Le chien roi
Le chien roi brings Michel Butor and Pierre Alechinsky together in a compact illustrated publication from the Repères / Cahiers d’art contemporain series. The book belongs to that late twentieth-century zone where artist’s book, gallery publication and literary image-essay overlap. Butor, one of the great renovators of the French novel and a tireless writer with artists, finds in Alechinsky a partner for whom line, writing and image are always in motion. The title is simple and enigmatic at once: the dog becomes king, sign, fable animal and occasion for a playful shift of power. The book appeared in Paris in 1984 from Daniel Lelong and comprises 41 illustrated pages. It is not a monumental deluxe edition, but a clear, carefully published encounter between two figures who understood the book as a site of collaboration. For The Hidden Page, its importance lies above all in the dialogue between postwar literary experiment and Alechinsky’s graphic poetics.
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ALECHINSKY Pierre
Butor, Michel
ILLUSTRATORS
ILLUSTRATORS
ILLUSTRATORS
Le chien roi
1984 | Paris | Daniel Lelong
Le chien roi is a compact but meaningful collaboration between Michel Butor and Pierre Alechinsky. The publication gathers their shared interest in sign, movement, fable and book-space in a clear cahier format. As a first edition from Daniel Lelong, it is a valuable document within the postwar tradition of the artist’s book.
Le chien roi brings Michel Butor and Pierre Alechinsky together in a compact illustrated publication from the Repères / Cahiers d’art contemporain series. The book belongs to that late twentieth-century zone where artist’s book, gallery publication and literary image-essay overlap. Butor, one of the great renovators of the French novel and a tireless writer with artists, finds in Alechinsky a partner for whom line, writing and image are always in motion. The title is simple and enigmatic at once: the dog becomes king, sign, fable animal and occasion for a playful shift of power. The book appeared in Paris in 1984 from Daniel Lelong and comprises 41 illustrated pages. It is not a monumental deluxe edition, but a clear, carefully published encounter between two figures who understood the book as a site of collaboration. For The Hidden Page, its importance lies above all in the dialogue between postwar literary experiment and Alechinsky’s graphic poetics.
€300
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Format
In-8 (Octavo) approx. 20 × 26 cm
Edition Particulars
Regular first edition; no numbered deluxe issue or signature is mentioned in the supplied description.
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Product DETAIL
Le chien roi is not a conventional story with a developed plot, but an illustrated text-image publication around a title motif: the dog as king. Butor’s text likely approaches this motif through association, reflection, fable-like displacement and play with signs. Alechinsky’s images accompany that movement by making the dog appear not merely as an animal, but as a graphic character and sign-figure. The reader therefore follows not a plot, but a set of relations between word, image, authority, animality and imagination. The 41 pages form a compact composition in which text and illustration alternate and reinforce one another. The work belongs to a poetics in which the book is a space of passage rather than a linear narrative. Its thematic core lies in the playful elevation of an ordinary animal into an emblematic figure.
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