Surrealism Usa
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • Museum Quality
Surrealism Usa
Scott Rothkopf , Robert Lubar , Michael Duncan , Robert Hobbs , Peter Blume , Arshile Gorky , Andre Masson , Kay Sage , Joseph Cornell , Salvador Dali , Isamu Noguchi , Jackson Pollock , Yves Tanguy , and Max Ernst
Manufacturer: Hatje Cantz Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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  4. With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940-1965 (Chazen Museum of Art Catalogs) With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940-1965 (Chazen Museum of Art Catalogs)
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ASIN: 377571524X
Release Date: 2005-03-15

Book Description

While Surrealism became unfashionable in Europe in the 1930s, it enjoyed increasing popularity across the Atlantic at the same time. Surrealism USa, the catalogue to the exhibition at the National Academy of Design, Surrealism USA, traces the history of this movement in the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s by examining its manifestations throughout the country--from Social Surrealism and California Post-Surrealism to Magic Realism and the beginning of Abstract Expressionism. It chronicles the wide influence of Dal' on American art, the Surrealists' response to war and fascism, and the relationship between Surrealism and abstract art. With over 100 paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings, this definitive survey brings together the work of American artists like Joseph Cornell, Peter Blume, Kay Sage, Isamu Noguchi, Arshile Gorky, and Jackson Pollock--with that of Europeans in exile during World War II, including Salvador Dal', Yves Tanguy, Andra Masson, and Max Ernst.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Museum Quality.......2005-09-05

I was fortunate enough to see the Surrealism USA exhibit on tour in Phoenix in July. The collection was astounding. I found this book in the Phoenix Art Museum Store, however, $50 seemed like a lot to spend on a book while on a weekend vacation. I was thrilled to find it on Amazon for much less. The book is beautiful, the photographs are museum print quality and oversized, mostly one or two on each page. The book contains a thorough history of the surrealism movement in the United States during the last century. I would not hesitate to purchase it again.
Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space
Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
  • Illuminating a visionary but in black-and-white
Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space
Ana Maria Torres
Manufacturer: Monacelli
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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  5. Brancusi: Revised Edition Brancusi: Revised Edition

ASIN: 1580930549
Release Date: 2000-10-02

Amazon.com

Two entirely disparate aspects of our present zeitgeist--the embrace of multicultural complexity in place of its former suppression, and the current elision of landscape design with "real" sculpture and art--might seem to be as adolescent as our own postmodern age. Both, however, were fully embodied in the work of the great Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi (1904-88), which as early as the 1930s was finding reconciliation in cultural rootlessness, and eroding the line between landscape and sculpture. Ana Maria Torres's handsome, erudite, and broad-ranging study of Noguchi's public works drives these two points home. Complete with a wealth of black-and-white photographs of both his completed works and models of his unrealized ones, the book prompts us to consider from new angles some of the unique accomplishments of this very enterprising artist who incorporated elements of ancient outdoor sites into exterior work that provided an uncannily fitting complement to the very midcentury-modern architecture that it was commissioned to accompany.

Here, more than 75 projects are presented and considered; they are divided into seven chapters (each of which focuses on a subsection of Noguchi's vast output, including playgrounds; "earthworks"; gardens, plazas, and parks; memorials; fountains; interiors; and public sculptures) and engrossingly narrated by Torres. Each chapter is kick-started by a Noguchi excerpt about the work in question. The thematic organization of the book means that we keep bouncing back to the 1930s just when we are familiarizing ourselves with the projects and artistic preoccupations of Noguchi's final decade. But that format also underscores how his style and ambitions evolved in a uniquely personal manner, even as they seem to reflect perfectly the spirit of their particular age.

The exciting work that is included here is almost too vast and varied to be summarized, although a small sampling of highlights might include Noguchi's gardens for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, for which he convinced architects Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Bernard Zehrfuss to relocate a mobile of Alexander Calder in order for him to expand on his own ideas (needless to say that Calder was not pleased); the famous sunken garden for Yale University's Beinecke Library, with its three bold marble sculptures--of a pyramid, a ring, and a cube--and marble paving work that was inspired by that of Michelangelo's Piazza del Campidoglio, which Noguchi adored; the massive pylon water fountain and sprawling circular plaza that he designed for downtown Detroit from 1971-79, much to the delight of legendary mayor Coleman Young, who prompted him to design a subterranean amphitheater just beneath it for the city's annual Ethnical Festival; and, three years before his death, the garden of the Domon Ken Museum of Photography in Sakata, Japan: an enclosed court of water that runs over four stone terraces, with a single granite pillar rising up near the center--surely one of the most serenely beautiful vistas in modern architecture, even as reproduced here (as are all of the photos, somewhat unfortunately) in laconic black and white.

There is some less monumental work here that fascinates and delights, too, including the boldly biomorphic and drop-dead mod undulating ceilings that Noguchi designed for St. Louis's American Stove Company building (1948) and Rockefeller Center's Time-Life Building (1947, now shamefully destroyed), plus potentially terrific unrealized work, such as plans that he devised in the 1960s (with beloved collaborator Louis Kahn) for a playground for New York's Riverside Park.

There is one thing that this very satisfying retrospective makes clear about Noguchi: instead of letting the contradictions of his own ancestry undermine his work, he used them to his advantage in a way that--for all of the diverse global influences of his oeuvre--struck this reviewer as quite distinctly and resourcefully American. --Timothy Murphy

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars Illuminating a visionary but in black-and-white.......2001-05-27

Noguchi is, unfortunately, not as well known by the public as the major artist that he was. This book does a good job of showing the relationship between conception and the final realization of his major public spaces and public sculptures (the intention of the book), but a full understanding of Noguchi requires seeing his other works, such as his furniture and stage designs. The major drawback of the book is that the illustrations are entirely in black and white. While Noguchi's works were primarily about shape and their relationships and distribution through space, it would have been nice to see the photographs of the finished spaces and sculptures in color to get a better sense of their ambience. This book is appropriate for sculptors, environmental artists, architects, larger public libraries, and libraries in academic institutions with art programs that include instructors open to a broad range of ideas inart....
Objects of Design: The Museum of Modern Art
Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
  • Objects of Design from The Museum of Modern Art
Objects of Design: The Museum of Modern Art
Bevin Cline , Tina di Carlo , Christian Larsen , Luisa Lorch , Christopher Mount , Peter Reed , Peter Behrens , and Isamu Noguchi
Manufacturer: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0870706969
Release Date: 2003-09-02

Book Description

Showcasing selected works from The Museum of Modern Art's superlative architecture and design collection, Objects of Design features a wide variety of industrial and domestic artifacts by great designers of the modern period, from early masters such as Hector Guimard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Josef Hoffmann to contemporary practitioners including Droog Design, Ettore Sottsas, Gaetano Pesce, Hella Jongerius and others. Some of the objects represent turn-of-the-century designs of the Vienna Secession, Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement; others are Bauhaus and de Stijl explorations; still others show Charles and Ray Eames and other American designers of the second half of the 20th century; representations of the Italian design revolutions; and contemporary manifestations of familiar genres using radical new materials and techniques of manufacture. The book's 360 color plates not only reveal the range of aesthetic viewpoints in design since the late 19th century but together trace the historical development of the Museum's celebrated design collection. In the introductory essay, Paola Antonelli, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, explores the history of modern design as well as the story of the museum's collection and its influence on the history of modern and contemporary design itself.

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars Objects of Design from The Museum of Modern Art.......2004-04-18

MoMA canonized modern design as it did 20th-century art, and this anthology of pictures and expert texts highlights a collection of 3,708 objects that range in size from microchips to a helicopter. About a tenth of those are illustrated in nine thematic sections. Many are icons, but there are a few surprises, especially among recent acquisitions, where the inventive use of materials supplants functional beauty. Paola Antonelli, MoMA Curator of Architecture and Design, describes the collection as presenting a history of ideas and realizing a part of Alfred Barr's dream of a unity of the arts. She explains how the old selection criteria of truth and beauty have changed while retaining some of their old authority. It's comforting to know that relativism does not yet extend to firearms, making MoMA's collection a gun-free zone. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)
Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • Insight Noguchi
  • all encompasing noguchi - just take your time
Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World
Bonnie Rychlak , and Isamu Noguchi
Manufacturer: Steidl
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 388243970X
Release Date: 2004-07-02

Book Description

Description: In my long experience as an intimate witness of Noguchi's work, I believe that whatever the external entities of his coordinate translating may be, they represent a faithful manifest of the intellectual and harmonic being, Noguchi. In my estimation, the evoluting array and extraordinary breadth of his conceptioning realizations document a comprehensive artist without peer in our time. --R. Buckminster Fuller A Sculptor's World is the long-awaited reprint of Isamu Noguchi's 1968 autobiography. It remains Noguchi's most comprehensive statement about the art that brought him international acclaim. Told in words and images, A Sculptor's World is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the life and work of this seminal artist or a general interest in the art of sculpture. Also reprinted in this volume is the original foreword to the book by R. Buckminster Fuller, from which the above quote is taken.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Insight Noguchi.......2007-09-10

This is one beautiful book! Gorgeous reprint, true in form and spirit. A great read too as it is written from Noguchi's point of view and explains his first 42 years. Insightfull. Too bad it was slightly damaged...

5 out of 5 stars all encompasing noguchi - just take your time.......2004-08-03

Although I read the first publishing of this book (1968), i can only assume that the most recent printing lives up to the earlier edition. For a student of art, landscape architecture, furniture design, or sculpture this is a wonderful book to have in your collection. Spanning decades, noguchi explains his motives and reasons behind the pieces he so lovingly created. The text can be thick at times, but that is not necesisarily a bad thing. There is a wealth of information to be had; one only has to find it. There are quite a few photographic plates of noguchis work, however they were all in black in white except for a few. This is not necesisarily a bad thing either, as colorful pictures can be easily found on the web or in other (less auto-biographical) books. All in all, noguchi has much wisdom to offer, as long as you have the patience and interest to match the subject matter.
Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics: A Close Embrace of the Earth
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • cosmic enlightenment
Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics: A Close Embrace of the Earth
Louise Allison Cort , and Bert Winther-Tamaki
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0520239237

Book Description

Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) is renowned for his stone and bronze sculpture, his gardenlike installations in public spaces, and his furniture designs. Far less familiar, but no less important, is Noguchi's work in clay, which he executed in three intensive sessions in 1931, 1950, and 1952, all during visits to Japan. The pieces included in this elegant volume and the accompanying exhibition comprise the first major museum presentation of Isamu Noguchi's ceramics and the introduction of the work of major postwar Japanese ceramic artists with whom Noguchi collaborated or interacted. Supported by four linked essays and opulently illustrated in full color and black and white, Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics highlights the sculptor's struggles with cultural identity and his experimentation with the conflicts between modernity and tradition.
Noguchi's sculptures in the medium of clay reveal informal, spontaneous, and humorous aspects not visible in less flexible media such as bronze or stone. Through clay, Noguchi probed unresolved personal issues surrounding his ambiguous cultural identity as the son of a Japanese father and American mother. Because Noguchi made his ceramics in Japan, his work also creates links to a diversity of approaches within the ceramic world of Japan. These range from traditionalists such as Kitaoji Rosanjin and the Living National Treasure designates, to primitivists exemplified by Okamoto Taro and Tsuji Shindo, to avant-garde experimentalists led by the Sodeisha group. An understanding of the nature and scope of the concerns Noguchi expressed through clay is crucial to understanding his work as a whole, and consideration of Japanese ceramic artists in the 1950s reveals a largely unknown genre of modern Japanese art.
Copublished with the Smithsonian Institution

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars cosmic enlightenment.......2004-01-24

Noguchi is truley a master. The most complete catalog of this artists work in clay. As a ceramic sculpture student, this book has given me a world of new insight ang inspiration. Noguchi has been an influence for me for some time and it is wonderful to have such a wonderful resource. Louise Allison Cort has done a remarkable job and I look forward to future catalogs.
Isamu Noguchi
Average customer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • Accessible, significant, colorful, inexpensive ...
  • Great reference for Sculpture Class
Isamu Noguchi
Sam Hunter
Manufacturer: Abbeville Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0896590038

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Accessible, significant, colorful, inexpensive ..........2004-10-14

Greatest Hoosier artist ever? ... is a leading question. The sadly neglected tale of a shy 13 year-old boy traveling alone across the sea and the landscape to LaPorte, Indiana for early schooling and known there as "Sam Gilmour", was later to become universally known as one of the world's greatest artists -- Isamu Noguchi (a future Jeopardy question?).

Accessible, significant, colorful, inexpensive, the Modern Masters volume by Bruce Altshuler is easily the most accessible guide to Noguchi's works of a lifetime. This edition is distinguished by large illustrations, many in color and stylishly presented, yet in a less expensive paperback format. It is perhaps the best primer for recognizing the historic significance of the wide ranging yet simple, spiritual aesthetic gifts from this complex soul to the rest of us.

4 out of 5 stars Great reference for Sculpture Class.......2000-03-27

This book is filled with examples of Noguchi's artwork, mostly sculpture. I am currently enrolled in a Sculpture Class and found viewing the pictures a helpful reference for the sculptures I produced. It is most important as an artist to be influenced by other artists, and I feel that this book was successful in doing just that.
The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • sculptor, heartlander, world traveler, aka
The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders
Masayo Duus
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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  5. Noguchi East and West Noguchi East and West

ASIN: 0691127824

Book Description

Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles as the illegitimate son of an American mother and a Japanese poet father, was one of the most prolific yet enigmatic figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Throughout his life, Noguchi (1904-1988) grappled with the ambiguity of his identity as an artist caught up in two cultures.

His personal struggles--as well as his many personal triumphs--are vividly chronicled in The Life of Isamu Noguchi, the first full-length biography of this remarkable artist. Published in connection with the centennial of the artist's birth, the book draws on Noguchi's letters, his reminiscences, and interviews with his friends and colleagues to cast new light on his youth, his creativity, and his relationships.

During his sixty-year career, there was hardly a genre that Noguchi failed to explore. He produced more than 2,500 works of sculpture, designed furniture, lamps, and stage sets, created dramatic public gardens all over the world, and pioneered the development of environmental art. After studying in Paris, where he befriended Alexander Calder and worked as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, he became an ardent advocate for abstract sculpture.

Noguchi's private life was no less passionate than his artistic career. The book describes his romances with many women, among them the dancer Ruth Page, the painter Frida Kahlo, and the writer Anaïs Nin.

Despite his fame, Noguchi always felt himself an outsider. "With my double nationality and my double upbringing, where was my home?" he once wrote. "Where were my affections? Where my identity?" Never entirely comfortable in the New York art world, he inevitably returned to his father's homeland, where he had spent a troubled childhood. This prize-winning biography, first published in Japanese, traces Isamu Noguchi's lifelong journey across these artistic and cultural borders in search of his personal identity.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars sculptor, heartlander, world traveler, aka .......2004-10-19

"Sam" Gilmour, heartlander, great sculptor, world traveler, free spirit, aka "Noguchi"--
The sadly neglected tale of a shy 13 year-old boy traveling alone to LaPorte, Indiana for early schooling "as a true American" and known there as "Sam" Gilmour, was later to become widely known as one of the world's greatest sculptors -- Isamu Noguchi (a future Jeopardy question?). A new biography "The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey Without Borders" includes revealing details and childhood snapshots for the first time from the archives of Lilly Library at Indiana University. This biography, only recently published in English, unfolds like a panoramic tapestry of life ... colorful, insightful, personal. It includes his stressful adaptations to cultural duality, personal relationships with notable companions, and his bonding with the idea of "mound builders" of native Americans.

After traveling alone across the ocean and the country, he began his new, Midwestern experience by hiking down the remote dirt road for the first time past the farms, fields, and woods to the Interlaken boarding school, feeling overwhelmed by the "vastness, the sweep, the panorama of that open Indiana countryside." Soon, when fateful WW I events abruptly closed the boarding school, he lived alone on the abandoned premises for a month "like Daniel Boone". Finally good fortune had him transferring to the public LaPorte High School and living with a locally prominent family in town, he graduated four years later in 1922. Typically, he had a newspaper route. Aspiring to be an "all-American boy", the yearbook included his illustrations and classmates elected him "Biggest Bull-Head."

And so goes the first 100 pages. The next 340 pages of this epic follow his footprints through the Sands of Time, continuing 'Sam's Splendid Adventure' to the peaks of artistic expression in dance theatre, architecture, and sculpture. Along the way, this "Hoosier" sojourns with many of the greatest artistic spirits this world has ever seen.

On a very personal note, I met with Noguchi a couple of times ('70s) in my New York work, and had once played a basketball game ('50s) at his Indiana high school (big deal there, then). Regrettably, I didn't realize at the time that our paths had previously crossed, albeit if only in space-time. Somewhere, sometime, "somewhat" dedicated individuals must necessarily put out a wake-up call to the Arts in Indiana patrons at colleges, museums, and libraries on this wholly unusual and neglected chapter of American cultural history at the turn of the 20th Century with its demographic changes of nation building immigration, new industrialization, and new urbanism. Fittingly, the Noguchi Foundation has an extensive curriculum guide available. His centennial birth date is November 17, 2004.
Noguchi East and West
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • early Indiana schooling, profoundly American duality
Noguchi East and West
Dore Ashton
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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  1. Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space
  2. The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders

ASIN: 0520083407

Book Description

The life of the Japanese-American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was an unending spiritual and physical voyage between the two cultures of his birthright. In this definitive biography and critical study, Dore Ashton maps Noguchi's spiritual journey both in the events of his life and in the milestones of his art: the sculptures, gardens, public spaces, and stage decors that gained force and significance from his double heritage.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars early Indiana schooling, profoundly American duality.......2004-03-31

This volume is one of the more comprehensive reviews of Noguchi's life and work. Having met with Noguchi a couple of times at the premises of the future Museum, I regret not having then the insight now made accessible by our new digital lifestyle resources. His cross-cultural, multi-media artistry reflects Midwestern adolescence with Pacific overtures. Ashton states "Noguchi's biography is rich in hints of the sources of his formative years, and while no single source can be isolated, some are more suggestive than others. Dr. Rumely, the progressive educator who founded the Interlaken School in Indiana where Noguchi began his American education, had placed Noguchi in the home of ... a Swedenborgian minister. The boy was thrust into a situation in which the thoughts that had helped shape the modern movement -- through such figures as Blake, Emerson, Poe, and Baudelaire -- were sacred. ...the notion of a universal rhyming scheme had attracted nineteenth-century artists who wished to see some kind of elemental unity in the universe; who relished the endless possibilities of analogy."

Combining influences of the industrializing modernity of small cities and towns of the Midwest at this time, and seemingly inspired both by ancient Japanese "tumuli" and the Native American Mound Builders, his mnemonic response to the sights of such landscapes "got me going". With this amplified illumination into Noguchi's background and more familiarity with his abiding interests in "earth sculpturing", perhaps new educational paradigms should be considered in our thinking of art, architecture and American historic preservation.
Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design
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    Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design
    Vitra Design Museum
    Manufacturer: Vitra Design Mus
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Hardcover

    GeneralGeneral | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
    GeneralGeneral | Interior Design | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
    Noguchi, IsamuNoguchi, Isamu | ( M-O ) | Artists, A-Z | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
    GeneralGeneral | Design & Decorative Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
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    Similar Items:
    1. Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World
    2. Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space

    ASIN: 3931936325
    Spaces of the Mind: Isamu Noguchi's Dance Designs
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      Spaces of the Mind: Isamu Noguchi's Dance Designs
      Robert Tracy
      Manufacturer: Limelight Editions
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Paperback

      Noguchi, IsamuNoguchi, Isamu | ( M-O ) | Artists, A-Z | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
      ClassicalClassical | Dance | Performing Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
      GeneralGeneral | Dance | Performing Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
      GeneralGeneral | Theater | Performing Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
      StagecraftStagecraft | Theater | Performing Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
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      EntertainersEntertainers | Arts & Literature | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
      GeneralGeneral | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
      ASIN: 087910953X

      Book Description

      One of the greatest artists of the past century, Noguchi worked with an extraordinary range of materials to produce an equally extraordinary array of sculptural creations. Among the most powerful and haunting were his designs for theatre, especially the theatre of dance. This book celebrates that sculpture with splendid photographs of 37 set designs, mainly for Martha Graham, and with commentary on each that tells the story of the dance as well as the story behind the sculptor's creation, usually in his own words. This handsome, large-format book is a treasure for both art lovers and dance lovers.

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