At first glance, Bram van Velde is interesting because of Samuel Beckett. It was Beckett’s name, at any rate, that prompted me to search out the slim, paperback Evergreen Gallery Book. The volume, printed by Grove Press in 1960, is the fifth in a series on contemporary artists (De Kooning, Stuart Davis, and Philip Guston, for example) in which, as the back jacket explains, “each work, perceptively presented by an outstanding authority, is richly illustrated.” This rich illustration, in the case of Bram van Velde, includes nine black and white prints, much as you might expect, with an additional twelve color plates, tipped-in—that is, glued onto the pages along their top edge only. It’s a process that hardly seems practical, production-wise. Guide marks on the pages suggest that it might have been a human, and not a machine, who preformed this meticulous pasting. Nevertheless, I’m glad someone took the trouble, because, as I flip through the book, it appears to me as if these plates have truly been hung on the pages—very much as the paintings they replicate once would have been in, you know, a gallery.
