Clown Paintings Hardcover – October 1, 2002

as a clown painting collector, I am the target audience for this book! That said, there are so many great ones in here!

Bought this for a friend who likes vintage clown art. She said "It's the most $#*&'?@ amazing book ever!"

The book was nicely packed, and fast delivery.I bug againThanks

I love this book. I put it out on the coffee table and my guest pick it up to look thru it - over and over as I do.

With 'Clown Paintings' (2002), idiosyncratic actor, author, and director Diane Keaton has produced the kind of offbeat creative work that is sorely lacking in American culture today. 'Clown Paintings' is just what is appears to be: a slim compendium of presumably amatuer clown paintings which were happily discovered at swap meets, yard sales, bargain bins, and thrift stores.What makes 'Clown Paintings' surprising is that Keaton treats the sixty-six paintings as oddball if serious pieces of work, and pointedly avoids treating them as banal, ironic objects of kitsch or high or low camp. Created roughly over a period of thirty years, all of the paintings were made by unknown artists, and many are unsigned, further obscuring their etiology.Keaton and Los Angeles gallery owner Robert Berman each contribute a brief but fascinating essay. Keaton, a well-known comedian herself, perceives clowns as perpetually bright-eyed innocents and eternally hopeful beings that are easily wounded but fundamentally incapable of learning from negative experience or their own mistakes.Noting that clowns were acceptable enough subjects for Picasso, Beckmann, and Matisse, Keaton believes that clowns images "expose the human experience at its most transcendent on one hand, and on the other, its most tragic." Berman, who thinks "one clown painting alone may look like a silly indulgence," dreams "of a gallery full of clowns, floor to ceiling, walls of clowns - so powerful that the viewers would be overwhelmed."Keaton has asked a broad range of mostly-American comedians to comment on the subject, including Woody Allen, Don Knotts, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Ben Stiller, Chevy Chase, Sandra Bernhard, and Jerry Lewis. Not surprisingly, most of those solicited find both clowns and their painted images appalling, frightening, repulsive, or subtle metaphors for psychopathology. With few exceptions, these short commentaries are insightful and touching rather than merely glib or clever. Based on the written selections, it appears clowns are rarely if ever a neutral subject. Like garden gnomes, clowns seem to be "loved by millions, and loathed by millions more."What 'Clown Paintings' only barely touches upon is the clown as an archetypal trickster figure, a psychopomp, a mythical straddler of at least two conflicting states, a figure perpetually at the crossroads, a subversive, borderland creature who manifests in dreams, childhood memories, literature, popular entertainment, consumerism, world history, and in the gray area of symbol and metaphor.Clowns are and have been everywhere and nowhere at once throughout history, like witches. As with all numinous images, they both reveal and conceal simultaneously. Are clowns predominantly good or predominantly evil? Trustworthy or innately figures of suspicion? Well-intended or conspicuously devious? Social outcasts or masters of their fates? Where does the man end, and the clown artifice begin? Are clowns partially transvestite figures? Or gussied-up memento moris? Like glamorized, inverted modern Medusas, clowns and clown images are capable of eliciting at least a brief fit of paralysis in their audience or viewer.Despite their apparent obviousness and bluntness, these paintings, which underscore several American traditions, proudly maintain their mystery, even when their dignity seems to be faltering. Regardless of the viewer's discipline or angle of approach, their secrets remain inscrutable and thus safe forever. Curious readers willing to give these pieces their time will be adequately rewarded, for, ultimately, 'Clown Paintings' is an eccentric, funhouse-mirror meditation on the strangeness of being human.

This book is pure inspiration. I love the comments by the comedians as well as the images themselves. It is a comment on laughter and how we use it to explain our world.

Great book in a very good condition. Very inspirational images.

Very nice coffee table book, with a nice variety of clowns, some scary, some funny, all enjoyable to look at.