Category Archives: Artists’ books

Artists’ books

Les Illuminations

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), Les illuminations. Lithographs by Fernand Léger, preface by Henry Miller. Lausanne: Éditions des Gaules, 1949. One of 395 copies. Graphic Arts Collection 2014- in process

During the Second World War, the French artist Fernand Léger (1881-1955) lived and worked in the United States, teaching for a brief time at Yale University. He returned to France in 1945 and worked on several livres d’artistes late in his career. In 1948 Léger sent a series of drawings to the American author Henry Miller (1891-1980), who wrote The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (Ex 3857.19.386) to accompany Léger’s circus imagery.

Although the artist decided not to use this piece, Léger went back to Miller the following year and requested that he write a preface to his next project, Les Illuminations. Miller agreed and his text is reproduced in facsimile of his own handwriting.
The prose poems of Les Illuminations were written by Arthur Rimbaud between 1873 and 1875, and partially published in La Vogue in 1886. Léger chose a selection of these poems to include with 15 of his lithographs, 6 of which were stencil colored under the direction of the Swiss publisher Louis Groschaude.

One of the poems Léger chose to use was Parade, which has been translated as:

“Sturdy enough jesters. Several have exploited your worlds. Devoid of need, in no hurry to make play of their brilliant faculties or their knowledge of your conscience. How ripe they are! Eyes dazed like the summer night, red and black, tricolours, steel pricked with golden stars; features deformed, leaden, pallid, on fire; hoarse-throated frolickers! A cruel swagger of faded finery! – Some are young – how do they view Cherubino? – endowed with frightening voices and dangerous resources. They’re sent out soliciting in city streets, decked out in disgusting luxury.”

Among Léger other book project are J’ai Tué (1918) and La Fin du Monde Filmée par l’Ange Notre-Dame (1919) both by Blaise Cendrars; Lunes en Papier by André Malraux (1921); and Liberté by Paul Éluard (1953). To read more, see Renée Riese Hubert, “The Books of Fernand Léger: Illustration and Inscription,” in Visible Language, 23, no. 2/3 (spring/summer 1989), p. 255-79 (Firestone Library (F) Z119 .J88).

A Four Dimensional Concrete Sculpture Happening

Born in Macon, Georgia, the poet and fine press printer Don Gray (194?-1999) moved to California after college. A motorcycle accident in 1965 resulted in the amputation of his right arm but this didn’t stop him from learning to set type and print with only his left hand. Gray established the imprint of Twowindows Press in San Francisco in 1967 and began making letter press poetry books. When his family moved to Berkeley in the 1978, so did the press. To earn a living, Gray worked as a high school teacher, eventually becoming head of his English Department.

In 1969, he wrote and printed a strip of paper with a poem and twisted it into a Mobius strip, leaving instructions as to how to cut the loop once you acquired it. We have not yet cut our Mobius Poem: Being a Four Dimensional Concrete Sculpture Happening, which sits happily in a clamshell box built by our book conservator at the time.

Don Gray (194?-1999), Mobius Poem (San Francisco: Twowindows Press, 1969). Series: Twowindows folio, 5. No. 30 of 100 signed copies. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) 2010-0461N

Other books by Gray include Little Un’s Book (1968); The Five Hours (1969); Dark Side of the Moon (1970); and The Saga of Sam & Martha (1978).

Nancy Holt, 1938-2014

American Land Art artist Nancy Holt, recently celebrated in the Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition New Jersey as Non-Site, died Saturday, February 8, 2014, at the age of 75. Holt delivered a keynote lecture at Princeton last October, speaking about the site-specific work she created in New Jersey both alone and alongside her late husband Robert Smithson.

Holt was born in Massachusetts but spent much of her childhood in Clifton, N.J. In recent years, she has lived in Galisteo, New Mexico. Her work was the subject of a retrospective, Nancy Holt: Sightlines, organized by Columbia University in 2011, which traveled to the Santa Fe Arts Institute, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and her alma mater, Tufts University, among other venues.

In a 2012 interview with Alastair Sooke, Holt spoke of visiting the American West for the first time with Smithson and the artist Michael Heizer. “I got off the plane in Las Vegas – the airport was out in the desert – and I remember feeling that my inner world and the outer world were one,” said Holt. “It was very powerful. I just felt connected to the place – as if the desert had been within me right along.”

When asked if she would call the experience an epiphany, she replied, “I don’t like that word, but it was a moment that changed me. I never was the same again. And my work evolved out of this central experience.”

The Graphic Arts Collection holds one of her early artists’ books, which was a remembrance of her Aunt Ethel. Nancy Holt (1938-2014), Ransacked: Aunt Ethel: an ending (New York: J: N. Jacobson & Son, Inc, 1980). Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize 2006-0095Q

Enveloppe-moi

Annette Messager and Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Enveloppe-moi (New York: Museum of Modern Art Library Council, 2013). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process.

According to the Museum of Modern Art Library prospectus, “Enveloppe-moi, by Annette Messager, is the ninth in a series of artists’ books and editions published by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art. This edition, conceived by the artist in Paris, comes to readers as something found deep in a closet or tucked under a bed, ready to be opened and brought back to light. Within separate enclosures, a handmade box contains a postcard correspondence between the artist and the writer/artist Jean-Philippe Toussaint; a letter and a photograph by Toussaint; and 10 photographic collages by Messager.

These contents could be souvenirs of an intensely imagined or experienced liaison, or clues to a secret history. The whole represents an enigmatic visual and verbal exchange.

Over a five-month period in 2011, Messager sent 15 postcards, one by one, to Toussaint. Each card features on one side a black-and-white photograph of one of Messager’s preexisting artworks. The collection of postcard images presents a series of indefinite but suggestive images of obscured words, phrases, nets, and body parts.

Toussaint replied on the blank side of each postcard with brief comments, questions, and literary references apparently prompted by the image on the opposite side. A second set of postcards reproduces the same artworks by Messager, but these postcards are still blank on the writer’s side. At the artist’s suggestion, readers may consider sending the “virgin” postcards (as the artist describes them) to another correspondent.Messager also created 10 collages that visualize emotionally heightened (and slightly ironic) scenes from a fictional romance: a manipulated photograph of the artist as a young woman, trapped in a spider web–like net; a B-movie style image of a lover’s kiss; a playful, doodled image of a floating mermaid overlaying a dark installation of photographic memorabilia; artworks based on graphic representations of words such as “chaos,” “trouble,” and “hotel-fiction”—these and other images are as fantastical and personally expressive as the postcard exchange is restrained. They deepen the mystery of the boxed collection. Nine of these collages appear as pigment prints in the center well of the portfolio.

A tenth collage is stamped onto the cloth-covered box. (This collage also appears as an additional pigment print in the deluxe edition.) Messager’s handwritten title, Enveloppe-moi, is silkscreened on the red cloth covers of the box and two additional images are silkscreened on the inside of the box.

During the five-month correspondence, Toussaint photographed the quotidian circumstances in which he wrote on his side of Messager’s postcards. One digitally printed photograph by Toussaint, of a hand dropping a postcard into a postbox slot, can be found within a slot on an inside flap of the portfolio, along with Toussaint’s digitally printed letter.

Messager designed the portfolio and its contents in collaboration with the co-editors, the designer, and the binder. This edition was edited and produced for The Museum of Modern Art’s Library Council by May Castleberry, Editor, Contemporary Editions, MoMA Library Council, and Céline Fribourg, Founder, éditions Take5, Geneva. The text, the colophon page, and one of the title images were designed by Philippe Apeloig in Paris. The portfolio was bound and assembled by Mark Tomlinson in Easthampton, Massachusetts, using silkscreen-printed and stamped covers created by Annette Messager. “

Julio Cortázar and Julio Silva

Photograph by Laure Vasconi at Silva’s workshop (Paris, 1992).

In trying to understand contemporary artists’ books, we often ask which came first, the text or the images? For one of Latin America’s most acclaimed 20th -century writers Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) and his fellow Argentine Julio Silva (born 1930), that process evolved over time.

Print on Japan paper accompanying artist’s proofs of Discours du Pince-Gueule.

Chronologically, the first book that brings them together is Les Discours du Pince-Gueule, as Peter Standish notes in his book Understanding Julio Cortázar, “Not only was this the first such combination essayed by Cortázar, it was also the first of what would become many collaborative ventures with his friend….” [Peter Standish, Understanding Julio Cortázar (Univ of South Carolina Press, 2001)]. Published in Paris in 1966, the first edition of their book had a limited run of only 100 copies. This has become a very rare volume, with most libraries only collecting the 2002 edition.

It may not be obvious to those who are not fluent in French that the title is a neologism. Standish points out that Cortázar “made the Pince-nez flip down from the nose to the mouth (for which gueule is a vulgar slang word) and no doubt he also had in the back of his mind the term pince-san-rire, meaning a person with a dry humor.”

Detail of a photograph by Colette Portal (Saignon, 1979)

Portrait of Julio Silva by Julio Cortázar at the Place du Général Beuret house (Paris, 1965).

In the case of this first collaboration, Silva provided lithographs to complement text that Cortázar had already written for Les Discours du Pince-Gueule (1966). This later changed when Silva’s designs came first with the two collage books, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967) and Último round (1969) and then Territorios (1978). With Silva and other collaborators, Cortázar preferred to let them take the lead, writing that he had “a wish to walk alongside friends who are painters, creators of images, and photographers” (Territorios, 107). According to Standish, “by the seventies he was saying that he was writing because of the existence of their art, and pointing out that critics had paid a great deal of attention to literary influences upon him but not enough to a long list of artistic and musical ones.”

Opening from Discours du Pince-Gueule.

BIO 219_ JULIO ET JULIO SAIGNON PRES DE APT 1971

Photograph by Colette Portal (Saignon, 1979).

We are fortunate to have acquired not only the 1966 limited edition artists’ book but also many drawings and proofs that led to the first edition. We also acquired several albums of personal photographs from Silva and Cortázar, providing views of their friends and collaborations. The photographers include Pierre Boulat; Colette Portal; Yan Voss; and Cortázar himself. We are extremely grateful to Julio Silva for making this acquisition possible, which will undoubtedly inspire and inform generations of researchers.

Photograph by Pierre Boulat at Julio Silva’s home at the Rue de Beaune, Paris with Julio Cortázar and Olivier Silva (Paris, 1969).

Julio Cortázar, Les Discours du Pince-gueule. Illustrations by Julio H. Silva (Paris: M. Cassé, 1966). Edition of 100. Graphic Arts Collection. Purchased with the generous support of Stanley J. Stein, the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor in Spanish Civilization and Culture, Emeritus, in honor of Barbara H. Stein, Princeton University’s first bibliographer for Latin America, Spain and Portugal.

Unica T

Once a month during the academic year 1986-1987, the book arts collective Unica T published a typographic portfolio for the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (The German Academy for Language and Literature) in an edition of 70 copies. Each was an interpretation of the author read at the month’s meeting. The Graphic Arts Collection has acquired the set of nine portfolios, which feature the writing of Paul Verlaine, Ludwig Harig, and others.

Utica T (a fictitious person making real books) was a collaborative of five women, led by Ulrike Stoltz and Uta Schneider. When the group disbanded in 2001, the two artists continue to collaborate under the name ‹usus›. Schneider also works as a free lance designer in book design and typography, after twelve years as executive manager for the Stiftung Buchkunst (Book Art Foundation). Stoltz is professor for typography at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig.

Unica T, Erster Jahrgang. Veranstaltet die Deutshe Akademie Fur Sprache und Dichtung (Darmstadt: Unica T, 1986-87). 9 portfolios. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process.

NO, IT IS

NO, IT IS, 2012. Triptych of three flipbook films; HD video shown on 3 flat screens. (c) William Kentridge

The South African artist William Kentridge prepared and delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University in 2012. They can be seen here: http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/norton-lectures His exploration of various ongoing multimedia projects evolved into an exhibition, which just opened at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City.
http://vimeo.com/56083100

One segment of the show involves the translation of Kentridge’s 2012 flip book NO, IT IS, into a triptych of flip-book films shown on three flat screens, including Workshop Receipts, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Practical Enquiries.

The Graphic Arts collection is fortunate to hold one of the sold out copies of NO, IT IS, published by Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg. The Refusal of Time, a documentation of the creative process for the work of the same title, shown at Documenta (13), 2012 and published by Xavier Barral, Paris, is available at Marquand Library (Oversize N7396.K46 A4 2012q).

William Kentridge: No, It Is (Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, 2012). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2012- in process

Le dur désir de durer

The 1946 Paris partnership of Arnold Fawcus (1917-1979) and Pierre Bordas (1913-2000) led to only one Arnold-Bordas Edition, a livre d’artiste pairing Paul Eluard (1895-1952) poetry with drawings by Marc Chagall (1887-1985) entitled Le dur désir de durer (The Hard Desire to Endure). When Bordas left the following year, Fawcus established the Trianon Press in London and to increase distribution, several American companies including Grey Falcon Press in Philadelphia. By 1950, a second larger edition of Le dur désir de durer was released with an English translation.

Both editions include one pochoir (stencil) colored plate created at the studio of Daniel Jacomet (1894-1966), under Chagall’s supervision. Jacomet worked primarily on fine art reproductions for museums, preparing a collotype of the original painting or watercolor, which was then hand colored through a series of stencils to replicate the original. Editions were usually 300-500 and Jacomet had a large studio of women who did the cutting and coloring once he designed the stencils. The studio continues to operate under Jacomet’s son Bruno.

To get both Chagall prints, one needs to have both editions of the book.

For more information, read Sebastian Carter “Arnold Fawcus and the Trianon Press,” in Matrix 3 (GAX Oversize Z119 .M38q) and Emily Anderson, The Pursuit of Happy Results (Boston: David R. Godine, Published for members of Hoc Volo, [1991]) (Graphic Arts Collection (GA) NC139.S635 A54 1991)

Paul Éluard (1895-1952), Le dur désir de durer. Illustré par Marc Chagall ([Paris] Bordas, 1946, 1950). “Il a été tiré du présent ouvrage … 1.000 exemplaies sur vélin bouffant d’Alfa numérotés de 16 à 1.015 … Le frontispice en couleurs fut reproduit à la main dans les ateliers de Daniel Jacomet sous le contrôle de Marc Chagall”–P. [9]. Copy 179 or 1000. Inscribed by the author to Paul Gabriel Dolonne. Full red crushed morocco with gilt and blind tooling and block-printed endpapers, by Christine Hamilton. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize PQ2609.L75 D78q

Paul Eluard (1895-1952), Le dur désir de durer; illustrated by Marc Chagall ; with the English translation by Stephen Spender and Frances Cornford (Philadelphia: Grey Falcon Press; London: Trianon Press, 1950). “750 copies, numbered 1 to 750, reserved for the Trianon Press … 750 copies, numbered 751 to 1500, reserved for the Grey Falcon Press … The color frontispieces … were reproduced by hand in the workshops of Daniel Jacomet, Paris, under the supervision of Marc Chagall.” Copy 420 or 1500. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize PQ2609.L75 D7813q

Alpha Botanica

According to Sarah Horowitz, Alpha Botanica “began in the fall of 2004 with a few trial capitals and many sketches to ascertain the viability of a Yiddish-English book of poems illustrated with engraved images and capitals. From this grew designs for two sets of botanical alphabets, one Roman and one Hebrew.”

The printing of the first half was accomplished in 2006 by Chris Stern of Stern & Faye Printers, who unfortunately passed away before it could be completed. Arthur Larson of Horton Tank Graphics finished the book and Claudia Cohen bound the edition of 45 copies. Depicted behind each letter is a plant whose name begins with that letter. The list of plants and the colophon are found in the center of the volume.

Alpha Botanica, engravings by Sarah Horowitz ([Portland]: Wiesedruck, 2007). Copy 32 of 45. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2013- in process

http://wiesedruck.com/about/

Figures Made Visible in the Sadness of Time

Figures Made Visible in the Sadness of Time. Designed by Michele Burgess, poetry by Peter Everwine, etching by Bill Kelly (San Diego: Brighton Press, 2003). Copy 8 of 40. Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2004-0236Q

“This book was designed by the artists in close collaboration with the poet and Michele Burgess. The poems were printed letterpress by Nelle Martin and the etchings were hand wiped by the artists and printed with the assistance of Alvin Buenaventura. The tea-dyed linen cover bears a stencil that was hand cut by the artists and hand stamped through twelve templates by Sonja Jones. An original pochoir appears on the title page.” –Colophon

“Kelly has collaborated with the poetry of Peter Everwine to illustrate “Figures Made Visible in the Sadness of Time,” writes Marcia Manna. “The shape of a dragonfly is embedded as an etching on one page and also displayed on a long scroll, embellished with sparkles and vibrant shades of blue. Kelly said the image represents the fleeting moments when something is recognized and then disappears. ‘To be very literal about something means you are just seeing, and Peter operates in a world of transcendent beauty,’ Kelly said. ‘He’s one of the few poets I’ve worked with who understands art in a deep physical sort of way. The great thing about these books and art is that one doesn’t illustrate the other. One broadens the view of the other and it becomes something bigger.’”– “These books are also works of art,” by Marcia Manna (2004)

There is in me, always,
you and the absence of you.

There is in me, always,
that road that leads to a field
of flowers we once knew

in that place where you were young,
there, where Memory keeps a life
of its own in the dark,

like a plant that waits patiently
year after year, asleep and folded inward
until the appointed night arrives

when it stirs and wakes
and opens out—Oh dream flowering!
Darkness flowering into darkness!—

forms, figures made visible
in the sadness of Time.

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Alpha Botanica, engravings by Sarah Horowitz ([Portland]: Wiesedruck, 2007). Copy 32 of 45. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2013- in process

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Figures Made Visible in the Sadness of Time. Designed by Michele Burgess, poetry by Peter Everwine, etching by Bill Kelly (San Diego: Brighton Press, 2003). Copy 8 of 40. Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2004-0236Q

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