Juin 40
Juin 40 is a powerful illustrated war book in which Frans Masereel gives visual form, through 32 plates, to the French defeat and disarray of June 1940. The plates are preceded by Henry de Montherlant’s Fragments d’un journal de guerre 1940, so that text and image together create a double testimony: literary, historical and moral. Masereel, renowned for his woodcuts and wordless novels, here brings his expressive black-and-white drama to bear on an immediate historical trauma. The oblong format gives the plates a horizontal, almost cinematic space in which flight, soldiers, civilians and destruction can unfold. The book appeared in Paris with Pierre Tisné in 1942, in the midst of the war, giving it a special tension between memory, censorship, mourning and visual urgency. This copy, n°16, belongs to the first 350 copies on vélin Lana Bélier within a total edition of 1,550. It is an early and materially attractive copy of a book in which Masereel’s humanist graphic art retains its historical edge.
Quantity
Montherlant, Henry de
Masereel, Frans
Juin 40
1942 | Paris | Éditions Pierre Tisné
A powerful war book in which Montherlant’s diary voice and Masereel’s graphic humanism make the defeat of June 1940 tangible. Number 16 on vélin Lana Bélier gives this copy clear bibliophilic appeal.
Juin 40 is a powerful illustrated war book in which Frans Masereel gives visual form, through 32 plates, to the French defeat and disarray of June 1940. The plates are preceded by Henry de Montherlant’s Fragments d’un journal de guerre 1940, so that text and image together create a double testimony: literary, historical and moral. Masereel, renowned for his woodcuts and wordless novels, here brings his expressive black-and-white drama to bear on an immediate historical trauma. The oblong format gives the plates a horizontal, almost cinematic space in which flight, soldiers, civilians and destruction can unfold. The book appeared in Paris with Pierre Tisné in 1942, in the midst of the war, giving it a special tension between memory, censorship, mourning and visual urgency. This copy, n°16, belongs to the first 350 copies on vélin Lana Bélier within a total edition of 1,550. It is an early and materially attractive copy of a book in which Masereel’s humanist graphic art retains its historical edge.
€420
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References & Bibliography
Format
In-4 Oblong (à l'italienne)
Edition Particulars
Number 16, one of 350 copies on vélin Lana Bélier, followed by 1,200 copies on Aussedat.
Print Run
1550
Copy Number
No. 16
Paper
vélin Lana Bélier
Inscription
No inscription
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Product DETAIL
Juin 40 consists of an introductory text by Henry de Montherlant, Fragments d’un journal de guerre 1940, followed by 32 plates by Frans Masereel. The text gathers notes and observations from the war days of 1940, when France faced military defeat, chaos, mass flight and moral disarray. Montherlant records impressions of mobilisation, fear, patriotism, uncertainty and the rupture between rhetoric and reality. Masereel’s plates translate that historical experience into images of people on the move, soldiers, civilians, tension, abandonment and collective loss. The book does not tell a continuous story with characters, but constructs a sequence of scenes around the catastrophe of June 1940. The combination of diary fragments and plates makes the work both documentary and symbolic. Its core is the experience of a country suddenly seeing its certainties collapse.
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