1500s to the current era, and presents an exciting mix of painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, and architecture. Ranging from the sensual and surreal to the abstract, expressionistic and humorous, EYEBOOK features such artists as Magritte, Man Ray, Dali, Kusama, Wegman and Warhol. Lyrical quotes by noted authors and thinkers about vision, seeing, and the eye – including Blake, Proust, Poe, Sartre, Kerouac, and Billy Collins – appear throughout. Published by Damiani of Italy, in 2015.
EYEBOOK: Sixty Artists. One Subject.
$45 signed.
Hardback, 8.5 x 8.5 inches, 132 pages, 60 illustrations.
EYEBOOK Collector's Edition.
$250 signed and numbered.
8.5 x 8.5 inches, 132 pages, 60 illustrations.
Hardback with linen slipcase. Limited edition of 100 signed and numbered copies. Includes a signed and numbered print by Jenny Lynn.
If the eyes are indeed the mirror of the soul, then Jenny Lynn’s EyeBook is as soulful as it gets. With a deft curatorial hand, Lynn matches a collection of iconic images — photographs, paintings, prints, drawings — with masterfully culled companion quotations from poets, artists, philosophers, scientists and sages..... Without a doubt, the eyes have it.
- Steven Rea, film critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer
Jenny Lynn’s EyeBook
A review by Jon Naar, Copyright 2016
But first a disclaimer: Among the images that constitute the main body of Jenny Lynn’s EyeBook: Sixty Artists. One Subject. is a photograph of mine (Eye Window) that I shot in Puebla, Mexico in 1962 accompanied most appropriately by the Yiddish Proverb, “The eyes are the mirror of the soul.” I am indeed honored to be included in the illustrious company of contributing artists such as Odilion Redon, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Philip Guston, Roy Lichtenstein, Paul Gaugin, Yayoi Kusama, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol, sculptor Louise Bourgeois, cartoonist R. Crumb, and fellow photographers Andreas Feininger, Man Ray, Herbert Bayer, Ralph Gibson, Lee Friedlander, Jenny Lynn, and forty other contributors. What is so distinctive about EyeBook, is author Lynn’s balancing or countering these beautiful images with a perceptive selection of captions. Each one is afforded a full page alongside the image with text that matches and amplifies the meaning of the picture. Thus we get Franz Kafka writing “Looking on oneself as something alien, forgetting the sight. Remembering the gaze”, illuminating Redon’s The Eye like a Strange Balloon Mounts toward Infinity; Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be”, offsetting Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonte (A Week of Kindness)”; Andre Breton’s wonderful “The man who can’t visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot”, saluting Warhol’s Myths: The Star; and Helen Keller’s heart-wrenching “Of all the senses, sight must be the most beautiful”, sharing with us the inner magic of Lynn’s Eye Dream.
This incomparably happy marriage of the vivid visual images and the brilliantly expressed texts is celebrated by Chris Schwartz’s elegant design of the book’s 8 3/4”-square format along with its impeccable production by the Bologna, Italy-based publisher Damiani Editore. I have just one minor “beef”: the author of EyeBook is far too modest when she states, on the wonderful cover (by Elliott Curson), that this truly outstanding work of art was “Edited (my underline) by Jenny Lynn.” Of course, it was edited by Lynn, but it was also conceived, collected, composed, collated, and effectively created by her. EyeBook is nothing less than a masterwork that will become a collector’s item. So buy two copies, one for yourself and one for your best friend!
Jon Naar (1920-2017) was an internationally acclaimed photographer and author/co-author of twelve books, including most recently Getting the Picture and The Birth of Graffiti.