Les Fleurs du Mal
This monumental edition of *Les Fleurs du Mal* brings together Baudelaire’s dark music and Léonor Fini’s sensual imagination. Issued as a large in-folio in loose sheets, it is conceived as a true bibliophilic object: reading becomes a ritual of unfolding, touching, and returning. For Le Cercle du Livre Précieux, Fini created 24 original lithographs—mostly in colour according to the notices—making Baudelaire’s erotic charge, dream logic, and looming menace vividly present. The dialogue between text and image is not mere illustration but a parallel poetry, theatrical in tone, where desire and decay echo one another. This copy, no. 436, is from the regular issue and is in very good condition. A classic text reframed through a distinctly twentieth-century artist’s gaze.
Quantity
Baudelaire, Charles
Leonor Fini
Les Fleurs du Mal
1964 | Paris | Le Cercle du Livre Précieux
A rare, large-scale artist’s edition where Baudelaire and Fini meet at full intensity.
This monumental edition of *Les Fleurs du Mal* brings together Baudelaire’s dark music and Léonor Fini’s sensual imagination. Issued as a large in-folio in loose sheets, it is conceived as a true bibliophilic object: reading becomes a ritual of unfolding, touching, and returning. For Le Cercle du Livre Précieux, Fini created 24 original lithographs—mostly in colour according to the notices—making Baudelaire’s erotic charge, dream logic, and looming menace vividly present. The dialogue between text and image is not mere illustration but a parallel poetry, theatrical in tone, where desire and decay echo one another. This copy, no. 436, is from the regular issue and is in very good condition. A classic text reframed through a distinctly twentieth-century artist’s gaze.
€1,150
Condition Report:
In-Depth Study
References & Bibliography
Format
In-folio (Folio) approx. 30 × 40 cm
Edition Particulars
Regular issue copy; no. 436; 24 original lithographs (mostly in colour per notices); very good condition.
Print Run
501
Copy Number
No. 436
Paper
Papier vergé blanc
Inscription
No inscription
Product DETAIL
Baudelaire’s collection probes the modern soul caught between ecstasy and disgust, Ideal and Spleen. Across poems of love, the city, art, and transgression, the same tension returns: the pull of the absolute and the inevitable fall into the everyday. Beauty appears as a perilous force—at once saving and corrupting. With razor-sharp imagery and musical cadence, perfume, night, the body, and metallic melancholy become a single language. What seems like personal confession turns into an era’s mirror: the birth of modernity, with its intoxication and fatigue. In this edition, Fini’s imagery shadows the text as a second, dreamlike register.
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