This collection of poems about animals is the first book illustrated by Dufy, who provided 39 original woodcuts, including 4 full-page, 26 three-quarter-page, 4 vignettes and 5 decorative initials. Apollinaire had initially considered entrusting these thirty poems, fifteen of which had been published in June 1908 in La Phalange, to Picasso, but he ultimately turned to Dufy, writing to him in August 1910, along with the list of poems, that he was “certain that with your art, which you possess so fully, and your culture, an ideal will carry you away and that the result of your work will be marvelous.” Le Bestiaire “remains one of the most original testimonies to the revival of the illustrated book as the poets envisioned it. It is well known that Apollinaire’s work later inspired Chirico, Marcoussis and again Dufy, but these posthumous encounters no longer belong to those heroic times when two young talents supported one another” (Fr. Chapon). The edition is limited to 120 copies.
This copy has been bound together with Le Supplément au Bestiaire, published twenty years later. A bibliophile, Pierre Bellenger, had discovered two poems set aside by Apollinaire, who considered them “too licentious”: “Le Condor” and “Le Morpion.” According to A. Coron, he “decided to publish them in the same format and typography as the original edition, commissioning Dufy to produce the woodcuts illustrating them. […] The buyers of this supplement, rarer still than the book itself, added it to their copies on Japanese paper and even on Holland paper.”
The 5 original woodcuts are by Dufy, including two three-quarter-page woodcuts illustrating these two rejected poems. Only a small portion of the 29 copies printed found their way back to join the original 1911 publication.
Provenance: Daniel Filipacchi (sale I, Christie’s, April 2004, lot 15).
A magnificent copy.