L'Éternelle Revue, n° 1 et 2

This sharp postwar intervention belongs to the primary printed matter of the Internationale Lettriste, on the threshold of the Debord milieu and the genealogy of Situationism. *Toutes ces dames au salon !* responds to the Brussels exhibition “L’Industrie du pétrole vue par des artistes” (2–14 June 1956), targeting the moral veneer of the salon system sustained by corporate patronage. The sheet operates as direct action: a text that does not merely speak about art but intervenes in the social field. The convergence of Paris (Internationale Lettriste), Brussels (Les Lèvres Nues) and Milan (Movimento Arte Nucleare) turns it into a rare node of transnational neo-avant-garde exchange. This set is especially desirable because it brings together two material variants: the well-known large two-column placard and the narrow one-column version that also circulates on its own. Ephemera of this kind was made to vanish, and its survival—here in duplicate form—is exactly what gives it bibliophilic force.

Scarce édition originale as an offprint from Les Cahiers du Chemin no. 22 (1974), produced in small numbers. A meditative piece on listening, vibration, and the resonant body. This copy carries a signed author’s inscription and several textual corrections, very likely in Michaux’s hand (not formally confirmed). The stripped, pamphlet-like presentation suits the taut clarity of the essay. The later Gillot chemise–slipcase reflects careful collection stewardship.

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.

La Danse Futuriste is one of the key texts of Italian Futurism in its most direct, militant, and performative form. It is a separately issued French manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder and tireless propagandist of the movement. Rather than a deluxe book, it is a tract, designed for the rapid circulation of ideas and for immediate impact. That modest physical form is precisely what makes it so faithful to Futurist practice, in which print was used as an instrument of artistic intervention. The text transfers the Futurist glorification of speed, violence, and mechanism into the realm of dance, doing so with the aggressive clarity that is so characteristic of Marinetti. As a separate French issue, the pamphlet is bibliographically intriguing, since specialists have catalogued it both as 1917 and as circa 1920. That uncertainty only adds to its interest rather than diminishing its importance. For collectors, this is above all a primary avant-garde document: scarce, fragile, and historically charged.