Écritures
*Écritures* is one of the major artists’ books from Max Ernst’s later career and at the same time one of Le Point Cardinal’s most striking achievements. The volume brings together Ernst’s texts with one hundred and twenty images drawn from his own visual world, so that writing and image continually echo one another. The original lithograph on the cover immediately gives the book the status of an autonomous art object. In the artist’s copy, a signed etching used as frontispiece further elevates the whole into a luxurious and highly desirable bibliophilic edition. The publisher’s presentation, with the Leroux-designed case and its distinctive cobra spine, lends the book an almost sculptural presence. For that reason, this edition holds an eminent place within the postwar French artist’s book.
Quantity
Ernst, Max
ILLUSTRATORS
ILLUSTRATORS
ILLUSTRATORS
Écritures
1970 | Paris | Le Point Cardinal
A landmark of Ernst’s late surrealist book art, where text, image, and object become perfectly one.
*Écritures* is one of the major artists’ books from Max Ernst’s later career and at the same time one of Le Point Cardinal’s most striking achievements. The volume brings together Ernst’s texts with one hundred and twenty images drawn from his own visual world, so that writing and image continually echo one another. The original lithograph on the cover immediately gives the book the status of an autonomous art object. In the artist’s copy, a signed etching used as frontispiece further elevates the whole into a luxurious and highly desirable bibliophilic edition. The publisher’s presentation, with the Leroux-designed case and its distinctive cobra spine, lends the book an almost sculptural presence. For that reason, this edition holds an eminent place within the postwar French artist’s book.
€2,850
Condition Report:
In-Depth Study
References & Bibliography
Format
In-8 (Octavo) approx. 20 × 26 cm
Edition Particulars
Artist’s copy, justified by the publisher Jean Hughes, with a signed Max Ernst etching as frontispiece in addition to the original lithographic cover.
Print Run
100
Copy Number
Artist Copy J.H. (John Hughes)
Inscription
No inscription
1
Edition Particulars:
We welcome private inquiries, collaborations with institutions, and acquisition requests. Each message is treated with discretion and respect. We welcome private inquiries, collaborations with institutions, and acquisition requests.
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Condition Report:
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Product DETAIL
The book forms a hybrid space between poetic notation, visual thinking, and autobiographical montage. Ernst does not arrange texts and images according to a conventional linear logic, but through associations, shifts, and unexpected echoes. In this way, *Écritures* reads as an extension of his visual practice, where language is granted the same freedom as collage or frottage. The one hundred and twenty illustrations are not mere decoration, but an integral part of the book’s rhythm and meaning. The result is a dense, meditative, and playful publication in which memory, dream, and imagination flow into one another.
Char, Rene · Stael, Nicolas de
Arrière-histoire du poème pulvérisé
*Arrière-histoire du poème pulvérisé* is a later illustrated edition of a key text in which René Char looks back on the genesis and inner background of *Le Poème pulvérisé*. Published in 1972 by Imprimerie Union, it opens with a colour frontispiece by Nicolas de Staël. The pairing of Char and de Staël is especially charged: two post-war voices, each seeking concentration, clarity, and rupture in his own medium. This copy is one of only six hors commerce copies on Arches and is signed. The autograph presentation inscription to Doctor Marcel Zara, with poetic quotation and October 1972 dating, makes it a deeply personal copy.
Ill Book
€920
Ruscha, Edward · Ruscha, Ed
Some Los Angeles Apartments
Some Los Angeles Apartments is one of Ed Ruscha’s iconic early artist’s books, devoted to the banal architecture of Los Angeles. Instead of monuments, drama or urban glamour, Ruscha shows ordinary apartment buildings, coolly photographed and without visible sentimentality. This second edition of 1970, printed in 3,000 unnumbered copies, confirms the wider circulation of his conceptual book form. The small format, sober wrappers and original glassine wrapper make it an essential Ruscha object.
Ill Book
€950
Char, Rene · Pierre Andre Benoit (PAB)
Les Dentelles de Montmirail
Les Dentelles de Montmirail is one of the characteristic small masterpieces born of the collaboration between René Char and PAB. It was published in 1960 between L’Isle-sur-Sorgue and Alès, two places that immediately evoke the geography of Char and that of Pierre André Benoit. The edition joins Char’s brief, aphoristic lyric voice to five natural impressions from Montmirail, so that text and matter quite literally meet. With PAB, poetry often takes on an intimate, almost handmade form, and that quality is especially palpable here. The limited issue on Arches heightens the book’s discreet yet unmistakable bibliophile character. This copy gains further importance from the autograph inscription to Dr Marcel Zara, far more than a routine dedication and almost readable as a small autonomous poem. For collectors, it is an exemplary PAB production in which landscape, trace, inscription, and poem become a single object.
Ill Book
€2,250
René Char, Georges Braque · Lachaud, Mariette · Pierre Andre Benoit (PAB)
Ainsi va l'amitié
What makes this copy especially memorable is not only its tiny limitation but the way it fixes three friendships at once: that between Char and Braque, that between Char and PAB, and that of all of them with the image that outlives them. The eight original photographs are not an illustrative supplement but the true bearers of presence; they preserve gazes, workspaces, and silences. The fact that PAB and Mariette Lachaud signed this copy gives it an almost confidential status, as though the circle of makers were still present within the book. In such editions, bibliophily becomes more than rarity alone: it becomes a form of shared memory.
