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Accession number:
PML 198726
Published:
Paris : Éditions des hommes nouveaux, 1913.
Description:
1 folded sheet : color illustrations ; 1991 x 355 mm folded to 180 x 95 mm
Credit:
Gift of Dr. Gail Levin, 2021.
Notes:
Text printed in multiple typefaces inked in various colors, illuminated with pochoir in gouache and watercolor, with some brush play and overlap of wash in stencil areas.
"Tirage de luxe, No ... . De 1 à 8 pour l'exemplaire parchemin. De 9 à 36 pour les exemplaires japon. De 37 à 150 pour les exemplaires simili japon"--Edition limitation statement.
Library's copy numbered 136, printed on simili japon and signed by Cendrars in purple ink.
Binding:
Four sheets joined together and folded in half vertically, then accordion-folded in twenty-two sections, mounted on parchment pochoir covers painted in wash and in black, blue, green, red, purple, yellow, orange, pink, and grey oil after a composition by Sonia Delaunay.
Inscriptions/Markings:
Inscribed in brown ink by Cendrars to the painter Morgan Russell: "à Morgan Russell, en souvenir du soleil de Cannes durant l'hiver 1917 / Blaise Cendrars."
Provenance:
Morgan Russell (1886-1953); Suzanne Raingo Russell (1890-1980); Gail Levin.
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Credits:
© Blaise Cendrars/Succession Cendrars, © Pracusa 20230412.
Blaise Cendrars, born Frédéric Louis Sauser, was a catalyst in some of the explosive artistic innovations of the early twentieth century. An intrepid spirit, he left his Swiss homeland at age seventeen. In Saint Petersburg and New York, he wrote his first poems and transformed into Blaise Cendrars--a name symbolizing his aesthetic goals: to burn and to create poetry from the ashes of his life.
Cendrars made his mark in Paris in 1913 with an experimental travel poem, La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France), self-published in a spectacular vertical format with illustrations by the Ukrainian-born painter Sonia Delaunay-Terk (1885-1979). Through his subsequent experiences as a traveler, soldier, and collaborator with artists across many mediums, Cendrars developed a poetic philosophy to embody modernity's rhythms, technologies, contrasts, and depth.