Category Archives: prints and drawings

prints and drawings

This Hunger….

Anaïs Nin (born Neuilly, France, 1903-1977), This Hunger (New York: Gemor Press, 1945). No. 28 of 50 with 5 color woodcuts by Ian Hugo (Hugh Parker Guiler, born Puerto Rico, 1898-1985). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2020- in process.

When Nin’s 1944 book, Under a Glass Bell sold out in three weeks, she and her lover Gonzalo More moved their printing press to a new home on East 13th Street, calling it Gemor Press after More’s initials. She wrote in her diary,

“As Gonzalo wanted the press to seem more businesslike, more impersonal, less like a private press run by writers, we had to find an appropriate place. The Villager had just moved out of 17 East Thirteenth Street. It was a small, two-story house. The ground level with a cement floor was suitable for the printing press. A narrow, curved iron staircase led to the second floor, which would be perfect for the engraving press. The house rented for sixty-five dollars a month, almost twice as much as the old studio on Macdougal Street.”

 

Their first book at the new location was This Hunger…., later expanded and incorporated into Ladders to Fire, She completed it in September 1945, noting in her diary that she “printed the one hundred and eighty-fourth page, the last of the de luxe edition of This Hunger” and went home exhausted. Although More wanted the business, Nin did the majority of the work, printing at least eight hours a day. The move was expensive and she owed money to everyone, saved in part by Henry Miller, another lover, who gave her $1,000, ”the first large amount he ever earned, which helped me pay off debts; with the rest he bought a cottage in Big Sur.”

 


According to volume 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin 1944-1947, in the mid-1940s Nin also had a relationship with Edmund Wilson (1895-1972). In reviewing This Hunger in The New Yorker November 10, 1945, he wrote:

“There is not much expert craftsmanship in This Hunger by Anaïs Nin but it is a more important book than either Marquand or Isherwood because it explores a new realm of material. Even Isherwood can do little more than add to an already long series another lucid and well-turned irony of the bourgeois world on the eve of war. But Anaïs Nin is one of those women writers who have lately been trying to put into words a new feminine point of view, who deal with the conflicts created for women by living half in a man-controlled world against which they cannot help rebelling, half in a world which they have made from themselves but which they cannot find completely satisfactory.”

He ends “I feel sure that Anaïs Nin has still hardly begun to get out of her intelligence and talent the writing that they ought to produce. This new book, like the one before it, has been published by Anaïs Nin herself. Anaïs Nin is at present a special cult, when she ought to have a general public.”

He sent her flowers and a set of Jane Austen. “He was hoping,” Nin wrote, “I would learn how to write a novel from reading her!”

 

Maya Angelou and John T. Biggers

https://achievement.org/achiever/maya-angelou/

Maya Angelou (1928-2014), Our Grandmothers. Lithographs by John T. Biggers (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1994). Lithographs and letterpress. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2020- in process


She stands
before the abortion clinic,
confounded by the lack of choices.
In the Welfare line,
reduced to the pity of handouts.
Ordained in the pulpit, shielded
by the mysteries.
In the operating room,
husbanding life.
In the choir loft,
holding God in her throat.
On lonely street corners,
hawking her body.
In the classroom, loving the
children to understanding.

Centered on the world’s stage,
she sings to her loves and beloveds,
to her foes and detractors:
However I am perceived and deceived,
however my ignorance and conceits,
lay aside your fears that I will be undone,

for I shall not be moved.
–Maya Angelou, Last stanzas from “Our Grandmothers” first published in I Shall Not Be Moved (1990).

When Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson) agreed to allow her poem “Our Grandmothers”  be used in a Limited Editions Club publication, she asked that it “be illustrated by her favorite artist, John T. Biggers, an internationally acclaimed muralist and printmaker. …And now, for the Maya Angelou poem, Biggers has created five monumental lithographs that synthesize his concepts for the soul of Black Africa and its American reincarnation, of ancient myth and contemporary reality.” [-prospectus]. In planning his contribution to the book, Biggers used several elements from his 1992 triptych entitled “Family Arc,” seen above.

Originally published in her fifth poetry book, I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), the poem’s 1994 printing had a limited run of 400 numbered copies signed by both the author and the artist. It was one of the largest-format books (17 3/4 x 22 inches) ever issued by the Club.

“Angelou had written four autobiographies and published four other volumes of poetry up to that point. Angelou considered herself a poet and a playwright and her poetry has also been successful, but she is best known for her seven autobiographies, especially her first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She began, early in her writing career, of alternating the publication of an autobiography and a volume of poetry. …[She grew up] with their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, the young girl experienced the racial discrimination that was the legally enforced way of life in the American South, but she also absorbed the deep religious faith and old-fashioned courtesy of traditional African American life. She credits her grandmother and her extended family with instilling in her the values that informed her later life and career. She enjoyed a close relationship with her brother. Unable to pronounce her name because of a stutter, Bailey called her “My” for “My sister.” A few years later, when he read a book about the Maya Indians, he began to call her “Maya,” and the name stuck.
—https://achievement.org/achiever/maya-angelou/

An unsigned obituary for John T. Biggers, published on January 29, 2001 in the Washington Post, mentioned their collaboration, describing him as ”a pioneering black muralist who became known for the epic sweep of his work in profiling the African American experience.” The piece continues:

“Dr. Biggers, who lived in Houston, founded the art department of what is now Texas Southern University in Houston in 1949. He directed the department and served on its faculty until retiring in 1983 to devote his time to his artwork. He had gained national attention in 1943, when his mural “Dying Soldier” was included in the landmark exhibition “Young Negro Art” in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. After he settled in Houston, his artwork, which was inspired by Mexican political muralists, became part of the very landscape of Lone Star schools and businesses.

…In 1994, he illustrated Maya Angelou’s poem “Our Grandmothers.” She had said that his art “functions as delight and discovery. He sees our differences and celebrates them. And in so doing, he allows the clans of the world to come together in respectful appreciation.”

 

 

What happens when a play is a flop but the poster is a hit?


Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872–1898), Avenue Theatre, A Comedy of Sighs! March 29, 1894. Printed by Stafford & Co. Ltd., Nottingham. Color lithograph and letterpress. Purchased by the Friends of the Princeton University Library in memory of Ben Primer. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2020- in process

Thanks to the Friends of the Princeton University Library, the Graphic Arts Collection has a new lithographic poster by Aubrey Beardsley, purchased in memory of Ben Primer (1949-2019).

[William Butler] Yeats and {George Bernard] Shaw had a mutual friend in Florence Farr (1860–1917), who had created Blanche in Widowers’ Houses. She became manageress of the Avenue Theatre in 1894, and set out with a group of others to flout convention with the production of avant-garde plays. Their season opened with Dr. John Todhunter’s The Comedy of Sighs and Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire in a double bill, but Todhunter’s play was a failure and was replaced by Arms and the Man, with Florence Farr as Louka….– W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955) pp. 281–4.

The poster (and program) announcing these two plays was design by the hot young illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, who Farr wisely commissioned to handle her advertising. It was his first and still, best known poster with a rare use of color. As soon as it was posted around town, all of London society began talking.

Already recognized for his infamous illustrations of Le Morte D’Arthur and Salomé (images first published in Pall Mall Budget magazine), Beardsley was seen as a controversial but hugely fashionable new artist. He associated with the British Decadents, inspired by the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler, along with the notorious Oscar Wilde.

The poster opened a Pandora’s box on the Decadents’ use of eroticism and sexual ambiguity in their imagery. Charles Hiatt described its initial reception “nothing so compelling, so irresistible, had ever been posted on the hoardings of the metropolis [of London] before. Some gazed at it with awe, as if it were the final achievement of modern art; others jeered at it as a palpable piece of buffoonery; everybody, …was forced to stop and look at it.” —Le livre, revue du Monde Littéraire 5 (November 1884): 356.

The Japanese influence in the title calligraphy and flatness of the overall design led to questions of racial blending, while the dot pattern over the female’s face and body were read as a suggestion of syphilis and sexual promiscuity. To research the topic further, see the soon to be released Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media by Rachel Teukolsky (Oxford University Press, 2020), selections already available on google books.

Here is one of several humorous pieces published in Punch, this one April 21, 1894. The magazine told the theater’s manager (in Cockney slang) to “ave a new poster,” obviously a pun on the word Avenue.

 See more: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/aubrey-beardsley

La victoire remportée par l’armée du roi


Almanach pour l’an de grâce M. DCC VIII. La victoire remportée par l’armée du roi commandée par / monsieur le Duc de Barvick sur les anglois et portuguais pres Dalmanza le 25 avril [The Victory Won by the King’s Army Ordered by the Duke of Berwick on the English and Portuguese Near Almanza on April 25] Paris, chez P. Gallays, rue Saint Jacques a Saint Francois de Sales, [1707]. Engraving in two sheets. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2020- in process

 

This spectacular depiction of the French victory over the Hapsburgs at the 1707 Battle of Almanza is the second of two French almanac prints recently acquired by the Graphic Arts Collection. Although printed in large runs and sold at low prices, these broadsides were often destroyed at the end of each year to make room for the new almanac print, making them quite rare in collections today.

 

In the large scene, James FitzJames, 1st Duke of Berwick (1670-1734), is seen with other officers after their victory. FitzJames was the illegitimate son of James Duke of York (later King James II) and Arabella Churchill (1648-1730, sister of John Churchill duke of Marlborough). http://www.spanishsuccession.nl/berwick.html. On April 25, 1707, he won a great and decisive victory at the Almanza, where an Englishman at the head of a Franco-Spanish army defeated Ruvigny, a Frenchman at the head of an Anglo-Portuguese-Dutch army. Vignettes on either side of the almanac show the 1707 battle and the subsequent surrender.

The last great event of the War of the Spanish Succession occurred on September 11, 1714, when his soldiers stormed Barcelona after a long siege. In that year, he was appointed a Knight of the Golden Fleece. This scene appears in a later almanac print.

Pierre Gallays (1677?-1749) was an engraver who made a career out of publishing large runs of popular prints with dramatic historical scenes. The son of a Parisian merchant, in 1702 he married Élisabeth-Louise de Heuqueville (died 1735), daughter of the Parisian bookseller Louis II de Heuqueville and widow of the printer/publisher Pierre Landry (died 1701). Gallays inherited the business Landry established and continued his success in marketing these patriotic prints.

 

Fin de la guerre ou la paix conclue …

Almanach pour l’année M. DCC XIV. Fin de la guerre ou la paix conclue entre les Princes Chretiens par leurs Plenipotentiaires assemblez à Ultrach 11e avril mil sept cent treize. [End of the War or the Peace Concluded between the Princes Christians by their Plenipotentiaries Assembled in Utecht April 11th 1713]. Paris, chez Gerard Jollain rue St. Iacques a l’Enfant Iesus, 1713. Engraving in two sheets, Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2020- in process.

 

 

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired two French almanach prints, the first of which is shown here. Thanks to curator Rachel Jacobs, Waddesdon Manor, and her exhibition “Glorious Years,” we know these almanacs were “created at speed, involving a team of artists, specialized engravers, poets, printers, and publishers. Printed in the thousands, they were relatively cheap and available to the middle classes. A calendar is essential for everyday life. …replaced annually [they] were not designed to last.”

During the height of their popularity, there may have been up to ten scenes published for a particular year by private presses, such as this one issued by the printer/publisher François Gérard Jollian (active 1684-1719). The scenes were sanctioned by the King to celebrate his victories. Here we see the signing of one of the treaties of Utrecht, also called Peace of Utrecht, which brought the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) to an end.

By the treaty with Britain (April 11), France recognized Queen Anne as the British sovereign and undertook to cease supporting James Edward, the son of the deposed king James II. At the top of the print are three allegorical figures of peace holding portraits of King Louis XIV and Queen Anne. Three personifications of war are at the bottom holding portraits of the failed rulers. Note the fireworks in the center cartouche. Along the sides are detailed borders presenting twelve different seals of European nobility.

 
 

Many of the same scenes turn up in a variety of popular prints, such as L’idée de la paix conclue entre les Hauts alliés et les françois dans la ville d’Utrecht le 11 avril et ratifiée le 12.me mai 1713, published in Amsterdam.

The “Opportunity” Art Folio

As a subscription incentive in 1921, The New Republic magazine published and sold Six American Etchings, a portfolio of fine art prints by major American artists including John Marin, Edward Hopper [left], and others (Graphic Arts GA 2007.01456).

When Forbes Watson took over as editor of The Arts magazine in 1923, he also published several portfolios of contemporary fine art prints (four appear in OCLC) under the series title The Arts Portfolio Series. Both these series are now found in the print departments of major American museums.

Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life editor Charles S. Johnson offered several promotions to his readers, beginning in December 1925 with a small advertisement that read “What could be a more welcome Christmas gift than The Book of American Negro Spirituals.”  Edited by James Weldon Johnson, the volume included 61 spirituals with arrangements by J. Rosamond Johnson and Lawrence Brown. No images are provided and no extra subscription accompanied the purchase.

The second “Opportunity special” was advertised in the December 1926 issue as a deluxe portfolio of six poetry broadsides with text by Langston Hughes and off-set lithographs by Aaron Douglas, each of which had appeared in the pages of the October issue. They were marketed as the Opportunity Art Folio [portfolio cover above] and thanks to the Beinecke Library, they can be seen in digital surrogates here: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu.ezproxy.princeton.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=15947286 . This is how they appeared originally:


Later, published as: Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), Six Poems (New York: Opportunity [Johnson], 1926) 6 leaves in portfolio.

The first poem, “Misery,” is accompanied by “Play De Blues.”
The second poem, “Down an’ Out,” joins “I Needs A Dime For Beer.”
The third poem, “Lonesome Place,” is together with “Weary As I Can Be.”
The fourth, “Bound No’th Blues,” joins “On De No’thern Road.”
The fifth, “Hard Luck,” is with “Ma Bad Luck Card.”
The sixth poem, “Feet o’ Jesus,” accompanies an untitled print.

 

 

The “Third Opportunity Special!” listed on the title page of the December 1927 issue was the small book entitled Ebony and Topaz (An Opportunity Collectanea). An Eldorado of Art and Literature by Distinguished Arts and Writers, selling for $2.00. Guaranteed to be ready for Christmas, it was to include two hitherto unpublished poems by Phyllis Wheatley, artwork by Richard Bruce, Frank Holbrook, Aaron Douglas, and Charles Cullen, along with stories, sketches, and poems by approximately 40 writers.

By 1928, the only special Christmas offer was a handsomely bound copy of Who’s Who in Colored America for $10, which would also get you a year’s subscription to Opportunity. Unfortunately no library in OCLC mentions a copy with a special binding.

Göttingen University Library


After Georg Daniel Heumann 91691-1759), Bibliotheca Büloviana Academiae, Georgiae Augustae donata Göttingae – La Biblioteca della Università di Göttinga – Di Universitäts Bibliothec zu Göttingen [Augsburg: Georg Balthasar Probst, 1760/70s). Hand colored engraving. Graphic Arts Collection 2020- in process

 

Inside Georg Daniel Heumann’s True representation of the City of Göttingen [also called Wahre Abbildung der königl. gross britan. und churfürstl. braunschw. lüneb. Stadt Göttingen, ihrer Grund-Lage, äusserl. und innerlicher Prospecte und der zur Georg Augustus Universitaet gehörigen Gebäude; gezeichnet und in Kupffer herauss gegeben] (1747), plate 7 is an engraving of the Göttingen University library. Founded thirteen years earlier in 1734, this ‘book hall’ was located in the converted rooms of the former Pauline monastery.

Later in the century, Augsburg publisher Georg Balthasar Probst (1732-1801) copied and colored the engraving to release as a vue d’optique or perspective print to be used with a zograscope or optical box. This reprinting has entered the Graphic Arts Collection of perspective prints.

“Initially, the Pauliner Church was part of a Dominican monastery founded in Göttingen in 1294. It represents an architectural style typical of the mendicant orders. In 1529, in the wake of the Reformation, the first Lutheran services were held in the Pauliner Church, since it was the largest church in town. Between 1542 and 1733, a newly founded secondary school, the so-called Paedagogium, was located in the building of the former monastery.

In 1733, Prince-Elector Georg August of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who, as George II, was also King of Great Britain and Ireland, decided to found a regional university in Göttingen. One year later, in 1734, the university library was set up in a hall belonging to the former monastery. Three years later, the ceremonial opening of Göttingen University took place in the Pauliner Church. The university also had its home in the former monastery, and the Pauliner Church went on to be used as the university church and as a venue for university events.”

…During the Second World War, in 1944, the Pauliner Church was largely destroyed …. From 2000 to 2006, the whole of the Historical Building was refurbished. Careful attention was paid to the reconstruction of the Historical Hall in the Pauliner Church on the basis of historical depictions. After only six months of work, the Historical Hall [below] was re-opened in its former guise on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition ‘Gutenberg and his impact’.”– https://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/en/about-us/portrait/history/paulinerkirche/

It is a nice complement to another bookseller print, one of Probst’s five allegorical prints to the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn.

Mercurius, Planetarum Quartus, Ejusque Influentia (Augsburg: Georg Balthasar Probst, 1700s). Hand-colored engraving. Graphic Arts collection, Princeton University Library. GA2007.03748

Artists of “Opportunity”

The artists of Opportunity, the monthly publication of the National Urban League edited by Charles S. Johnson, were always identified in the table of contents but almost never given further biographical details in magazine’s “Who’s Who” or other text. Here are some of the leading graphic artists from the late 1920s, before photography took over. Perhaps not surprisingly, some were Black and some White. Covers are printed on a tan stock that photographed grey here.

 

Winold Reiss, “Langston Hughes,” Opportunity 5, no. 3 (March 1927).
Winold Reiss (1886–1953) No information is provided by Opportunity, even in “Who’s Who.” A White German American artist, Winold Reiss arrived in New York City in 1913, where he soon began creating sensitive representations of African Americans and Native Americans. “Reiss’s depictions avoided the racist stereotypes common at the time.” Along with his student Aaron Douglas, Reiss illustrated The New Negro: An Interpretation, a collection of Harlem literary works by Alain Leroy Locke, the first African American Rhodes scholar.—Details from National Portrait Gallery.

 

 

Aaron Douglas, [Untitled], Opportunity 5, no. 5 (May 1927).
Aaron Douglas (1899-1979). “Douglas arrived in Harlem shortly after the publication of what was immediately recognized as a landmark publication: the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic titled, “Harlem: Mecca for the New Negro” [later published in The New Negro]. … [In New York, he studied] with German émigré artist Fritz Winold Reiss… and Du Bois, who gave him a job in the mail room of The Crisis. In 1927 … Douglas to join the staff of The Crisis as their art critic… and …illustrated God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse by James Weldon Johnson. Douglas became chairman of the art department at Fisk University while also remaining active in Harlem.—”Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist,” ed. Susan Earle (2007).

 

 

Aaron Douglas, [Untitled], Opportunity 5, no. 7 (July 1927).

 

 

Charles Cullen, “A Copper Sun,” Opportunity 5, no. 9 (September 1927).
Charles Cullen (born 1887). A White Irish American artist, influenced by Aubrey Beardsley, Cullen illustrated many of Countee Cullen’s early poetry books. These designs are often repeated in the magazines or advertisements of the period. “Countee Cullen tells an interesting tale about how the father of Charles Cullen is always interested in anyone whose name is Cullen…it was in this way that he came to buy Color, Countee Cullen’s first book, the which he sent to his son Charles…it later developed that Charles was an artist… hence these very beautiful drawings which he did for Countee Cullen’s book…and truly they are lovely to behold!” Opportunity September 1927, p. 277.

 

 

Charles Cullen, [Untitled], Opportunity 6, no. 2 (February 1928).

 

 

James L. Wells, [Untitled], Opportunity 6, no. 4 (April 1928).
James Lesesne Wells (1902-1993). Described in Opportunity as a “Young Negro artist living in Buffalo.” Wells studied in New York City at Teachers College and the National Academy of Design, where the owner of the New Art Circle Gallery, J.B. Neumann, saw his work and included him in the “International Modernists” exhibition in 1929. Wells became a crafts instructor at Howard University, teaching block printing, ceramics, clay modeling, and sculpture. He also developed professional and personal relationships with Alain Locke, historian Carter G. Woodson, and later, Stanley Hayter, while further developing his printmaking skills at Hayter’s Atelier 17.

 

 

Albert A. Smith, “Ethiopia–A Fantasy,” Opportunity 6, no. 6 (June 1928).
Albert Alexander Smith (1896-1940), Listed in Opportunity as “A young Negro artist now on a visit in this country from Paris where he has resided for the past seven years.” Smith was the first African American to win a scholarship to the High School of Ethical Culture and the first African American to study at the National Academy of Design. In 1920 his work was published in Crisis, shortly before he left the United States to live permanently in Europe. Often sending work back to the States, he continued to publish in Opportunity and elsewhere but died suddenly in France only forty-four years old.

 

 

James Lesesne Wells, [Untitled], Opportunity 6, no. 7 (July 1928).

 

 

Lois Jones, [Untitled], Opportunity 6, no. 8 (August 1928).
Lois Jones (1905-1998). Opportunity described her as “A promising young artist living in Boston.” In 1928 Jones formed and chaired the art department at the Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina, and two years later was recruited to teach at Howard University in Washington, D.C., [where she] taught design and watercolor painting for the next forty-seven years…. In 1937 Jones received a year-long fellowship that took her to Paris to live and work. This was a defining moment for the young black artist who experienced—for the first time in her life—the complete freedom to live as she wished without the indignities of segregation that she felt in the United States.”—Phillips Collection.
“In 1941, Jones entered her painting “Indian Shops Gay Head, Massachusetts” into the Corcoran Gallery’s annual competition. At the time, the Corcoran Gallery prohibited African-American artists from entering their artworks themselves. Jones had [a White artist] Céline Marie Tabary enter her painting to circumvent the rule. Jones ended up winning the Robert Woods Bliss Award for this work of art, yet she could not pick up the award herself. Tabary had to mail the award to Jones. …In 1994, the Corcoran Gallery of Art gave a public apology to Jones at the opening of the exhibition The World of Lois Mailou Jones, 50 years after Jones hid her identity.” –Karla Araujo, “Against All Odds,” Martha’s Vineyard Magazine.

 

 

D. Edouard Freeman, [Untitled], Opportunity 6, no. 9 (September 1928).
The artist is listed in Opportunity as an “Instructor in drawing at Tuskegee.” Nothing else is known.

 

 

Lois Jones, [Untitled], Opportunity 6, no. 10 (October 1928).

 

 

Also included: Cornelius Marion Battey (1873-1927). Many of the early cover designs for Opportunity were created by photographer C.M. Battey, who, in his last years of life, turned to pen and brush. A short obituary is printed in Opportunity, May 1927, p. 126. Battey moved from Cleveland to New York City “where for six years he was superintendent of the Bradley Photographic Studio on Fifth Avenue. He went to work at the city’s most famous photographic company, Underwood and Underwood, where he was put in charge of the retouching department. Battey finally got the opportunity to work on his own. With a partner he opened the Battey and Warren Studio in New York. …Battey was one of the best pictorialists in New York City.

His work led him into a valuable friendship with black author and educator W. E. B. DuBois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). DuBois was also editor of the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis. Soon Battey’s portraits of well-known black leaders were appearing regularly on the covers of The Crisis. In 1916, Battey was invited to take over the photography department of the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama [where] Battey not only taught photography but also chronicled in pictures the life of the campus.” – Black Artists in Photography (1840-1940) by George Sullivan.

Music’s Family Tree

Alexandre Denéréaz (1875-1947), L’évolution de l’art musical, Depuis les origines jusqu’à l’époque moderne. Arbre généalogique [The Evolution of Music from Its Origins to Modern Times. A Family Tree] (Lausanne: Georges Bridel et Cie [1916]). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2020- in process

In just over 11 feet, this chromolithographed timeline tracks the musical arts from their roots (labeled Instinct for Self-Preservation) to the various branches of the early twentieth century. OCLC lists several editions of Alexandre Denéréaz’s wall chart from 1916 to 1923, meant to supplement his “La musique et la vie interieure” (https://archive.org/stream/lamusiqueetlavie00bour#page/n5/mode/2up) written with Lucien Bourguès and also first issued in 1916. Later Denéréaz published Cours d’Harmonie, Rythmes cosmiques et rythmes humains and La gamme, ce problème cosmique.


Denéréaz signed the sheet, as though he were also responsible for the lithography. There is no mention of the Swiss musician doing any other drawings or printing, so perhaps he autographed the chart for someone.

Louis XIV Performs Apollo


 

 

Giacomo Torelli (1608-1678), Scene e machine preparate alle Nozze di Teti, balletto reale representato nella sala del piccolo Borbone (Paris, 1654). Bound with: Giacomo Torelli (1608-1678) and Giulio Strozzi (1583-1652), Feste theatrali per la Finta Pazza drama del Sig. Giulio Strozzi. Rappresentate nel piccolo Borbone in Parigi quest’anno 1645 (Paris, 1645). Text in French and Italian. Provenance: From the library of the late-eighteenth-century Milanese engineer Giacomo Antonio Besana. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2020- in process

Together with the Marquand Art and Archaeology Library, the Graphic Arts Collection acquired a first edition of this royal ballet, staged for Cardinal Mazzarino (1602-1661) with the participation of Louis XIV (1638-1715, King of France 1643-1715). Detailed plans for the inventive staging are by Giacomo Torelli (1608-1678), one of the most talented Baroque theater designers. This variant B edition in an early vellum binding retains two additional leaves with Torelli’s verses “Per la ricreazione e fuoco di Gioia,” engraved title page, plus the five folding double plates. Many pages are uncut.

 

 

Copying the dealer’s note in full:

In 1645, Torelli arrived in Paris and directed the refurbishment of the Palais Royal, the theatre built by Cardinal Richelieu. There he staged several appreciated performances, winning over not only the title of “Grand Sorcier”, but also the patronage of Cardinal Mazzarino. This famous “Noces de Pèlee et de Thétis” were staged by Torrelli in 1645, at the Petit Bourbon, with King Louis XIV dancing the role of Apollo. The libretto was composed by Francesco Buti, the music by Carlo Caproli and the ballets by Isaac de Benserade. The lavish scenographic apparati are thoroughly documented in this book, which contains the preparatory plans attributed directly to Torelli by Bjustrom. The opening verses and the following eight descriptions were penned by the Friuli librettist Giovanni Battista Amalteo, active in Vienna. The remarkably neat engravings were made by Silvestre Israël (1621-1691) after François Francart (1622-1672).

The acclaimed performance remained memorable as one of the first in Paris to exploit such complex machinery, insomuch that this edition was commissioned to eternalise this very aspect of the play. The copy also retains Torrelli’s large and inventive plates related to Finta Pazza, another work staged at the Petit Bourbon in 1645. The play had already been hailed as a great success at the premiere in Venice on 14 February 1641, with music composed by Francesco Sacrati. One can find here the title-page and the plates of the first edition of Finta Pazza, which circulated independently from the libretto, as was the case of the copies recorded by Vinet. Likewise, Gourary’s copy is with no text and intriguingly bound together with the Nozze di Teti, also without text, and other 13 suites of French and Italian theatrical, architectural and garden ornament.

This acquisition can be studied in the Firestone Library Special Collections reading room, when it reopens.