The book as an artistic expression in Brazil

Abstract

This article offers an introductory conceptual overview of the category “artist’s book.” We highlight some definitions of artists’ books, underlining the difficulty in establishing a classification that encompasses their complex formal and conceptual possibilities. Based on these perspectives, we present a Brazilian production of experimental and highly expressive artistic books that began in the 1920s and intensified in the 1950s, almost four decades before the milestones traditionally cited by some researchers as the emergence of the “artist’s book” category. The proposed trajectory invites a review of classifications that still oscillate between art book and bibliophile book, seeking to challenge these labels for some publications and deepen the debate surrounding the category, in light of the authors and ideas that permeate the article.