Avedon, The Sixties, Signed to Elaine Kaufman
[Signed by Richard Avedon to Elaine Kaufman] Avedon, Richard. Avedon, The Sixties. First Edition. 1999. Book and dust jacket are both in very condition. Co-written by Doon Arbus. Book is inscribed on the flyleaf, “For dear Elaine, across the years, Dick 2000.” Text by Doon Arbus.
Elaine Kaufman, to whom this copy is signed, is not one of the subjects depicted in this book, but her eponymous restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side, which opened in the 1960s, was the unofficial clubhouse some of those who are, most particularly fashionable literary types like Normal Mailer. Consisting mostly of full page-photographs, this book covers the mid-to-late 1960s and the people and events that made those years so fascinating: the Beatles, Janis Joplin, Abbie Hoffman, Rudolph Nureyev, Andy Warhol and the Factory, Twiggy, Penelope Tree, Allen Ginsberg, the Civil Rights Movement, Simon and Garfunkel, and much more. Book is mostly images, supplemented with short essays from the subjects themselves.
“Peace is a very complicated concept. When the lion gobbles up the lamb and wipes his lips, then there’s peace. Well, I ain’t for that peace at all.”
--Abbie Hoffman