Frazetta - A Retrospective (Alexander)
(1994 - Alexander Gallery)

Note that the front cover has no typography and only the name FRANK FRAZETTA appears on the spine as a title. This was the catalogue of New York's Alexander Gallery's major Frazetta exhibition of the early 90's. I guess if any book was to have what I've been calling 'the museum mystique', this would be the one. 32 oil paintings are faced with a blank white page, with only the caption appearing on it, which includes the title, the medium & size, as well as the owner acknowledgement. Two other oil painting reproductions are found elsewhere in the book. You also get 13 other color works, mostly preliminaries for certain paintings. Finally, add to that, 23 finished drawings and 55 pages from his sketchbooks, many with large-ish pieces among them. As you can see, the drawings are allowed to dominate in this volume. This 200-page book doesn't score very high on The List because so many pages are given over to text, price lists, comic model sheets and sketchwork, not to mention the nine works that are turned sideways. It's probably just as well, since, at this writing, there aren't any copies available under $ 200 (because of its relative inaccessability, we will not be including it in our recommendation process for Frazetta books). If you had the wherewithal to secure this book, after previously getting the higher recommended Underwood retrospectives, THE PILLOW BOOK, the FRAZETTA SKETCHBOOKs, ROUGH WORK, the Ballantine collections and LIVING LEGEND, you would still be getting 11 color pieces (half of them impressive preliminaries) that you haven't seen 'well-presented' yet and another 16 such drawings & worthy sketches.